6 ms·

Fuck Off Google

111 points by acqbu 5y ago

kjellsbells 5y ago
Echoes of the old kein mitleid fur Microsoft site, http://www.kmfms.com/ http://www.kmfms.com/ Plus ça change...
cruelty2 5y ago
sagarpatil 5y ago
So much for ‘Don’t be evil’
- scythmic_waves 5y ago
  Whenever "Don't be evil" comes up, I can't help but think of this (nearly decade old) tweet [1]: > Google motto 2004: Don't be evil > Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define > Google motto 2013: We make military robots [1]: https://twitter.com/BrentButt/status/412700627152961536 https://twitter.com/BrentButt/status/412700627152961536
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    I wonder how many people those military robots have killed, maimed, enslaved, removed the rights from, etc, in the past 9 years? Implying military robots are inherently evil is like implying that punching someone in the nose is inherently evil. Context is important. If I punch a random person in the nose, maybe I am evil. If I punch a person in the nose who randomly punched me in the nose, I wouldn't consider myself evil.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      A military robot designed for US - the country that has more troops in war zones around the world than anybody else (indeed, than everybody else combined!) - is practically guaranteed to be used for something inherently evil.
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
      - lostmsu 5y ago
        Then so is designing kitchen knives for humans, who have more homicides, than any other species.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  It should have been 'Don't be so naive'
shadowgovt 5y ago
> Decentralize All -> "People shall control technology rather than be controlled by it!" sigh Any attempt to undermine a major software services company that doesn't start from a place from understanding how many users do not want this is doomed to failure. You have to provide users a better service, not "freedom," if you want to woo them away from the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, Apples, and Twitters of the world. Users, on average, do not want to "control" their machines any more than they want to rebuild their car engines. For most users, that level of "freedom" would basically guarantee their systems would be owned by the first hacker to bother to come across their under-secured self-administered solutions.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  > You have to provide users a better service Same applies with piracy. You can't fight on price on a service provided for free by motivated volunteers, but you can at least take the fight on the quality+speed of service and convenience.
- ece 5y ago
  If users want compatibility and interoperability (which most do), there needs to be some awareness of at least buying into and using open ecosystems.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Aye, aye. Again "stupid people" just want to live their lives instead of fighting evil Google, evil Wall street, evil oil and car manufacturers lobby and evil <insert your pet peeve here>.
nus07 5y ago
Back in 2004 I saw an interview of Larry Page who talked about how they wanted to be different from Wall Street and be more humble and nerdy and less evil.As a nerdy kid I became a huge fan of the Google counter culture against the evil Wall Street “derivatives” culture in the early 2000s and admired Page. Little did I know that the Burning man, Grateful Dead , Don’t be Evil was glossing over and corporate speak for one of the most evil and powerful organizations ever making money off my privacy and ads. Meanwhile Larry Page is retired in a Pacific island or New Zealand with billions and no concern for the minions and the working class ideals that he and his Michigan family stood for. Animal Farm is truly an important read .
- stareblinkstare 5y ago
  > [Just rich people saying rich shit, OP feigning shock and awe] > Animal Farm is truly an important read . Doesn't sound like it taught you much.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    Cynicism isn't a synonym for intelligence.
- dnissley 5y ago
  What's your elevator pitch on how google is one of the most evil organizations? How did you become convinced?
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    "Surveillance Capitalism" by Zuboff is far from an elevator pitch, but goes into some great detail on how Google more or less singlehandedly developed modern surveillance capitalism (the art of turning behavioral surplus from users of your product into predictive models and products you can sell to others, or, roughly, "Why everyone hoovers up everything they possibly can and tries to big data learn it for advertising"). The argument is that nothing inherent in our technology requires this particular outcome - that the techniques of surveillance capitalism were developed, by specific people, at a specific point in time (when Google needed money desperately), and turn out to be exceedingly profitable. Unfortunately, that also turns out to be exceedingly human-toxic. Machine learning flips the usual quality/quantity tradeoffs, and in order to get the highest quality, requires the most quantity. It's not that Google/Facebook/Twitter want to know a lot about you. It's that their profits are based on them knowing everything about you. And that then leads to the whole "engagement" problem that is most of the modern internet. Google... collects a lot of what it needs by nature of mostly being "the internet." YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliated companies gather what they need by trying to ensure, by hook or by crook, that you spend as much time as at all possible on their platforms. Your time is literally their money. So out of this you get all the nasty little human psychology exploits that modern platforms use to "drive their users nuts" and keep them coming back, and the nature of the content, and what it's doing to their brains. Drive them down some crazy conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Great, they'll spend more time on your platform looking for more stuff (cough YouTube cough). Genocide in some exotic foreign language you don't care enough to learn to moderate? Whatever, it's engaging (Facebook?). And so on. So the "elevator pitch" I'd use is that the reason the modern internet (and as a result most of consumer tech) is so rabidly human-toxic in most of the commonly used forms is a direct result of Google inventing the technologies that require that sort of engagement as a feed into the profit engines they've decided to use.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Last edit to their "next events" wiki page was two years ago. Main page last edited one year ago. I wonder if the organization petered out because of covid or because their true mission was local and was successfully concluded (i.e. to prevent the building of a Google office in their neighborhood).
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Their mission petered out because it was founded upon a null conclusion. There was no greater purpose to strive for.
werber 5y ago
I intellectually fall into the "Fuck Off Google" crowd (with a gmail account, and a paid YT), but, https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternatives https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternat... , their list of alternatives are all not easy as a centralized solution. I don't think by any means the intent of this page is to be elitist, but this is a large ask for someone who fairly component technologically speaking, let alone the average user. Just understanding something isn't the best choice, is not enough. You need to have the ethical argument, better ideas, and better products and results and that is hard beyond my capabilities and don't know what the answer is
- cable2600 5y ago
  I think people need to donate money to Duckduckgo to make alternatives to Google software and services. Ones that don't spy on you and serve you ads.
  - Yuioup 5y ago
    ... until Duckduckgo changes direction due to change of ownership, VC money, IPO, ...
neatze 5y ago
May be I am naive, but I really have hard time understanding how/why/where google is evil; Compared to what google is evil specifically ? If google is gone tomorrow there is with certainty better alternative ? What is evil any way when contrasted with other organizations in similar space ?
- elliotec 5y ago
  The linked website has many of your answers. Some of the listed evils include mass surveillance, mass censorship, participation in drone killings, stealing and exploiting people's data for profit, building murder robots, colonizing physical space, systematic tax evasion, law violation, corrupt political lobbying, so on and so forth. To your point, measuring the evilness of something is going to be fraught, especially in a competitive space of a bunch of other seemingly equally evil entities like Amazon, Facebook, etc. One of the interesting differences is your other point, the "better alternative." Alternative to what? https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternatives https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternat... - their reach is so far and wide that it takes pages to list out alternatives for the bits and pieces of what we use Google software for now. "BETTER" is relative and difficult to define, especially when one of the major advantages to Google products is their ubiquity. "What is evil anyway..." great question. At some point, it seems like you know it when you see it.
  - zmix 5y ago
    Seeing this post slowly fading away, I guess, there is a lot of Googlers here. Hasn't a Google employee just sued Google, because of the "Don't be Evil" contractual item not being applied?
  - neatze 5y ago
    Can you please tell me few organizations that are not evil ?
    - elliotec 5y ago
      I'd think most companies generally wouldn't be considered evil outside the "there is no ethical consumption/production under capitalism" thought - some obvious candidates for organizations that are not evil are those such as Wikimedia, The Internet Archive, other non-profits. In terms of for-profit organizations, people often cite Costco, or companies that are in many ways the antithesis of some things google does like Brave Software.
chasil 5y ago
The destruction of Google is always one election away. I worked for an old and conservative company in my youth, and in the same way that the rules for wearing my suitcoat were imparted (the moment of crossing from carpet to linoleum), restraint of partisan expressions in the workplace was required. Google does not adhere to this doctrine. They embraced Obama, reacted violently to Trump, and while tight-lipped on Biden, their position is well-known. This particular example would be unthinkable in any of my past positions: https://www.abc15.com/news/national/leaked-video-shows-google-executives-upset-after-2016-presidential-election https://www.abc15.com/news/national/leaked-video-shows-googl... The 2022 election is going to place forces opposed to Google into power. I am able to work with both staunch conservatives and liberals, though I am neither. This is not the Google way. I am sure that Google's lobbying efforts have been both widely placed and generous, but I would not recommend any bias with YouTube or other outlets of partisan expression for the immediate future. Nancy is not going to be able to protect you in 2023.
- silisili 5y ago
  Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if R states just start banning FB and Google. I'm not really excited about a fractured internet, but I guess that would bear better alternatives.
  - HumanReadable 5y ago
    Are there any odds you would be interested in betting on whether this will happen? If so I would probably be happy to take the other side of the bet :)
    - silisili 5y ago
      Absolutely not :). There's quite a distance between 'wouldnt be surprised if' and 'am sure of'.
      - HumanReadable 5y ago
        What is that distance? We can just make odds reflect that.
holografix 5y ago
The push back on the Kreuzberg campus was much more about housing affordability than perceived privacy and data abuse. “Konstantin Sergiou, a member of one of the neighborhood campaign groups, told the Guardian in May that the Google campus signaled the kind of urban change “that has proven to be so problematic elsewhere, such as in San Francisco.” He noted that a several different tenants’ groups and activists had been working to halt gentrification in Kreuzberg. “When Google decided to move into the area, we were already organized.””[0] [0] https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/qz.com/1435550/google-abandons-plan-to-build-a-new-kreuzberg-campus-in-berlin/amp/ https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/qz.com/1435550/google-abando...
Santuse 5y ago
I don't really see how their actions are substantially different from other corporations of their scale. Nay, they are more tame. Facebook's embedded videos are routinely ripped from YouTube, and Facebook monetizes those videos, but is often tardy in enforcing DMCA requests. Oil companies will cook the planet and destroy life on earth with how insanely reckless their policies have been. Listen to Louis Rossman on Apple. Look at the June oven, and how Amazon tracks trending products and redirects traffic to their own models.
- elliotec 5y ago
  > I don't really see how their actions are substantially different from other corporations of their scale. I don't think they are, but the site/organization is just focusing on Google rather than "Big Tech" as a concept and industry, which is a reasonable approach given the size and magnitudes of it all.
betaby 5y ago
At that point Cloudflare and Akamai are bigger problem. They are basically gate-keeping everything in the internet so you can't web-crawl the web anymore. Heck, even 1 page sites are now 'protected'.
Reubachi 5y ago
A thoughtful cause with a well thought out landing page to grab the eye. Unfortunately,every link on that page to support them 404s.

Fuck Off Google

111 points by acqbu 5y ago

kjellsbells 5y ago

Echoes of the old kein mitleid fur Microsoft site, http://www.kmfms.com/ http://www.kmfms.com/ Plus ça change...

cruelty2 5y ago

sagarpatil 5y ago

So much for ‘Don’t be evil’

scythmic_waves 5y ago
Whenever "Don't be evil" comes up, I can't help but think of this (nearly decade old) tweet [1]: > Google motto 2004: Don't be evil > Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define > Google motto 2013: We make military robots [1]: https://twitter.com/BrentButt/status/412700627152961536 https://twitter.com/BrentButt/status/412700627152961536
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  I wonder how many people those military robots have killed, maimed, enslaved, removed the rights from, etc, in the past 9 years? Implying military robots are inherently evil is like implying that punching someone in the nose is inherently evil. Context is important. If I punch a random person in the nose, maybe I am evil. If I punch a person in the nose who randomly punched me in the nose, I wouldn't consider myself evil.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    A military robot designed for US - the country that has more troops in war zones around the world than anybody else (indeed, than everybody else combined!) - is practically guaranteed to be used for something inherently evil.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      Then so is designing kitchen knives for humans, who have more homicides, than any other species.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
It should have been 'Don't be so naive'

shadowgovt 5y ago

> Decentralize All -> "People shall control technology rather than be controlled by it!" sigh Any attempt to undermine a major software services company that doesn't start from a place from understanding how many users do not want this is doomed to failure. You have to provide users a better service, not "freedom," if you want to woo them away from the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, Apples, and Twitters of the world. Users, on average, do not want to "control" their machines any more than they want to rebuild their car engines. For most users, that level of "freedom" would basically guarantee their systems would be owned by the first hacker to bother to come across their under-secured self-administered solutions.

m-p-3 5y ago
> You have to provide users a better service Same applies with piracy. You can't fight on price on a service provided for free by motivated volunteers, but you can at least take the fight on the quality+speed of service and convenience.
ece 5y ago
If users want compatibility and interoperability (which most do), there needs to be some awareness of at least buying into and using open ecosystems.
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
Aye, aye. Again "stupid people" just want to live their lives instead of fighting evil Google, evil Wall street, evil oil and car manufacturers lobby and evil <insert your pet peeve here>.

nus07 5y ago

Back in 2004 I saw an interview of Larry Page who talked about how they wanted to be different from Wall Street and be more humble and nerdy and less evil.As a nerdy kid I became a huge fan of the Google counter culture against the evil Wall Street “derivatives” culture in the early 2000s and admired Page. Little did I know that the Burning man, Grateful Dead , Don’t be Evil was glossing over and corporate speak for one of the most evil and powerful organizations ever making money off my privacy and ads. Meanwhile Larry Page is retired in a Pacific island or New Zealand with billions and no concern for the minions and the working class ideals that he and his Michigan family stood for. Animal Farm is truly an important read .

stareblinkstare 5y ago
> [Just rich people saying rich shit, OP feigning shock and awe] > Animal Farm is truly an important read . Doesn't sound like it taught you much.
- Talanes 5y ago
  Cynicism isn't a synonym for intelligence.
dnissley 5y ago
What's your elevator pitch on how google is one of the most evil organizations? How did you become convinced?
- Syonyk 5y ago
  "Surveillance Capitalism" by Zuboff is far from an elevator pitch, but goes into some great detail on how Google more or less singlehandedly developed modern surveillance capitalism (the art of turning behavioral surplus from users of your product into predictive models and products you can sell to others, or, roughly, "Why everyone hoovers up everything they possibly can and tries to big data learn it for advertising"). The argument is that nothing inherent in our technology requires this particular outcome - that the techniques of surveillance capitalism were developed, by specific people, at a specific point in time (when Google needed money desperately), and turn out to be exceedingly profitable. Unfortunately, that also turns out to be exceedingly human-toxic. Machine learning flips the usual quality/quantity tradeoffs, and in order to get the highest quality, requires the most quantity. It's not that Google/Facebook/Twitter want to know a lot about you. It's that their profits are based on them knowing everything about you. And that then leads to the whole "engagement" problem that is most of the modern internet. Google... collects a lot of what it needs by nature of mostly being "the internet." YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliated companies gather what they need by trying to ensure, by hook or by crook, that you spend as much time as at all possible on their platforms. Your time is literally their money. So out of this you get all the nasty little human psychology exploits that modern platforms use to "drive their users nuts" and keep them coming back, and the nature of the content, and what it's doing to their brains. Drive them down some crazy conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Great, they'll spend more time on your platform looking for more stuff (cough YouTube cough). Genocide in some exotic foreign language you don't care enough to learn to moderate? Whatever, it's engaging (Facebook?). And so on. So the "elevator pitch" I'd use is that the reason the modern internet (and as a result most of consumer tech) is so rabidly human-toxic in most of the commonly used forms is a direct result of Google inventing the technologies that require that sort of engagement as a feed into the profit engines they've decided to use.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

Last edit to their "next events" wiki page was two years ago. Main page last edited one year ago. I wonder if the organization petered out because of covid or because their true mission was local and was successfully concluded (i.e. to prevent the building of a Google office in their neighborhood).

jmercouris 5y ago
Their mission petered out because it was founded upon a null conclusion. There was no greater purpose to strive for.

werber 5y ago

I intellectually fall into the "Fuck Off Google" crowd (with a gmail account, and a paid YT), but, https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternatives https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternat... , their list of alternatives are all not easy as a centralized solution. I don't think by any means the intent of this page is to be elitist, but this is a large ask for someone who fairly component technologically speaking, let alone the average user. Just understanding something isn't the best choice, is not enough. You need to have the ethical argument, better ideas, and better products and results and that is hard beyond my capabilities and don't know what the answer is

cable2600 5y ago
I think people need to donate money to Duckduckgo to make alternatives to Google software and services. Ones that don't spy on you and serve you ads.
- Yuioup 5y ago
  ... until Duckduckgo changes direction due to change of ownership, VC money, IPO, ...

neatze 5y ago

May be I am naive, but I really have hard time understanding how/why/where google is evil; Compared to what google is evil specifically ? If google is gone tomorrow there is with certainty better alternative ? What is evil any way when contrasted with other organizations in similar space ?

elliotec 5y ago
The linked website has many of your answers. Some of the listed evils include mass surveillance, mass censorship, participation in drone killings, stealing and exploiting people's data for profit, building murder robots, colonizing physical space, systematic tax evasion, law violation, corrupt political lobbying, so on and so forth. To your point, measuring the evilness of something is going to be fraught, especially in a competitive space of a bunch of other seemingly equally evil entities like Amazon, Facebook, etc. One of the interesting differences is your other point, the "better alternative." Alternative to what? https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternatives https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternat... - their reach is so far and wide that it takes pages to list out alternatives for the bits and pieces of what we use Google software for now. "BETTER" is relative and difficult to define, especially when one of the major advantages to Google products is their ubiquity. "What is evil anyway..." great question. At some point, it seems like you know it when you see it.
- zmix 5y ago
  Seeing this post slowly fading away, I guess, there is a lot of Googlers here. Hasn't a Google employee just sued Google, because of the "Don't be Evil" contractual item not being applied?
- neatze 5y ago
  Can you please tell me few organizations that are not evil ?
  - elliotec 5y ago
    I'd think most companies generally wouldn't be considered evil outside the "there is no ethical consumption/production under capitalism" thought - some obvious candidates for organizations that are not evil are those such as Wikimedia, The Internet Archive, other non-profits. In terms of for-profit organizations, people often cite Costco, or companies that are in many ways the antithesis of some things google does like Brave Software.

chasil 5y ago

The destruction of Google is always one election away. I worked for an old and conservative company in my youth, and in the same way that the rules for wearing my suitcoat were imparted (the moment of crossing from carpet to linoleum), restraint of partisan expressions in the workplace was required. Google does not adhere to this doctrine. They embraced Obama, reacted violently to Trump, and while tight-lipped on Biden, their position is well-known. This particular example would be unthinkable in any of my past positions: https://www.abc15.com/news/national/leaked-video-shows-google-executives-upset-after-2016-presidential-election https://www.abc15.com/news/national/leaked-video-shows-googl... The 2022 election is going to place forces opposed to Google into power. I am able to work with both staunch conservatives and liberals, though I am neither. This is not the Google way. I am sure that Google's lobbying efforts have been both widely placed and generous, but I would not recommend any bias with YouTube or other outlets of partisan expression for the immediate future. Nancy is not going to be able to protect you in 2023.

silisili 5y ago
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if R states just start banning FB and Google. I'm not really excited about a fractured internet, but I guess that would bear better alternatives.
- HumanReadable 5y ago
  Are there any odds you would be interested in betting on whether this will happen? If so I would probably be happy to take the other side of the bet :)
  - silisili 5y ago
    Absolutely not :). There's quite a distance between 'wouldnt be surprised if' and 'am sure of'.
    - HumanReadable 5y ago
      What is that distance? We can just make odds reflect that.

holografix 5y ago

The push back on the Kreuzberg campus was much more about housing affordability than perceived privacy and data abuse. “Konstantin Sergiou, a member of one of the neighborhood campaign groups, told the Guardian in May that the Google campus signaled the kind of urban change “that has proven to be so problematic elsewhere, such as in San Francisco.” He noted that a several different tenants’ groups and activists had been working to halt gentrification in Kreuzberg. “When Google decided to move into the area, we were already organized.””[0] [0] https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/qz.com/1435550/google-abandons-plan-to-build-a-new-kreuzberg-campus-in-berlin/amp/ https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/qz.com/1435550/google-abando...

Santuse 5y ago

I don't really see how their actions are substantially different from other corporations of their scale. Nay, they are more tame. Facebook's embedded videos are routinely ripped from YouTube, and Facebook monetizes those videos, but is often tardy in enforcing DMCA requests. Oil companies will cook the planet and destroy life on earth with how insanely reckless their policies have been. Listen to Louis Rossman on Apple. Look at the June oven, and how Amazon tracks trending products and redirects traffic to their own models.

elliotec 5y ago
> I don't really see how their actions are substantially different from other corporations of their scale. I don't think they are, but the site/organization is just focusing on Google rather than "Big Tech" as a concept and industry, which is a reasonable approach given the size and magnitudes of it all.

betaby 5y ago

At that point Cloudflare and Akamai are bigger problem. They are basically gate-keeping everything in the internet so you can't web-crawl the web anymore. Heck, even 1 page sites are now 'protected'.

Reubachi 5y ago

A thoughtful cause with a well thought out landing page to grab the eye. Unfortunately,every link on that page to support them 404s.