9 ms·

I for one, will never use a Google product again. They level of creepiness and data they have on all their users is insane. I personally have switched to DuckD

I for one, will never use a Google product again. They level of creepiness and data they have on all their users is insane. I personally have switched to DuckDuckGo, Fastmail, FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw), and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented. Smooth sailing. The problem with Google, is they are building a repository for themselves, but also for government. Couple that with their willingness to kill products, and you'd have to be insane to trust their services.

royabbink 9y ago
I totally agree. But hiring talent is hard. I assume companies will grab every opportunity to hire the best people. Even if that means using Google.
_pmf_ 9y ago
Couple that with the fact that they do not offer anything that deserves the moniker "customer service".
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  I've gotten excellent customer service from them with Google Express. They certainly can offer good customer service where they choose to.
- Spivak 9y ago
  If you pay them you get good customer service. Google Play, YouTube Red, Chromecast, Chromebook, Nexus, all have pretty good service.
  - pgodzin 9y ago
    Google Fi as well
  - DataWorker 9y ago
    I completely disagree. Recently did a factory reset on my nexus only to find out that without the password for the last sync'd google account, a throwaway I don't remember, it's bricked. I can report it stolen on the device page, can easily prove to google it's my device, but I can't reset or sell or do anything with the phone. Google's response after spending days trying to fix, and talking to different support people who had wildly different answers, the only viable answer was to give me the number for Lg and wish me good luck. Never have I paid so much for a product which is broken by its own design while being entirely unsupported by the vendor. Never will I purchase a google product or service and I will tell everyone I know to do the same.
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      (I work at google but not on android). That's because, short of sending you a new device, there isn't any way to bypass the theft prevention. Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
      - argv_empty 9y ago
        Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive? This is a pretty disingenuous analogy. GP did not ask about recovering data from the device. GP asked about starting over from scratch. Most people do have the expectation that an old encrypted drive can be reformatted and repurposed without knowing the key.
        joshuamorton 9y ago
        True, but in this case, you're "encrypting" (or really, securing) your device, and not your data. (I realize this will be misunderstood because "encrypting your device" normally means encrypting the data on your device). The whole point of that is as an anti-theft measure (a stolen device [with a locked bootloader] cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission). It would be kind of silly if you could bypass that by saying "no look, its mine I just forgot the password.". Now admittedly, I'm unsure if you need to know the original password, or if you can change the password online and then reset it, but I think the second would work. As an aside, this I think fits into a trope I see repeatedly (and pretty much only on HN). I'm not making any judgement about whether being privacy conscious is good or bad. But I find it amusing when people state something like "This product is awful because I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX> and then <some product was not useful, and my experience was notably less good than other people>."
  - puranjay 9y ago
    Just ask the thousands of pissed off AdWords advertisers about their customer service
- praneshp 9y ago
  The few times I needed help with my project Fi connection it took about 3 minutes to reach a human. Even faster if I was willing to chat instead of call.
w00bl3ywook 9y ago
Stay in your bunker and don't use AMP on your website.
- hdhzy 9y ago
  Funny because AMP was exactly the reason why I switched to DuckDuckGo (although https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com is also a viable option). One more thing to remember - Firefox for Android has AdBlock extensions (e.g uBlock). My personal experience with mobile ads is best described as vibrating, redirecting scams that just drove me nuts.
Spivak 9y ago
Isn't the replacement for Android right now iOS? Still proprietary but Apple seems to take a much tougher stance on privacy.
- arpit 9y ago
  It seems more a marketing strategy than a real belief in user privacy. For example, see the latest rejection of ad-blocking VPN apps from the App Store https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts-app-store-policy-to-stop-adblockers-outside-of-safari/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts-app-s...
  - gareim 9y ago
    Those VPN apps install a root cert don't they? That's a huge security hazard and likely why Apple is putting their foot down on it.
  - millstone 9y ago
    It's not marketing - Apple goes out of their way to build privacy into their products. For example, the way that Apple Maps has no persistent user identifier and prevents Apple from knowing your location history. Regarding ad-blocking VPNs, I can see why one might be sad to lose these and disagree with Apple's move here. But it's not a privacy decision - it's an ad-blocking decision. VPNs actually focused on privacy, like privateinternetaccess, aren't being removed from the App Store.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    I've never been able to take seriously the argument that anything Apple is "just marketing", and I'm not about to now.
product50 9y ago
This is not for you. This is for your company to use. It's tied to Google Suite.
- halite 9y ago
  Why is it useful to a company unless Google provides "value add" features that are better than thousands of other services for hiring.
  - product50 9y ago
    It is about the integrated experience. Most big companies I know of actually hire recruiting co-ordinators for scheduling and following up with potential candidates as well as with interviewers internally. If Google can use their G-Suite products including Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc. to provide a seamless recruiting experience, I would give it a shot - especially if my company is already on G Suite. Now that Google has the building blocks for businesses - Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Video Conferencing etc. - it makes sense for them to get into common enterprise services. This ways they can extract more rent and also provide an integrated/more valuable experience to their customers.
    - Fernanda54 9y ago
      Since I started with my online business I earn $95 every 15 minutes. It sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you don't check it out. ----------------->>http://cutt.us/7N2sG http://cutt.us/7N2sG
- lettergram 9y ago
  I'd argue this is a tangental product. You can easily use Google Suite, but also use Workday (which provides a similar service to Hire).
halite 9y ago
Even without reading the article, this is what I came to add. Now they have a service of this nature, the need and urgency of saying goodbye to Google has increased tremedously.
Jonnax 9y ago
It is certainly annoying with how they try and nudge other products away in subtle ways. Like like Firefox on Android, works really well. However on Google's search, they give you a stripped down version of their search results inferior to what Chrome gets. Use an addon like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-google-android/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-... And you find out that Firefox has no problem rendering the full featured chrome version. I assume the only reason they do it is so that Firefox for Android users feel slightly inconvenienced enough to remain Chrome users.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Curious, I find the left version preferable. More compact, and probably faster to load too.
  - Jonnax 9y ago
    It's similar speeds though I've got 4G or good Wifi. But what you miss out on is the top cards. Like if you search for Weather, you can see what's the predicted forecast per hour. Or when you search for translate, you get a translate widget at the top. And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.
    - YCode 9y ago
      Is it possible they rolled out a "Chrome" and an "everyone else" option since some options like cards are only tested by Google on Chrome, and that's why it shows up as such? Just applying Hanlon's razor here.
      - Jonnax 9y ago
        Well they give the chrome site to Safari on iPhone OS. So possibly but this is the company that is all about web standards, right? At least I'm sure that what someone working on Chromium/Chrome/Angular/etc would say.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pr0ph3t 9y ago
You should read about the founder of DuckDuckGo
- saimiam 9y ago
  For the lazy: --- 2008: DuckDuckGo was founded[15] by Gabriel Weinberg,[16][17] an entrepreneur whose previous venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million. This is most relevant snippet I could find about DDG's founder.
- JohnKacz 9y ago
  So I found this[0] but haven't read it yet. Was there something we should be looking for? [0] - https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/search-engine-and-privacy-gabriel-weinberg https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/search-engine-and-pri...
sergiotapia 9y ago
They've gotten to big for their breeches. If you're tech, try to mitigate a bit by using services from other companies.
hellofunk 9y ago
> and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented One alternative that's been around for a while you might like if you want to continue using smart mobile devices is an operating system made by Apple (not Google), called iOS (used to be called iPhone OS but it can now be used on tablets too even some music players like iPods have it). Just throwing that out there, they have a lot of similar features, but with iOS you don't need to get involved with Google. Check it out, it's definitely a viable alternative.
- aabaker99 9y ago
  The OP seems concerned about privacy. Apple certainly has a lot of PR activity promoting privacy of their products. But at the same time it seems so many websites, apps, companies, ISPs, etc. are hoping to track their users much more than before. Perhaps even sell profiles on their users to advertisers or other tech companies. Apple also seems to be a fairly secretive company. Their products have historically felt more "closed" than Android. Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android? And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
  - sigjuice 9y ago
    Apple takes your money up front so they don't need to violate user privacy for business reasons.
    - ariwilson 9y ago
      Apple also sucks at using user data to make better products compared to Google, so it's perfect for them to claim concern for privacy as a business strategy.
      - H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
        Refusing to do something isn't the same as being bad at doing something.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw) I just tried to install Firefox on my phone, because the builtin browser regularly crashes. I browsed one page. It felt like my phone was about to melt. So I'm still using the builtin browser that crashes after fully loading a page.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Try Firefox beta The regular FF is terrible, but the beta one works OK for me
ehsankia 9y ago
It's easy to critique them for being too big, but what solution do you have? Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products? I realize that they are really big, and with more products, they get more data, but imagine for one second that your goal truly was to help customers and provide them with as many useful tools as possible, what options would you have? You either make more products that helps people (and end up getting more data), or you don't, stay stale, and end up going down like Yahoo or many other company who don't evolve do.
- azakai 9y ago
  It's in corporations' nature to grow, just like Microsoft did in its antitrust days, and Google (and Amazon and others) are now. It can be dangerous. I don't expect corporations to stop growing by themselves. But consumers can use alternative products, and tech workers can prefer to work at other companies. We can limit the danger that way.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  I fall under this line of thinking too. I am a gmail/drive/cal user primarily. I find their services fast, reliable, secure and integrated to a lot of other services. Sure, they collect and sell my browsing data. But so what? It costs me nothing, doesn't impact my experience (outside of the occasionally annoying ad), and provides them revenue to keep innovating. I don't really understand the anti-google sentiment that's been brewing lately. Why not the same aversion to apple, microsoft, and amazon? Or is it just flavor of the month? Personally I'd much rather use Hire over LinkedIn. But I guess it's just one devil for another.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products? Yes. I want an economy where we have millions of tiny companies, each doing one thing, and doing that well. Like the German Mittelstand.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    Having Amazon split up into dozens of smaller companies for different categories just sounds really annoying to me.
komali2 9y ago
I can see the n-gate summary now: "Google finds another way to make money by spying on people. Hackernews ignores the article and instead settles in for a good old iPhone vs Android debate."
nialv7 9y ago
Maybe you can choose to use only the open source parts of Android?
markdown 9y ago
HN should build a bot that posts this comment automatically on every Google post to save these guys from having to type the same thing over and over.
- foxylad 9y ago
  I agree - it's boring to see "but they close projects so you can't trust them" comments every time Google does anything constructive. Maybe the bot could also post an "If you provide a free service, how are you obligated to provide it forever?" response, to save me having to.
rb666 9y ago
I fully agree, but I just could not get used to DuckDuckGo. It just pales in comparison to Google Search somehow, but I find it difficult to explain why. The same applies to Firefox, I really tried, but especially the extension ecosystem in Chrome is more mature. For example, Lastpass works much better in Chrome than Firefox. Considering this, I switched to Fastmail and removed my Google account from all my browsers. I created a dummy Google account that I only use to set my home address (again, too handy) and to be able to set preferences and have a Chrome profile. To me, this is the best of both worlds right now.
cosmeen 9y ago
You can also try Brave which blocks ads and trackers. And is based on firefox afaik.

royabbink 9y ago

I totally agree. But hiring talent is hard. I assume companies will grab every opportunity to hire the best people. Even if that means using Google.

_pmf_ 9y ago

Couple that with the fact that they do not offer anything that deserves the moniker "customer service".

dragonwriter 9y ago
I've gotten excellent customer service from them with Google Express. They certainly can offer good customer service where they choose to.
Spivak 9y ago
If you pay them you get good customer service. Google Play, YouTube Red, Chromecast, Chromebook, Nexus, all have pretty good service.
- pgodzin 9y ago
  Google Fi as well
- DataWorker 9y ago
  I completely disagree. Recently did a factory reset on my nexus only to find out that without the password for the last sync'd google account, a throwaway I don't remember, it's bricked. I can report it stolen on the device page, can easily prove to google it's my device, but I can't reset or sell or do anything with the phone. Google's response after spending days trying to fix, and talking to different support people who had wildly different answers, the only viable answer was to give me the number for Lg and wish me good luck. Never have I paid so much for a product which is broken by its own design while being entirely unsupported by the vendor. Never will I purchase a google product or service and I will tell everyone I know to do the same.
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    (I work at google but not on android). That's because, short of sending you a new device, there isn't any way to bypass the theft prevention. Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
    - argv_empty 9y ago
      Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive? This is a pretty disingenuous analogy. GP did not ask about recovering data from the device. GP asked about starting over from scratch. Most people do have the expectation that an old encrypted drive can be reformatted and repurposed without knowing the key.
      - joshuamorton 9y ago
        True, but in this case, you're "encrypting" (or really, securing) your device, and not your data. (I realize this will be misunderstood because "encrypting your device" normally means encrypting the data on your device). The whole point of that is as an anti-theft measure (a stolen device [with a locked bootloader] cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission). It would be kind of silly if you could bypass that by saying "no look, its mine I just forgot the password.". Now admittedly, I'm unsure if you need to know the original password, or if you can change the password online and then reset it, but I think the second would work. As an aside, this I think fits into a trope I see repeatedly (and pretty much only on HN). I'm not making any judgement about whether being privacy conscious is good or bad. But I find it amusing when people state something like "This product is awful because I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX> and then <some product was not useful, and my experience was notably less good than other people>."
- puranjay 9y ago
  Just ask the thousands of pissed off AdWords advertisers about their customer service
praneshp 9y ago
The few times I needed help with my project Fi connection it took about 3 minutes to reach a human. Even faster if I was willing to chat instead of call.

w00bl3ywook 9y ago

Stay in your bunker and don't use AMP on your website.

hdhzy 9y ago
Funny because AMP was exactly the reason why I switched to DuckDuckGo (although https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com is also a viable option). One more thing to remember - Firefox for Android has AdBlock extensions (e.g uBlock). My personal experience with mobile ads is best described as vibrating, redirecting scams that just drove me nuts.

Spivak 9y ago

Isn't the replacement for Android right now iOS? Still proprietary but Apple seems to take a much tougher stance on privacy.

arpit 9y ago
It seems more a marketing strategy than a real belief in user privacy. For example, see the latest rejection of ad-blocking VPN apps from the App Store https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts-app-store-policy-to-stop-adblockers-outside-of-safari/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts-app-s...
- gareim 9y ago
  Those VPN apps install a root cert don't they? That's a huge security hazard and likely why Apple is putting their foot down on it.
- millstone 9y ago
  It's not marketing - Apple goes out of their way to build privacy into their products. For example, the way that Apple Maps has no persistent user identifier and prevents Apple from knowing your location history. Regarding ad-blocking VPNs, I can see why one might be sad to lose these and disagree with Apple's move here. But it's not a privacy decision - it's an ad-blocking decision. VPNs actually focused on privacy, like privateinternetaccess, aren't being removed from the App Store.
- s73ver 9y ago
  I've never been able to take seriously the argument that anything Apple is "just marketing", and I'm not about to now.

product50 9y ago

This is not for you. This is for your company to use. It's tied to Google Suite.

halite 9y ago
Why is it useful to a company unless Google provides "value add" features that are better than thousands of other services for hiring.
- product50 9y ago
  It is about the integrated experience. Most big companies I know of actually hire recruiting co-ordinators for scheduling and following up with potential candidates as well as with interviewers internally. If Google can use their G-Suite products including Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc. to provide a seamless recruiting experience, I would give it a shot - especially if my company is already on G Suite. Now that Google has the building blocks for businesses - Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Video Conferencing etc. - it makes sense for them to get into common enterprise services. This ways they can extract more rent and also provide an integrated/more valuable experience to their customers.
  - Fernanda54 9y ago
    Since I started with my online business I earn $95 every 15 minutes. It sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you don't check it out. ----------------->>http://cutt.us/7N2sG http://cutt.us/7N2sG
lettergram 9y ago
I'd argue this is a tangental product. You can easily use Google Suite, but also use Workday (which provides a similar service to Hire).

halite 9y ago

Even without reading the article, this is what I came to add. Now they have a service of this nature, the need and urgency of saying goodbye to Google has increased tremedously.

Jonnax 9y ago

It is certainly annoying with how they try and nudge other products away in subtle ways. Like like Firefox on Android, works really well. However on Google's search, they give you a stripped down version of their search results inferior to what Chrome gets. Use an addon like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-google-android/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-... And you find out that Firefox has no problem rendering the full featured chrome version. I assume the only reason they do it is so that Firefox for Android users feel slightly inconvenienced enough to remain Chrome users.

icebraining 9y ago
Curious, I find the left version preferable. More compact, and probably faster to load too.
- Jonnax 9y ago
  It's similar speeds though I've got 4G or good Wifi. But what you miss out on is the top cards. Like if you search for Weather, you can see what's the predicted forecast per hour. Or when you search for translate, you get a translate widget at the top. And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.
  - YCode 9y ago
    Is it possible they rolled out a "Chrome" and an "everyone else" option since some options like cards are only tested by Google on Chrome, and that's why it shows up as such? Just applying Hanlon's razor here.
    - Jonnax 9y ago
      Well they give the chrome site to Safari on iPhone OS. So possibly but this is the company that is all about web standards, right? At least I'm sure that what someone working on Chromium/Chrome/Angular/etc would say.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pr0ph3t 9y ago

You should read about the founder of DuckDuckGo

saimiam 9y ago
For the lazy: --- 2008: DuckDuckGo was founded[15] by Gabriel Weinberg,[16][17] an entrepreneur whose previous venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million. This is most relevant snippet I could find about DDG's founder.
JohnKacz 9y ago
So I found this[0] but haven't read it yet. Was there something we should be looking for? [0] - https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/search-engine-and-privacy-gabriel-weinberg https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/search-engine-and-pri...

sergiotapia 9y ago

They've gotten to big for their breeches. If you're tech, try to mitigate a bit by using services from other companies.

hellofunk 9y ago

> and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented One alternative that's been around for a while you might like if you want to continue using smart mobile devices is an operating system made by Apple (not Google), called iOS (used to be called iPhone OS but it can now be used on tablets too even some music players like iPods have it). Just throwing that out there, they have a lot of similar features, but with iOS you don't need to get involved with Google. Check it out, it's definitely a viable alternative.

aabaker99 9y ago
The OP seems concerned about privacy. Apple certainly has a lot of PR activity promoting privacy of their products. But at the same time it seems so many websites, apps, companies, ISPs, etc. are hoping to track their users much more than before. Perhaps even sell profiles on their users to advertisers or other tech companies. Apple also seems to be a fairly secretive company. Their products have historically felt more "closed" than Android. Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android? And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
- sigjuice 9y ago
  Apple takes your money up front so they don't need to violate user privacy for business reasons.
  - ariwilson 9y ago
    Apple also sucks at using user data to make better products compared to Google, so it's perfect for them to claim concern for privacy as a business strategy.
    - H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
      Refusing to do something isn't the same as being bad at doing something.

thaumasiotes 9y ago

> FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw) I just tried to install Firefox on my phone, because the builtin browser regularly crashes. I browsed one page. It felt like my phone was about to melt. So I'm still using the builtin browser that crashes after fully loading a page.

CaptSpify 9y ago
Try Firefox beta The regular FF is terrible, but the beta one works OK for me

ehsankia 9y ago

It's easy to critique them for being too big, but what solution do you have? Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products? I realize that they are really big, and with more products, they get more data, but imagine for one second that your goal truly was to help customers and provide them with as many useful tools as possible, what options would you have? You either make more products that helps people (and end up getting more data), or you don't, stay stale, and end up going down like Yahoo or many other company who don't evolve do.

azakai 9y ago
It's in corporations' nature to grow, just like Microsoft did in its antitrust days, and Google (and Amazon and others) are now. It can be dangerous. I don't expect corporations to stop growing by themselves. But consumers can use alternative products, and tech workers can prefer to work at other companies. We can limit the danger that way.
nxsynonym 9y ago
I fall under this line of thinking too. I am a gmail/drive/cal user primarily. I find their services fast, reliable, secure and integrated to a lot of other services. Sure, they collect and sell my browsing data. But so what? It costs me nothing, doesn't impact my experience (outside of the occasionally annoying ad), and provides them revenue to keep innovating. I don't really understand the anti-google sentiment that's been brewing lately. Why not the same aversion to apple, microsoft, and amazon? Or is it just flavor of the month? Personally I'd much rather use Hire over LinkedIn. But I guess it's just one devil for another.
kuschku 9y ago
> Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products? Yes. I want an economy where we have millions of tiny companies, each doing one thing, and doing that well. Like the German Mittelstand.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Having Amazon split up into dozens of smaller companies for different categories just sounds really annoying to me.

komali2 9y ago

I can see the n-gate summary now: "Google finds another way to make money by spying on people. Hackernews ignores the article and instead settles in for a good old iPhone vs Android debate."

nialv7 9y ago

Maybe you can choose to use only the open source parts of Android?

markdown 9y ago

HN should build a bot that posts this comment automatically on every Google post to save these guys from having to type the same thing over and over.

foxylad 9y ago
I agree - it's boring to see "but they close projects so you can't trust them" comments every time Google does anything constructive. Maybe the bot could also post an "If you provide a free service, how are you obligated to provide it forever?" response, to save me having to.

rb666 9y ago

I fully agree, but I just could not get used to DuckDuckGo. It just pales in comparison to Google Search somehow, but I find it difficult to explain why. The same applies to Firefox, I really tried, but especially the extension ecosystem in Chrome is more mature. For example, Lastpass works much better in Chrome than Firefox. Considering this, I switched to Fastmail and removed my Google account from all my browsers. I created a dummy Google account that I only use to set my home address (again, too handy) and to be able to set preferences and have a Chrome profile. To me, this is the best of both worlds right now.

cosmeen 9y ago

You can also try Brave which blocks ads and trackers. And is based on firefox afaik.