6 ms·

This is an unproductive interpretation of "living without tech giants". Yes, if you decide to ban all major cloud providers from your live, including everything

by DJHenk 6y ago

This is an unproductive interpretation of "living without tech giants". Yes, if you decide to ban all major cloud providers from your live, including everything they host, you are going to have a hard time. But it is foolish to give up that easily. Let's say I want to ban Google from my live and I ditch my GMail account. Thinking along the lines of this author I would not be done. Actually I would not be able to have an email account at all anymore, because there are other people who are still on GMail and they might mail me and then I would be "infected." And therefore I would better just keep my GMail. This is nonsense, of course. You're better of without GMail and Google and the others. You can't get all there in one day, but it is certainly worth it to take as much steps as you can.

dharmon 6y ago
I agree that it is still worthwhile to do what you can. If large numbers of people stopped using just Google search and gmail, Google would most definitely notice and feel it hard. Or to phrase it differently, the choices of individual users absolutely can still decide the fate of these companies. This sounds obvious, but is not always true (it would be much harder for individual preferences to dethrone Microsoft, for example).
- 3764738236 6y ago
  The choices of individual users are already affecting the fate of these companies. Most people just prefer life with these companies and their products rather than life without.
pjc50 6y ago
Sure - but the "just live without them" argument is the main one used against having public policy about them! If they really are inescapable, they should not escape public scrutiny.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > If they really are inescapable I think you missed the point of the comment you replied to. It's not that "just live without them" is impossible under a reasonable definition, it's that the author is using an unreasonable definition.
bhupy 6y ago
It's like complaining that you can't cut Microsoft out of your life because every business you interact with uses MS Excel.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  You make it sound like that is something that's not worth worrying about but actually, it's a huge threat. Businesses put customer data in Excel (or Access or Google whatever) which could be accessed by Microsoft (or Google). GMail on the recipient's side might read your messages, stores you walk into might track your phone via WiFi access points. Not only is it hard to do anything against that kinda stuff, most of the time you don't even know (or could have known) it happened in the first place.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    Sure, and this is the consequence of living in a digital world. In the days of yore, all of your private information was sitting in paper ledgers in every business you ever interacted with. Even back then, you were susceptible to receiving promotional spam and marketing, and law enforcement regularly perused a business's books during criminal investigations. It's perhaps a bit easier today, in the digital world, but in principle not much has changed. Even in the digital realm, your financial data is mostly safe on account of PCI-DSS compliance requirements. So even in our connected world, a company isn't going to (legally) get your credit card information unless they're storing it in an HSM. Your personal health data is mostly safe on account of HIPAA. Even though a business you interface with might have a BAA with Amazon to store your healthcare data in an S3 bucket, Amazon is prohibited by law from actually doing anything with that data. Any serious digital business that wants to grow beyond a certain size needs to be SOC-2 Type 2 certified, which all of the major cloud providers happen to be. The implication of being unable to "live without tech giants" as extending to being unable to prevent others from living without them is a bit of a stretch. The fact that you can't prevent others from interacting with "Tech Giants" (be they individuals or businesses) has been true for forever, and for any type of business. The idea this necessarily means that one ought to be able to prevent other individuals or businesses from interacting with them also is a more recent, but flawed idea.
stcredzero 6y ago
Here's a place to start. Just get another email account. A paid one, where you are not the product, but actually the customer. Then, every time you run into an account in your normal activities, you switch that email over. If you like, go through your password vault every day, and switch over one additional account you see there. If you keep doing this, and most of your daily business is switched over to the new account, rather painlessly. Your old gmail account will linger, but soon, it will be relegated to spam and near-spam.
- jamil7 6y ago
  I did this, my gmail account has become a convenient burner account. I initially intended to eventually phase it out but it's great for giving out to crappy websites.
- brazzy 6y ago
  Better yet: get your own domain and use it for your primary email and simply have it forwarded, so if your email hoster becomes a problem for whatever reason, you can switch easily.
  - _fat_santa 6y ago
    I made the switch from an @gmail to @mydomain.com a few years back. It's been freaking fantastic. While you do have to pay for it, switching email providers has been next to seamless.
    - fredthomsen 6y ago
      and the paid providers actually have customer service
      - techsupporter 6y ago
        Not only do they have customer service if things go wrong, they have customer service to take random requests. I've submitted four "hi this is just a feature request, no action needed" tickets to FastMail over the four years I've been a customer. Every time, a person who appeared to have a clue (based on their responses) replied to me with at least confirmation of "sure, we'll think about it, might be a heavy lift" and they did two of them.
_fat_santa 6y ago
For me it was less about leaving the tech giant, but moreso diversifying away from them. I used to be a Google Guy. Android Phone, everything in my Google Account, Gmail and would use a Google service over anything else. Then I started to hear about Google randomly banning accounts and realized that having this one god Google account that basically ran my life is a major vulnerability. So I started to diversify, not just to other services, but at Google as well. First I moved my mail, calendar, tasks to Fastmail, ditched my Android and got an iPhone, moved from Google Photos to iCloud. Next were the services I still needed from Google: Youtube, Google Play Console, Analytics, Search Console and a few others. For those I created seperate Google accounts to manage every individual service. One for GP, One for GA and Google Search Console and one for Youtube. This way if Google bans my Youtube account, the damage is only contained to that one account and that one service. That's how I did it.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  FWIW I've definitely heard of Google banning multiple accounts belonging to the same person in those random ban stories. I guess it makes sense that that could happen because their advertising/data algorithms are obviously going to correlate accounts, and presumably you'd have to work pretty hard to stop them being able to do so.
- piva00 6y ago
  > For those I created seperate Google accounts to manage every individual service. One for GP, One for GA and Google Search Console and one for Youtube. This way if Google bans my Youtube account, the damage is only contained to that one account and that one service. I'm not sure how helpful that is given that Google is known to be able to correlate different accounts to the same person, it's happened before with Google Ads, for example.
- halfFact 6y ago
  Apple has a far worse record than Google. Not sure you did yourself or capitalism any favors.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by DJHenk 6y ago

dharmon 6y ago

I agree that it is still worthwhile to do what you can. If large numbers of people stopped using just Google search and gmail, Google would most definitely notice and feel it hard. Or to phrase it differently, the choices of individual users absolutely can still decide the fate of these companies. This sounds obvious, but is not always true (it would be much harder for individual preferences to dethrone Microsoft, for example).

3764738236 6y ago
The choices of individual users are already affecting the fate of these companies. Most people just prefer life with these companies and their products rather than life without.

pjc50 6y ago

Sure - but the "just live without them" argument is the main one used against having public policy about them! If they really are inescapable, they should not escape public scrutiny.

Dylan16807 6y ago
> If they really are inescapable I think you missed the point of the comment you replied to. It's not that "just live without them" is impossible under a reasonable definition, it's that the author is using an unreasonable definition.

bhupy 6y ago

It's like complaining that you can't cut Microsoft out of your life because every business you interact with uses MS Excel.

t0astbread 6y ago
You make it sound like that is something that's not worth worrying about but actually, it's a huge threat. Businesses put customer data in Excel (or Access or Google whatever) which could be accessed by Microsoft (or Google). GMail on the recipient's side might read your messages, stores you walk into might track your phone via WiFi access points. Not only is it hard to do anything against that kinda stuff, most of the time you don't even know (or could have known) it happened in the first place.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Sure, and this is the consequence of living in a digital world. In the days of yore, all of your private information was sitting in paper ledgers in every business you ever interacted with. Even back then, you were susceptible to receiving promotional spam and marketing, and law enforcement regularly perused a business's books during criminal investigations. It's perhaps a bit easier today, in the digital world, but in principle not much has changed. Even in the digital realm, your financial data is mostly safe on account of PCI-DSS compliance requirements. So even in our connected world, a company isn't going to (legally) get your credit card information unless they're storing it in an HSM. Your personal health data is mostly safe on account of HIPAA. Even though a business you interface with might have a BAA with Amazon to store your healthcare data in an S3 bucket, Amazon is prohibited by law from actually doing anything with that data. Any serious digital business that wants to grow beyond a certain size needs to be SOC-2 Type 2 certified, which all of the major cloud providers happen to be. The implication of being unable to "live without tech giants" as extending to being unable to prevent others from living without them is a bit of a stretch. The fact that you can't prevent others from interacting with "Tech Giants" (be they individuals or businesses) has been true for forever, and for any type of business. The idea this necessarily means that one ought to be able to prevent other individuals or businesses from interacting with them also is a more recent, but flawed idea.

stcredzero 6y ago

Here's a place to start. Just get another email account. A paid one, where you are not the product, but actually the customer. Then, every time you run into an account in your normal activities, you switch that email over. If you like, go through your password vault every day, and switch over one additional account you see there. If you keep doing this, and most of your daily business is switched over to the new account, rather painlessly. Your old gmail account will linger, but soon, it will be relegated to spam and near-spam.

jamil7 6y ago
I did this, my gmail account has become a convenient burner account. I initially intended to eventually phase it out but it's great for giving out to crappy websites.
brazzy 6y ago
Better yet: get your own domain and use it for your primary email and simply have it forwarded, so if your email hoster becomes a problem for whatever reason, you can switch easily.
- _fat_santa 6y ago
  I made the switch from an @gmail to @mydomain.com a few years back. It's been freaking fantastic. While you do have to pay for it, switching email providers has been next to seamless.
  - fredthomsen 6y ago
    and the paid providers actually have customer service
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      Not only do they have customer service if things go wrong, they have customer service to take random requests. I've submitted four "hi this is just a feature request, no action needed" tickets to FastMail over the four years I've been a customer. Every time, a person who appeared to have a clue (based on their responses) replied to me with at least confirmation of "sure, we'll think about it, might be a heavy lift" and they did two of them.

_fat_santa 6y ago

For me it was less about leaving the tech giant, but moreso diversifying away from them. I used to be a Google Guy. Android Phone, everything in my Google Account, Gmail and would use a Google service over anything else. Then I started to hear about Google randomly banning accounts and realized that having this one god Google account that basically ran my life is a major vulnerability. So I started to diversify, not just to other services, but at Google as well. First I moved my mail, calendar, tasks to Fastmail, ditched my Android and got an iPhone, moved from Google Photos to iCloud. Next were the services I still needed from Google: Youtube, Google Play Console, Analytics, Search Console and a few others. For those I created seperate Google accounts to manage every individual service. One for GP, One for GA and Google Search Console and one for Youtube. This way if Google bans my Youtube account, the damage is only contained to that one account and that one service. That's how I did it.

mcintyre1994 6y ago
FWIW I've definitely heard of Google banning multiple accounts belonging to the same person in those random ban stories. I guess it makes sense that that could happen because their advertising/data algorithms are obviously going to correlate accounts, and presumably you'd have to work pretty hard to stop them being able to do so.
piva00 6y ago
> For those I created seperate Google accounts to manage every individual service. One for GP, One for GA and Google Search Console and one for Youtube. This way if Google bans my Youtube account, the damage is only contained to that one account and that one service. I'm not sure how helpful that is given that Google is known to be able to correlate different accounts to the same person, it's happened before with Google Ads, for example.
halfFact 6y ago
Apple has a far worse record than Google. Not sure you did yourself or capitalism any favors.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]