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Personally, I heavily rely on Google and Amazon. All my emails, purchases, photos, and browsing goes through them. Opting out would mean uprooting gigabytes of

Personally, I heavily rely on Google and Amazon. All my emails, purchases, photos, and browsing goes through them. Opting out would mean uprooting gigabytes of data to other services, which takes time to research, backup, and transfer. And even then you can't fully get rid of them, because switching to Apple from Android costs money, and I am not willing to root Android. This is merely my personal situation, but saying that people don't need Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon is ignoring the massive dependence these companies have forced onto users and the cost of leaving, which is not worth the time and money for many.

PostOnce 6y ago
"massive dependence" Switching from gmail to another provider isn't like living without electricity, it takes a couple of days updating some external accounts to reflect your new email; I did it. Buying shit from somewhere that isn't Amazon isn't exactly trekking through the jungle for 3 weeks. All you have to do is type in another domain. There is no shortage of non-Amazon sellers with similar prices. Switching from Chrome to Firefox takes 5 minutes, you can import your bookmarks and whatnot. Maybe you'll have to type in a password again. No climbing K2 level difficulty there either. Android and iOS aren't that different, you can click a browser, camera, or email in either in the same amount of time with the same UI. Sure it's effort, but it's not a hell of a lot of effort.
- nexthash 6y ago
  I hope you understand that this is all relative... what if you were in a situation where all of your friends/news are on Facebook? Where you don't have time to update 30+ accounts/subscriptions to reflect a new email address? Paying $500+ for an iPhone? Depending on the person, that is a hell of a lot of effort. If it wasn't, FAANG wouldn't be the empire it is today. It would be taking million user hits like WhatsApp after a single scandal.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Well, they got to where they are by being trusted at what they do. They have rapidly lost that trust, in my mind. Once a party violates some level of implicit trust, you have to distance yourself from that party. Big tech has shown their true colors. They will abuse their monopoly power to exploit politics, manipulate people, cut up and coming competitors off at the knees, and censor anything they don't agree with. This is not the web I signed up for. This is not the revolutionary open tech that kids like me that grew up in the 90s gushed about. This is a dystopian Orwellian nightmare. It's time to get off the ride.
COGlory 6y ago
I did it: - LineageOS + MicroG and F-Droid for mobile. - NextCloud (and DAV) running on an old laptop for calendar, contacts, and file storage. The mobile app uploads all my photos automatically. It backs up to Backblaze -ProtonMail with a custom domain for email. Amazon is pretty avoidable. Shipping has gotten faster and cheaper everywhere else at this point. At least for the rural place I am. I'm not particularly tech savvy. This took a significant time effort for me. At this point, it's all pretty stable, I don't really have glitches anymore. I imagine the average HN user could easily replicate it, and if this type of setup got more popular, it would invariably get easier to set up.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  What phone did you load LineageOS on? Do you know of any guides for it?
  - COGlory 6y ago
    I was using a Pixel 2, but the list of well documented phones is available: https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ It's pretty simple if your phone is supported. You enable developer mode, enable USB debugging, download the image, and run a couple ADB commands. For me it was: fastboot flashing unlock fastboot update image.zip And that was it.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >What phone did you load LineageOS on? Do you know of any guides for it? Not GP, but I'd been using LineageOS on my HTC OneMax. I like it a lot. Here's a list of supported devices: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ Click through the links on the above page for install guides.
- Trex_Egg 6y ago
  It is good to see such implementations adopted more and more
nabilhat 6y ago
I agree that going cold turkey on every trace of these orgs would be unrealistic. There's a lot to be said for locking down phones and shopping locally, but taking control of the assets those orgs hold is where it really pays off no matter who you are. Migrating email is intimidating, but alleviates the highest cost risk and is actually pretty painless. In my own case, I started a Fastmail account and told it to use my own domain and sync from my gmail account. I didn't have to commit to anything until I felt like it. After a couple of weeks I started lazily updating a few subscriptions as they got forwarded from gmail, and replying to people with 'hey, check it out this is my new email'. Now, Fastmail could vanish and I'd be temporarily inconvenienced for only as long as it took to staple my domain to some other email host. Losing access to my gmail account before making that switch would have been a disaster.
nobody9999 6y ago
>I am not willing to root Android. Why is that? I'm not being snarky, I just don't understand why. The difference between a rooted and non-rooted android is like the being in the wheel group or sudoers file on unix/linux and not being in them. Personally, I like to have full control of my own property. What reason do you have for not wanting that?
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  In theory it's nice, in practice are there phones that you can root without leaving the bootloader in a vulnerable state? And it looks like the future is a situation where it's impossible to prevent software from detecting unlocks and refusing to run.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >In theory it's nice, in practice are there phones that you can root without leaving the bootloader in a vulnerable state? I've always just unlocked the bootloader, then installed TWRP[0] (or similar) and then re-locked the bootloader. Once a reasonable recovery partition is in place, you don't need keep the bootloader unlocked. [0] https://twrp.me/ https://twrp.me/
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      And then how do you actually do the rooting in a way that doesn't make your phone fail to boot? What model of phone?
      - nobody9999 6y ago
        >And then how do you actually do the rooting in a way that doesn't make your phone fail to boot? What model of phone? That's dependent on which phone you have and what software you have on that phone. Here's a few places to start: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=root%20android%20phone https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=root%20android%20phone
      - 6y ago

PostOnce 6y ago

"massive dependence" Switching from gmail to another provider isn't like living without electricity, it takes a couple of days updating some external accounts to reflect your new email; I did it. Buying shit from somewhere that isn't Amazon isn't exactly trekking through the jungle for 3 weeks. All you have to do is type in another domain. There is no shortage of non-Amazon sellers with similar prices. Switching from Chrome to Firefox takes 5 minutes, you can import your bookmarks and whatnot. Maybe you'll have to type in a password again. No climbing K2 level difficulty there either. Android and iOS aren't that different, you can click a browser, camera, or email in either in the same amount of time with the same UI. Sure it's effort, but it's not a hell of a lot of effort.

nexthash 6y ago
I hope you understand that this is all relative... what if you were in a situation where all of your friends/news are on Facebook? Where you don't have time to update 30+ accounts/subscriptions to reflect a new email address? Paying $500+ for an iPhone? Depending on the person, that is a hell of a lot of effort. If it wasn't, FAANG wouldn't be the empire it is today. It would be taking million user hits like WhatsApp after a single scandal.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Well, they got to where they are by being trusted at what they do. They have rapidly lost that trust, in my mind. Once a party violates some level of implicit trust, you have to distance yourself from that party. Big tech has shown their true colors. They will abuse their monopoly power to exploit politics, manipulate people, cut up and coming competitors off at the knees, and censor anything they don't agree with. This is not the web I signed up for. This is not the revolutionary open tech that kids like me that grew up in the 90s gushed about. This is a dystopian Orwellian nightmare. It's time to get off the ride.

COGlory 6y ago

I did it: - LineageOS + MicroG and F-Droid for mobile. - NextCloud (and DAV) running on an old laptop for calendar, contacts, and file storage. The mobile app uploads all my photos automatically. It backs up to Backblaze -ProtonMail with a custom domain for email. Amazon is pretty avoidable. Shipping has gotten faster and cheaper everywhere else at this point. At least for the rural place I am. I'm not particularly tech savvy. This took a significant time effort for me. At this point, it's all pretty stable, I don't really have glitches anymore. I imagine the average HN user could easily replicate it, and if this type of setup got more popular, it would invariably get easier to set up.

chrisco255 6y ago
What phone did you load LineageOS on? Do you know of any guides for it?
- COGlory 6y ago
  I was using a Pixel 2, but the list of well documented phones is available: https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ It's pretty simple if your phone is supported. You enable developer mode, enable USB debugging, download the image, and run a couple ADB commands. For me it was: fastboot flashing unlock fastboot update image.zip And that was it.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >What phone did you load LineageOS on? Do you know of any guides for it? Not GP, but I'd been using LineageOS on my HTC OneMax. I like it a lot. Here's a list of supported devices: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ Click through the links on the above page for install guides.
Trex_Egg 6y ago
It is good to see such implementations adopted more and more

nabilhat 6y ago

I agree that going cold turkey on every trace of these orgs would be unrealistic. There's a lot to be said for locking down phones and shopping locally, but taking control of the assets those orgs hold is where it really pays off no matter who you are. Migrating email is intimidating, but alleviates the highest cost risk and is actually pretty painless. In my own case, I started a Fastmail account and told it to use my own domain and sync from my gmail account. I didn't have to commit to anything until I felt like it. After a couple of weeks I started lazily updating a few subscriptions as they got forwarded from gmail, and replying to people with 'hey, check it out this is my new email'. Now, Fastmail could vanish and I'd be temporarily inconvenienced for only as long as it took to staple my domain to some other email host. Losing access to my gmail account before making that switch would have been a disaster.

nobody9999 6y ago

>I am not willing to root Android. Why is that? I'm not being snarky, I just don't understand why. The difference between a rooted and non-rooted android is like the being in the wheel group or sudoers file on unix/linux and not being in them. Personally, I like to have full control of my own property. What reason do you have for not wanting that?

Dylan16807 6y ago
In theory it's nice, in practice are there phones that you can root without leaving the bootloader in a vulnerable state? And it looks like the future is a situation where it's impossible to prevent software from detecting unlocks and refusing to run.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >In theory it's nice, in practice are there phones that you can root without leaving the bootloader in a vulnerable state? I've always just unlocked the bootloader, then installed TWRP[0] (or similar) and then re-locked the bootloader. Once a reasonable recovery partition is in place, you don't need keep the bootloader unlocked. [0] https://twrp.me/ https://twrp.me/
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    And then how do you actually do the rooting in a way that doesn't make your phone fail to boot? What model of phone?
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >And then how do you actually do the rooting in a way that doesn't make your phone fail to boot? What model of phone? That's dependent on which phone you have and what software you have on that phone. Here's a few places to start: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=root%20android%20phone https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=root%20android%20phone
    - 6y ago