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I'd like to make a humble appeal to you, dear Reader, that you consider if you are able to exist without Google services and the tradeoffs they entail.
by 0des 5y ago
I'd like to make a humble appeal to you, dear Reader, that you consider if you are able to exist without Google services and the tradeoffs they entail.
- shadowgovt 5y agoI'm having the opposite reaction. 2FA is a strict improvement and everyone should be using it. I applaud Google for mandating a best practice. It's far preferable to the alternative of having your account compromised because your password is guessed or stolen.
- 0des 5y agoThis is not my opinion against 2FA, it is me using this moment of friction to ask a question most people are often too happy to ignore when things are going fine. Are you able to live without your captors or not?
- shadowgovt 5y agoI also don't see them as my "captors." I'm able to live without electricity but I'm not about to call the power company and have them cut my feed. There are folks who consider it some kind of incarceration to be beholden to the electricity provided by a power company; I respect them but I don't share their philosophy.
- xdennis 5y agoDepending on the situation it can be easy to cut yourself from the power company, but no one can create his own phone carrier regardless of the situation.
- shadowgovt 5y ago> Depending on the situation it can be easy to cut yourself from the power company Unless the situation is "There is another power company right next door," I'll have to disagree. If the claim is one can self-generate power, the analogy holds but not in the way, I think, the author means. Self-generation off-grid is a pain... Buy or build and maintain your own generators, your own storage, deal with impedance, deal with the risks of operating on high voltage, equipment breakdowns are yours and yours alone to repair, etc. Similarly, I can self-host my own email, video, web servers, and possibly even build my own voice-activated assistants tuned perfectly to my specifications, sharing my data with nobody... But that's a lot of work when Google has provided all of that for me.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoYes, it’s immensely frustrating when a service doesn’t support proper 2FA or forces weak SMS as a backup to proper 2FA, undermining much of its value. So while I support asking people to reconsider if they need a Google account, I would never recommend alternatives that lack 2FA and where possible, I refuse to use services that lack 2FA myself. Unfortunately there are still some categories like banking where TOTP, FIDO, etc is practically unheard of.
- xdennis 5y agoI'm continuously surprised how authoritarian some people are. You consider something superior just because it works for you and therefore everyone should be forced to do as you, but you ignore what doesn't work for others (such as being tied to a phone).
- arbitrage 5y agoNobody is forcing you to use Google's products. If having a phone is that onerous for you, you're allowed to not do that.
- ergot_vacation 5y agoGOOGLE is literally forcing people to use their products. Their entire business strategy is based around it, gobbling up or destroying every competitor, advertising and promoting their own services on search above others, illegally collaborating with other giant tech companies, and on and on. That's how monopolies work. That's the whole point.
- darkwizard42 5y agoThe announcement doesn't even require a phone... it just requires SOME second device to confirm your identity. There are several alternatives. And as others have said, you can use another product.
- tqi 5y agoWhat are the tradeoffs?