9 ms·

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and a

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.

okanat 8mo ago
That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.
- derbOac 8mo ago
  I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing. Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that? My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs. I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits. A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that. I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
- dopidopHN2 8mo ago
  You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight
  - OutOfHere 8mo ago
    Tuta is just horrible, often rejecting account creation altogether. AtomicMail.io is a nice free alternative to Proton.
    - dopidopHN2 8mo ago
      Thanks for your perspective. I've been using tuta since a year now. Nothing to report
      - OutOfHere 8mo ago
        Tuta is pathetic because it asked for my real name, ID verification, and real phone number, altogether defeating the point of anonymity. When I refused to provide identification, it disabled and deleted the new registration. This makes it as bad as Discord. Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.
        dopidopHN2 8mo ago
        Han. My only grippe was having to install a app. None of the rest.
    - mike-cardwell 7mo ago
      What's nice about AtomicMail.io? I just tested it with https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com and it leaked my IP and when I read the email. And I can't even find an option to turn off remote content loading, which has been a standard feature of email and webmail clients for privacy reasons for decades, and should be turned to off by default.
  - mvanbaak 8mo ago
    but then you send a mail to $person, and this $person uses gmail, and now your mail is still indexed by google. The only way to get around this is to use encryption. dont send plain text email.
salawat 8mo ago
Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.
- fwipsy 8mo ago
  The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
  - salawat 8mo ago
    >The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Uh huh. No. You use their system to do it, they have your prompt, and the output on hand. Even more so, they have the capability to tamper with it. They are essentially in a position to own the entire instance of the work product. It doesn't matter if they don't yet. It matters that they can. Furthermore you lose out on the learning. You lose out on any innovation. You lose out in the eyes of the law on the privacy of the communique you use to drive the black box. >In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely. Yup. Right. Like we don't know how that ends. <gestures to />50 years of market consolidation in the distance, letting the illusion of choice speak for itself>
- adamsb6 8mo ago
  You can self host AI but speed and quality aren’t going to be as good as what companies can offer. And the upfront cost will be quite high.
chistev 8mo ago
They are everywhere
WarmWash 8mo ago
Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free". Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register. People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.
- bloak 8mo ago
  Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    Giving the state control of things to prevent the state from easily spying on people...
    - intended 8mo ago
      This is the likely direction things are going. The US government can decide that EU officials are out of favor, and then those officials are locked out of Office/Gsuite. Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue. Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
      - WarmWash 8mo ago
        I'm curious the caliber of engineer that will turn down a $175k/yr Microsoft job to take a $45k/yr Government Office of Software job...
        intended 8mo ago
        There seem to be many layoffs, and the hype say that AI has made coders redundant. Who knows? Perhaps you won’t have to depend on the many people who would happily take lower pay for the chance to contribute to their nation. There’s more incentives than pure profit - Government seems capable enough to attract people when it comes to cyber weapons. Governments aren’t currently making these tools, because until last year, private enterprise was good enough. It still is, minus the dependency on America and its political climate. Personally - The issue isn’t engineer availability or salary, but committee based decision making.
harimau777 8mo ago
I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage. So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you." I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- torben-friis 8mo ago
  Where are you that Facebook (the network, not meta as a company) is still minimally relevant ? I haven’t logged in in about a decade.
  - BoneShard 8mo ago
    Facebook (if you don't use newsfeed) is a very useful product. Local events - check Local groups - check Small time music bands/artist/performances/etc - check Buy nothing groups where I can get rid of something I don't use - check Groups for mom with kids to get organized for some kids event - check A library having a read together event for a kids book author - check I'm happy I don't have to use FB, but my wife uses it all the time, she just avoids newsfeeds and all the click/rage bait parts.
    - torben-friis 8mo ago
      Is that in the US? I’m genuinely asking, it wasn’t rethorical - none of that exists in my corner of Europe anymore. Businesses, indie stuff and local stores use instagram, groups are WhatsApp, second hand stuff has its own app.. facebook seems to be just the >60 year old crowd.
MontyCarloHall 8mo ago
>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow. "Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that. [0] https://wordsunite.us/ https://wordsunite.us/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8 [2] https://wordsunite.us/terms https://wordsunite.us/terms [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698
- oceansky 8mo ago
  Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account. Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment
  - Schiendelman 8mo ago
    Apple isn't on the evil list, aside from the kowtowing every powerful leader must do not to have their business attacked.
    - anonym29 8mo ago
      Apple was a PRISM partner. They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google.
      - gruez 8mo ago
        >They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google. For something like icloud vs gmail/gdrive, they're approximately the same, but that doesn't mean "they share just as much [...] as Microsoft and Google. If they never collected data in the first place, they don't have to share with NSA. The most obvious would be for location data, which apple keeps on-device and google did not (although they did switch to on device a few years ago).
embedding-shape 8mo ago
> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.
- prmoustache 8mo ago
  It really depends where the restaurant is located.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    Name a place it isn’t true.
    - random2021 8mo ago
      Perhaps DPRK. I mean deGoogle/meta etc is almost impossible
    - rolph 8mo ago
      Alaska
    - epolanski 8mo ago
      I'm Italian, there's plenty of stellar places with no online presence and endless customers.
    - prmoustache 8mo ago
      Any city with either an actual city center, an historic center or touristic area. Any restaurant that is in a major business area. Any neighborhood were local zoning is not a thing and local restaurant can be open. We have a lot of tapas or marisquerías places in Spain that are almost only visited by people from the same neighborhood. I like fish and seafood but don't want the smell of it in my kitchen the next day, whenever I want to eat fish I go to some place selling that and I don't need google maps to find one in my neighborhood. Also world of mouth is still a thing in many places in this world. Reading HN feels sometimes like a weird parallel universe were people would never open their front door nor meet and to people.
tjpnz 8mo ago
Meta was easy - nothing of value is lost. Google and Amazon are a bit harder.
barnacs 8mo ago
> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice? This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private. It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?
- mistrial9 8mo ago
  "trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.
Insanity 8mo ago
Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc. Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.
- neoCrimeLabs 8mo ago
  Agreed. That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs. I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away. Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago." My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition. For others', that might be an impossible task.
  - Insanity 8mo ago
    I removed Facebook about 11 years ago now. I made new friends who know I’m not on social media so we organize through text or discord. And for my core friend group they also moved to discord servers, so that made the switch easier. I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.
pjmlp 8mo ago
Alone from that list, it means. No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it. Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.
II2II 8mo ago
In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription. At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)
notepad0x90 8mo ago
None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?
n8cpdx 8mo ago
It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples: - I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away. - I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon. - I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do? - I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working. - I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
ted_bunny 8mo ago
As if these tech giants are an aberration? Any company filling their niche will be under the same pressures.
AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
Other people are using them. You are surrounded by people using them. Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode. And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.
m3kw9 8mo ago
Surveillance is not black or white. In this world you’d have to be a cave man to not get surveyed, you just have to pick your battles. Not using any other the big 5-10’s product or s like saying don’t buy from Walmart or something. It’s stupid
ulfw 8mo ago
No no you see... when Google or Amazon or Meta et al are doing it it's a-okay. But let's ban Huawei or DJI on 'National Security' grounds because they MIGHT be doing this too!
anigbrowl 8mo ago
Do you have any evidence that this actually works as a strategy?

okanat 8mo ago

That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.

derbOac 8mo ago
I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing. Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that? My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs. I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits. A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that. I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
dopidopHN2 8mo ago
You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight
- OutOfHere 8mo ago
  Tuta is just horrible, often rejecting account creation altogether. AtomicMail.io is a nice free alternative to Proton.
  - dopidopHN2 8mo ago
    Thanks for your perspective. I've been using tuta since a year now. Nothing to report
    - OutOfHere 8mo ago
      Tuta is pathetic because it asked for my real name, ID verification, and real phone number, altogether defeating the point of anonymity. When I refused to provide identification, it disabled and deleted the new registration. This makes it as bad as Discord. Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.
      - dopidopHN2 8mo ago
        Han. My only grippe was having to install a app. None of the rest.
  - mike-cardwell 7mo ago
    What's nice about AtomicMail.io? I just tested it with https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com and it leaked my IP and when I read the email. And I can't even find an option to turn off remote content loading, which has been a standard feature of email and webmail clients for privacy reasons for decades, and should be turned to off by default.
- mvanbaak 8mo ago
  but then you send a mail to $person, and this $person uses gmail, and now your mail is still indexed by google. The only way to get around this is to use encryption. dont send plain text email.

salawat 8mo ago

Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.

fwipsy 8mo ago
The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
- salawat 8mo ago
  >The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Uh huh. No. You use their system to do it, they have your prompt, and the output on hand. Even more so, they have the capability to tamper with it. They are essentially in a position to own the entire instance of the work product. It doesn't matter if they don't yet. It matters that they can. Furthermore you lose out on the learning. You lose out on any innovation. You lose out in the eyes of the law on the privacy of the communique you use to drive the black box. >In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely. Yup. Right. Like we don't know how that ends. <gestures to />50 years of market consolidation in the distance, letting the illusion of choice speak for itself>
adamsb6 8mo ago
You can self host AI but speed and quality aren’t going to be as good as what companies can offer. And the upfront cost will be quite high.

chistev 8mo ago

They are everywhere

WarmWash 8mo ago

Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free". Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register. People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.

bloak 8mo ago
Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  Giving the state control of things to prevent the state from easily spying on people...
  - intended 8mo ago
    This is the likely direction things are going. The US government can decide that EU officials are out of favor, and then those officials are locked out of Office/Gsuite. Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue. Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
    - WarmWash 8mo ago
      I'm curious the caliber of engineer that will turn down a $175k/yr Microsoft job to take a $45k/yr Government Office of Software job...
      - intended 8mo ago
        There seem to be many layoffs, and the hype say that AI has made coders redundant. Who knows? Perhaps you won’t have to depend on the many people who would happily take lower pay for the chance to contribute to their nation. There’s more incentives than pure profit - Government seems capable enough to attract people when it comes to cyber weapons. Governments aren’t currently making these tools, because until last year, private enterprise was good enough. It still is, minus the dependency on America and its political climate. Personally - The issue isn’t engineer availability or salary, but committee based decision making.

harimau777 8mo ago

I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage. So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you." I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
torben-friis 8mo ago
Where are you that Facebook (the network, not meta as a company) is still minimally relevant ? I haven’t logged in in about a decade.
- BoneShard 8mo ago
  Facebook (if you don't use newsfeed) is a very useful product. Local events - check Local groups - check Small time music bands/artist/performances/etc - check Buy nothing groups where I can get rid of something I don't use - check Groups for mom with kids to get organized for some kids event - check A library having a read together event for a kids book author - check I'm happy I don't have to use FB, but my wife uses it all the time, she just avoids newsfeeds and all the click/rage bait parts.
  - torben-friis 8mo ago
    Is that in the US? I’m genuinely asking, it wasn’t rethorical - none of that exists in my corner of Europe anymore. Businesses, indie stuff and local stores use instagram, groups are WhatsApp, second hand stuff has its own app.. facebook seems to be just the >60 year old crowd.

MontyCarloHall 8mo ago

>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow. "Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that. [0] https://wordsunite.us/ https://wordsunite.us/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8 [2] https://wordsunite.us/terms https://wordsunite.us/terms [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698

oceansky 8mo ago
Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account. Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment
- Schiendelman 8mo ago
  Apple isn't on the evil list, aside from the kowtowing every powerful leader must do not to have their business attacked.
  - anonym29 8mo ago
    Apple was a PRISM partner. They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google.
    - gruez 8mo ago
      >They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google. For something like icloud vs gmail/gdrive, they're approximately the same, but that doesn't mean "they share just as much [...] as Microsoft and Google. If they never collected data in the first place, they don't have to share with NSA. The most obvious would be for location data, which apple keeps on-device and google did not (although they did switch to on device a few years ago).

embedding-shape 8mo ago

> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.

prmoustache 8mo ago
It really depends where the restaurant is located.
- lazide 8mo ago
  Name a place it isn’t true.
  - random2021 8mo ago
    Perhaps DPRK. I mean deGoogle/meta etc is almost impossible
  - rolph 8mo ago
    Alaska
  - epolanski 8mo ago
    I'm Italian, there's plenty of stellar places with no online presence and endless customers.
  - prmoustache 8mo ago
    Any city with either an actual city center, an historic center or touristic area. Any restaurant that is in a major business area. Any neighborhood were local zoning is not a thing and local restaurant can be open. We have a lot of tapas or marisquerías places in Spain that are almost only visited by people from the same neighborhood. I like fish and seafood but don't want the smell of it in my kitchen the next day, whenever I want to eat fish I go to some place selling that and I don't need google maps to find one in my neighborhood. Also world of mouth is still a thing in many places in this world. Reading HN feels sometimes like a weird parallel universe were people would never open their front door nor meet and to people.

tjpnz 8mo ago

Meta was easy - nothing of value is lost. Google and Amazon are a bit harder.

barnacs 8mo ago

> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice? This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private. It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?

mistrial9 8mo ago
"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.

Insanity 8mo ago

Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc. Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.

neoCrimeLabs 8mo ago
Agreed. That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs. I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away. Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago." My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition. For others', that might be an impossible task.
- Insanity 8mo ago
  I removed Facebook about 11 years ago now. I made new friends who know I’m not on social media so we organize through text or discord. And for my core friend group they also moved to discord servers, so that made the switch easier. I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.

pjmlp 8mo ago

Alone from that list, it means. No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it. Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.

II2II 8mo ago

In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription. At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)

notepad0x90 8mo ago

None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?

n8cpdx 8mo ago

It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples: - I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away. - I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon. - I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do? - I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working. - I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.

ted_bunny 8mo ago

As if these tech giants are an aberration? Any company filling their niche will be under the same pressures.

AtlasBarfed 8mo ago

Other people are using them. You are surrounded by people using them. Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode. And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.

m3kw9 8mo ago

Surveillance is not black or white. In this world you’d have to be a cave man to not get surveyed, you just have to pick your battles. Not using any other the big 5-10’s product or s like saying don’t buy from Walmart or something. It’s stupid

ulfw 8mo ago

No no you see... when Google or Amazon or Meta et al are doing it it's a-okay. But let's ban Huawei or DJI on 'National Security' grounds because they MIGHT be doing this too!

anigbrowl 8mo ago

Do you have any evidence that this actually works as a strategy?