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And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. They have their tendrils everywhere, except in places that consciously prevent them - wh

And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. They have their tendrils everywhere, except in places that consciously prevent them - which is usually done by even worse tyrannies like China/Russia. Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc…

blueflow 4y ago
You still have the choice to not use any of their services. You can get pretty far in life despite not using the internet at all.
- hosteur 4y ago
  Well not in all countries. In my country you are required to receive electronic messages from the government as well as to have a government issued ID and authentication system that forces you to have a fairly recent smartphone. For now, it is theoretically possible to use the authentication system without a smartphone but you will have to jump through an awful amount of (artificially imposed) hoops. Not having an internet connection is NOT an option. There is a legal process to get a special permit to avoid having to use these state mandated electronic systems but it is almost only theoretically in that you will need to have a doctor's note saying that you are unable to use such systems. E.g., by suffering by severe dementia or similar.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Which country are you speaking of?
    - bbarn 4y ago
      I'm not sure about OP, but here in Iceland having a smartphone with electronic ID built into it is not TECHNICALLY a requirement but life can be very difficult without it. It is the de-facto identification system used by every government service and banking institution.
    - vetinari 4y ago
      Afaik mandatory government-provided mailbox is in Czech republic ("datovka") and Slovakia, at least for some parts of population (like enterpreneurs, lawyers, other professions that communicate with state institutions), with general mandatory use coming soon. They serve the fiction of confirmed mail delivery. If you don't pick it up from this mailbox, it is considered delivered anyway and your problem, if you miss something here.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    I find this incredibly hard to believe. Governments have accessibility obligations and so their key services should absolutely be usable with something like Chromium/Linux. And it definitely shouldn't be more onerous than using a smartphone.
    - vetinari 4y ago
      For example, see https://www.slovensko.sk/sk/na-stiahnutie https://www.slovensko.sk/sk/na-stiahnutie It is the portal for Slovak republic. You are supposed to have your national ID card, which is a smart card. To use it, you need a smartcard reader and an application, which basically listens on localhost and is kind of a intermediate between your browser, the pages than need authentication and the department of state, which handles IAM. That application runs on Windows, Mac and Debian (9,10)/Ubuntu (18.04,20.04)/Mint (19.20) (it is not open source). Other distributions are not supported, forget ChromeOS. It is quite onerous. You have to enter your PIN for smartcard about four times, before you see the content of the inbox.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    But there's nothing that says you have to use that smartphone and services for anything other than government communications.
- leereeves 4y ago
  How would you (for example) apply for a job without the Internet?
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Postal? Or deliver the envelope in-person to their box when they are nearby. I learned it like this, its since recently that applying by email more commonly an option.
    - wormer 4y ago
      As someone who's in college and looking/lookedfor internships to do over the summer, postal is literally not an option anymore. Companies will not offer a mailing address to their hiring team at all, and if you send something via mail they will simply not look at it. Also, post-pandemic, most interviews are done via Zoom, so how are you going to do that then? Even if you're in the same area as the company you're applying in, they just will not let you into the building.
      - blueflow 4y ago
        This sounds really bad! Where are you from?
        wormer 4y ago
        New York City, and I don't think it's bad. The effort it takes for me to apply to jobs, and conversely, to approve/reject applicants (according to other people that I've talked to) is easier than having to sort through a ton of junk mail. People on Hacker News like to propose "just use low-tech!" or "just self host!" often and I don't get how that's a solution. I _could_ spend hours of my day printing out and mailing my resume to companies (if they allowed me to) and waiting days-weeks for my response _after_ they made their decision (during which time I still have to pay bills and have no job) or I could apply with one button on Linkedin and get my response back instantly. It just saves so much time. Others will say that that's a small price to pay to retain my freedom, which might be true. But what's not true is the other qualities of life that internet and big data affords me. If I don't have instagram or snapchat I literally lose all spontaneous contact with my friends and family. Sure, I _could_ mail them a letter, but with the delay in communication a lot of the intimacy is lost, and we would truthfully just talk a lot less. This, along with a lot of other problems (how do I contact my professor for help after class? go to their house?). Combined with the fact that I would have to be _extremely_ thorough and make sure that my data is scrubbed from all of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Whatever and it's subcompanies, it's just not a real solution. It's actually really annoying that so many are content with infeasible individual solutions instead of advocating for things like pushing against the EARN IT act or the like. I shouldn't have to have a computer science or cyber security degree to be private online - it should be done for me by the government. I don't know what the fuck is in that vaccine (or any medicine I take for that matter) but I can trust that it does me good because of regulations.
- dessant 4y ago
  In some cases Google can only be avoided at a potentially life altering personal cost. Consider how many government services use reCAPTCHA, and what it means to have no access or delayed access to these services.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    I don't buy this. This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services.
    - dessant 4y ago
      Elderly and marginalized people do suffer because of restricted access to online services. People who cannot access the web and its services are at an obvious disadvantage in life, and that sometimes can have severe consequences. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320
      - blueflow 4y ago
        And this is legal in your place?
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services. Having helped my 92 years old grandmother sorting out her tax returns on the government’s website, I can confirm that this is exactly what it means. And it’s the only practical way of communicating with the administration. Most local branches have been closed to the public, and the phone lines are congested all day (and cut you off after one hour waiting, which is always fun).
- bambax 4y ago
  The sentiment is noble, but that's not really true.
- kornhole 4y ago
  It is funny how some consider the internet synonymous with Google and the other big players. You don't need to use Google and the others at all these days. So many alternatives abound. The problem seems to be awareness of them. Ask me anything.
dudidrbtb 4y ago
tjpnz 4y ago
>Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc… Having had the pleasure of sharing the elevator with said individuals in shared office buildings the "common man" part almost made me lose my coffee.
- prox 4y ago
  Yeah, it is obvious from all of Googles actions they have lost the script. We are a long way from the don’t be “evil mantra” and “let’s do this for humanity!” I really wish it wasn’t so, but when your company serves the advertiser you aren’t serving humanity. The balance is off and which each passing year it isn’t getting better.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Nothing says “common man” like 500k in stock options. Big Tech monopolies need to be resisted
revolvingocelot 4y ago
>claiming to be “anti-fascist” I can't fault them too badly for that. I consider myself personally against the horrors that go into gathering the constituent materials for, and the assembly of, computers. This position co-exists with the fact that I, like most others here, derive the majority of my livelihood from Doing Things With Computers, which wouldn't be possible without the computers themselves, which wouldn't be possible without the horrors. Worse still, I live a provably better life than those of my peers whose youth did not, for whatever reason, revolve around Doing Things With Computers, let alone the far-flung people whose labour provides me with the computers on which I do those profitable things. It's difficult to morally reason about.
threeseed 4y ago
> And you can’t even escape these companies So you are forced to use an iPhone or Pixel phone, forced to search with Google, forced to use AWS. Even though open alternatives exist for all these who would love your support.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
What if I use Huawei phone, which is banned from using Google services? Obviously, China will have all my info, but they can't (yet) ban me from boarding US trains for low social rating, so what do I care?
- kornhole 4y ago
  You never know when Huawei or China will start doing something similar. You could do better and not have your data sitting with any corporate or government entity. I love my private Nextcloud running on a Raspberry PI. It syncs all contacts, calendar, files, bookmarks, tasks, notes, phone location, and much for may family's degoogled phones and PC's. Own your data and systems.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    If only that were the normal … But we've now allowed multiple generations to be trained by the "big" ISPs to believe that we're not a part of the Internet, but simply consumers of it. Back in "the old days" most people who used the Internet were fully aware that their Internet connection made them a node on the Internet and that they had the ability and right to run personal or even public services on their Internet connection. These days, people don't think that way anymore. It's just a service to be consumed, like television, and apparently it would not exist at all without so much advertising that you often cannot even see the content of a web page at all without an ad-blocker.
    - kornhole 4y ago
      We are taking it back, bit by bit. This is why I make these comments to make people aware that it is possible and really not that difficult anymore.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    >> much for may family's I would better let Google have all my photos and track my location than my father ...
LinuxBender 4y ago
And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. In my personal view the internet became one big country with overlapping laws and government policies and collusion by corporations. Ever so often I use google to see what search results they can muster but otherwise I don't use cloud storage and do not find myself depending on google. For email I try to teach my friends how to use Thunderbird so they can click a button and their email is mostly GPG encrypted. If I wanted to share files with someone that will not fit in that GPG encrypted email then I plonk them down on a mini-PC or a VM and share them over HTTPS with cache-control headers to reduce risk of file caches or SFTP with authentication. This is just my own preference and I am a stodgy cranky old bastard but if someone decides that basic auth is too much friction then it was not important for them to receive the files. I implement my own data retention and destruction policies. How my doctor or lawyer decides to store the files is up to them. I can only hope they are wise enough to not store things on their fondle-slab. An intelligent doctor should be able to handle basic authentication and/or be able to follow simple instructions for creating and sharing a GPG public key with me. Or I could just snail-mail them an encrypted USB drive, however a GPG encrypted email should suffice for sending a few little images to a doctor. Some will bring up rubber hoses and wrenches but there are mitigations for such things. Some might even want legislation to to bandage these dark patterns but experience has taught me to not trust that corporations would be held to account at the same level and standards as citizens.

blueflow 4y ago

You still have the choice to not use any of their services. You can get pretty far in life despite not using the internet at all.

hosteur 4y ago
Well not in all countries. In my country you are required to receive electronic messages from the government as well as to have a government issued ID and authentication system that forces you to have a fairly recent smartphone. For now, it is theoretically possible to use the authentication system without a smartphone but you will have to jump through an awful amount of (artificially imposed) hoops. Not having an internet connection is NOT an option. There is a legal process to get a special permit to avoid having to use these state mandated electronic systems but it is almost only theoretically in that you will need to have a doctor's note saying that you are unable to use such systems. E.g., by suffering by severe dementia or similar.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Which country are you speaking of?
  - bbarn 4y ago
    I'm not sure about OP, but here in Iceland having a smartphone with electronic ID built into it is not TECHNICALLY a requirement but life can be very difficult without it. It is the de-facto identification system used by every government service and banking institution.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Afaik mandatory government-provided mailbox is in Czech republic ("datovka") and Slovakia, at least for some parts of population (like enterpreneurs, lawyers, other professions that communicate with state institutions), with general mandatory use coming soon. They serve the fiction of confirmed mail delivery. If you don't pick it up from this mailbox, it is considered delivered anyway and your problem, if you miss something here.
- threeseed 4y ago
  I find this incredibly hard to believe. Governments have accessibility obligations and so their key services should absolutely be usable with something like Chromium/Linux. And it definitely shouldn't be more onerous than using a smartphone.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    For example, see https://www.slovensko.sk/sk/na-stiahnutie https://www.slovensko.sk/sk/na-stiahnutie It is the portal for Slovak republic. You are supposed to have your national ID card, which is a smart card. To use it, you need a smartcard reader and an application, which basically listens on localhost and is kind of a intermediate between your browser, the pages than need authentication and the department of state, which handles IAM. That application runs on Windows, Mac and Debian (9,10)/Ubuntu (18.04,20.04)/Mint (19.20) (it is not open source). Other distributions are not supported, forget ChromeOS. It is quite onerous. You have to enter your PIN for smartcard about four times, before you see the content of the inbox.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  But there's nothing that says you have to use that smartphone and services for anything other than government communications.
leereeves 4y ago
How would you (for example) apply for a job without the Internet?
- blueflow 4y ago
  Postal? Or deliver the envelope in-person to their box when they are nearby. I learned it like this, its since recently that applying by email more commonly an option.
  - wormer 4y ago
    As someone who's in college and looking/lookedfor internships to do over the summer, postal is literally not an option anymore. Companies will not offer a mailing address to their hiring team at all, and if you send something via mail they will simply not look at it. Also, post-pandemic, most interviews are done via Zoom, so how are you going to do that then? Even if you're in the same area as the company you're applying in, they just will not let you into the building.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      This sounds really bad! Where are you from?
      - wormer 4y ago
        New York City, and I don't think it's bad. The effort it takes for me to apply to jobs, and conversely, to approve/reject applicants (according to other people that I've talked to) is easier than having to sort through a ton of junk mail. People on Hacker News like to propose "just use low-tech!" or "just self host!" often and I don't get how that's a solution. I _could_ spend hours of my day printing out and mailing my resume to companies (if they allowed me to) and waiting days-weeks for my response _after_ they made their decision (during which time I still have to pay bills and have no job) or I could apply with one button on Linkedin and get my response back instantly. It just saves so much time. Others will say that that's a small price to pay to retain my freedom, which might be true. But what's not true is the other qualities of life that internet and big data affords me. If I don't have instagram or snapchat I literally lose all spontaneous contact with my friends and family. Sure, I _could_ mail them a letter, but with the delay in communication a lot of the intimacy is lost, and we would truthfully just talk a lot less. This, along with a lot of other problems (how do I contact my professor for help after class? go to their house?). Combined with the fact that I would have to be _extremely_ thorough and make sure that my data is scrubbed from all of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Whatever and it's subcompanies, it's just not a real solution. It's actually really annoying that so many are content with infeasible individual solutions instead of advocating for things like pushing against the EARN IT act or the like. I shouldn't have to have a computer science or cyber security degree to be private online - it should be done for me by the government. I don't know what the fuck is in that vaccine (or any medicine I take for that matter) but I can trust that it does me good because of regulations.
dessant 4y ago
In some cases Google can only be avoided at a potentially life altering personal cost. Consider how many government services use reCAPTCHA, and what it means to have no access or delayed access to these services.
- blueflow 4y ago
  I don't buy this. This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services.
  - dessant 4y ago
    Elderly and marginalized people do suffer because of restricted access to online services. People who cannot access the web and its services are at an obvious disadvantage in life, and that sometimes can have severe consequences. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320
    - blueflow 4y ago
      And this is legal in your place?
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services. Having helped my 92 years old grandmother sorting out her tax returns on the government’s website, I can confirm that this is exactly what it means. And it’s the only practical way of communicating with the administration. Most local branches have been closed to the public, and the phone lines are congested all day (and cut you off after one hour waiting, which is always fun).
bambax 4y ago
The sentiment is noble, but that's not really true.
kornhole 4y ago
It is funny how some consider the internet synonymous with Google and the other big players. You don't need to use Google and the others at all these days. So many alternatives abound. The problem seems to be awareness of them. Ask me anything.

dudidrbtb 4y ago

tjpnz 4y ago

>Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc… Having had the pleasure of sharing the elevator with said individuals in shared office buildings the "common man" part almost made me lose my coffee.

prox 4y ago
Yeah, it is obvious from all of Googles actions they have lost the script. We are a long way from the don’t be “evil mantra” and “let’s do this for humanity!” I really wish it wasn’t so, but when your company serves the advertiser you aren’t serving humanity. The balance is off and which each passing year it isn’t getting better.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Nothing says “common man” like 500k in stock options. Big Tech monopolies need to be resisted

revolvingocelot 4y ago

>claiming to be “anti-fascist” I can't fault them too badly for that. I consider myself personally against the horrors that go into gathering the constituent materials for, and the assembly of, computers. This position co-exists with the fact that I, like most others here, derive the majority of my livelihood from Doing Things With Computers, which wouldn't be possible without the computers themselves, which wouldn't be possible without the horrors. Worse still, I live a provably better life than those of my peers whose youth did not, for whatever reason, revolve around Doing Things With Computers, let alone the far-flung people whose labour provides me with the computers on which I do those profitable things. It's difficult to morally reason about.

threeseed 4y ago

> And you can’t even escape these companies So you are forced to use an iPhone or Pixel phone, forced to search with Google, forced to use AWS. Even though open alternatives exist for all these who would love your support.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

What if I use Huawei phone, which is banned from using Google services? Obviously, China will have all my info, but they can't (yet) ban me from boarding US trains for low social rating, so what do I care?

kornhole 4y ago
You never know when Huawei or China will start doing something similar. You could do better and not have your data sitting with any corporate or government entity. I love my private Nextcloud running on a Raspberry PI. It syncs all contacts, calendar, files, bookmarks, tasks, notes, phone location, and much for may family's degoogled phones and PC's. Own your data and systems.
- blooalien 4y ago
  If only that were the normal … But we've now allowed multiple generations to be trained by the "big" ISPs to believe that we're not a part of the Internet, but simply consumers of it. Back in "the old days" most people who used the Internet were fully aware that their Internet connection made them a node on the Internet and that they had the ability and right to run personal or even public services on their Internet connection. These days, people don't think that way anymore. It's just a service to be consumed, like television, and apparently it would not exist at all without so much advertising that you often cannot even see the content of a web page at all without an ad-blocker.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    We are taking it back, bit by bit. This is why I make these comments to make people aware that it is possible and really not that difficult anymore.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> much for may family's I would better let Google have all my photos and track my location than my father ...

LinuxBender 4y ago

And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. In my personal view the internet became one big country with overlapping laws and government policies and collusion by corporations. Ever so often I use google to see what search results they can muster but otherwise I don't use cloud storage and do not find myself depending on google. For email I try to teach my friends how to use Thunderbird so they can click a button and their email is mostly GPG encrypted. If I wanted to share files with someone that will not fit in that GPG encrypted email then I plonk them down on a mini-PC or a VM and share them over HTTPS with cache-control headers to reduce risk of file caches or SFTP with authentication. This is just my own preference and I am a stodgy cranky old bastard but if someone decides that basic auth is too much friction then it was not important for them to receive the files. I implement my own data retention and destruction policies. How my doctor or lawyer decides to store the files is up to them. I can only hope they are wise enough to not store things on their fondle-slab. An intelligent doctor should be able to handle basic authentication and/or be able to follow simple instructions for creating and sharing a GPG public key with me. Or I could just snail-mail them an encrypted USB drive, however a GPG encrypted email should suffice for sending a few little images to a doctor. Some will bring up rubber hoses and wrenches but there are mitigations for such things. Some might even want legislation to to bandage these dark patterns but experience has taught me to not trust that corporations would be held to account at the same level and standards as citizens.