
Goodbye Big Five: Google - kaboro
https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500
======
bpicolo
> “Your smart home pings Google at the same time every hour in order to
> determine whether or not it’s connected to the internet,” Dhruv tells me.
> “Which is funny to me because these devices’ engineers decided to determine
> connectivity to the entire internet based on the uptime of a single company.
> It’s a good metaphor for how far the internet has strayed from its original
> promise to decentralize control.”

The alternative is effectively DDoSing random websites from 100 million
devices, which is definitively an uncool move.

~~~
dTal
Not really. It can ping whatever resource it needs "the internet" for in the
first place. After all, if that's down, then no amount of "internet"
connectivity will help.

I put "internet" in quotes because it's not really a well-formed concept. How
much of the global network needs to be accessible to count as "internet
access"? Your home LAN? Your country? A specific server in Larry Page's
basement?

~~~
rtkwe
When it's connecting to a wifi access point your phone or device doesn't know
what resource you'll actually request so instead it pings the most resilient
thing a Google engineer could think of at the time without risking DDoSing
someone which is Google.

~~~
KeepFlying
We are talking about smart home things here though, which usually depend on
their own services anyway.

This is more of a problem with things like Windows reaching out to
msftconnecttest.com or some other generic internet service. But in the case of
a smart home device it's needs are usually more well defined.

This becomes harder with a consumer router trying to determine if it is online
though unfortunately because of exactly what you describe.

------
neurobashing
I am the only person on Earth, I think, that has had 0 problems with Apple
Maps (at least, in the past year). I have never aimed for Cleveland and ended
up in the Atlantic; and I've never been late or gotten lost. I think I've
disagreed with its shortcuts once or twice.

Not denying your bad Apple Maps experience - just, I have no idea why mine is
so trouble-free _because_ so many have bad ones.

(For calibration, I live in NoVA)

~~~
NikolaNovak
You might be!

Occasionally I'll rent a car that only has Apple's Car Play and have to use my
work iPhone to navigate (gawd forbid Apple would let us use Google Maps on Car
Play;).

My experience has been universally poor:

\- it provides no instructions for major actual intersections. It thinks
you're staying on same main road even when there's a confusing Y in front of
the driver. I have constant moments of panic when I see the intersection
coming and no help from the maps.

\- It provides confusing instructions on straight roads ("Turn right in 100
meters" when there's a stretch of straight road)

\- It'll reference names for a road that are nowhere near what any of the
signs indicate

\- "Keep in right three lanes to stay on the road" \- when the rightmost lane
is actually a turning lane

\- Something that is admittedly tricky, it struggles to provide useful
instructions on more than four-way roads (e.g. if it's a 5-way or 6-way, "Turn
right" has multiple interpretations). It doesn't use, at least not in my cases
"bear right" or "slight right" or similar vs "turn right" or "acute right" or
"sharp right" \- and again, it gets the road names wrong.

\- When Searching:

* it'll show me Bedford England 5000km away, but not Bedford NS 12km away

* It has some weird internal naming so searching for actual address will again not lead me anywhere near to what I want

Basically it's been a constant source of frustration beyond what I believe
could reasonably be attributed to my inexperience with its UI :-/

EDIT/UPDATE: Thx for feedback; my work phone is on iOS 11, good to know that
(*recently, after 4 years without it) CarPlay now supports other maps; note
that I don't think it in any way makes Apple Maps experience itself any better
0:-)

~~~
lanewinfield
FYI CarPlay supports third party maps like Google as of September.
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17875256/apple-
ios-12-car...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17875256/apple-
ios-12-carplay-google-maps-waze-support-third-party-navigation)

~~~
NikolaNovak
Thanks! I heard that might be coming, I'll check if there's an update waiting
on my work phone :)

------
kawfey
Despite the tirade of anti-facebook/google/amazon blogs and posts in the last
5 years, I'm still not convinced that "being tracked" in my day-to-day life is
a negative thing. I still don't perceive that my privacy is lost when I use
those services. That information is shared with companies who use the data
more-or-less responsibly with respect to my life.

Personally I prefer having a majority of my internet experience centralized in
one place. Calendar, Email, files, maps, news, search, entertainment, etc.
This saves a lot of time and effort in my life. Is it worth it?

~~~
slenk
My only fear with having everything centralized is that Google can decide you
did something wrong and cut you out of so many important things in your life,
without recourse.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146)
is just one example I found with minimal searching.

~~~
fencepost
You might also enjoy Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled":
[https://craphound.com/scroogled.html](https://craphound.com/scroogled.html)

Though for whatever reason the formatting on that appears terrible (to me in
my uMatrix locked down Firefox)

~~~
fxfan
I had a nice umatrix config saved to the cloud but it got deleted somewhere in
the last one year (I had to temporarily switch to chrome). Did that happen to
you too?

------
tivert
> There’s no way I can delete my Gmail accounts completely as I did with
> Facebook. First off, it would be a huge security mistake; freeing up my
> email address for someone else to claim is just asking to be hacked.

Does Google really free up your email address for re-allocation when you
delete your account? I do recall that was in issue at one point with Yahoo
Mail. No email provider should allow the reassignment of previously used email
addresses for precisely this reason.

~~~
kyrra
I believe Google never garbage collects deleted @gmail.com usernames.

According to [0]: "Your Gmail address can’t be used by anyone else in the
future."

[0]
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/61177?hl=en&topic=238...](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/61177?hl=en&topic=2382753&ctx=topic)

~~~
xingped
This used to be possible. I know because I once deleted my email and then
realized I missed something I needed to transfer, so just re-created my email
again to receive that email.

~~~
kyrra
How long between deleted and re-opening? The support page I linked talks about
being able to restore a deleted account within some period of time.

------
polskibus
Great experiment. It really shows how badly we are dependent on Google.
Everything relies on it, seems like it would be best if it was regulated as a
public utility, enjoying monopoly but also having to serve the public good
also when it doesn't necessarily align with its commercial interest (like in
EU energy companies have to give you a link to the grid).

It also shows that it doesn't have real competitors, being so broad in scope
and having all that data before others did.

~~~
fixermark
Part of the challenge there is it's bigger than a public utility.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the US nationalizes it. That leaves
EU, Australian, Canadian, &c Google customers out in the cold---it's unlikely
either the US or those other countries will be comfortable with continued
service by a national utility to customers outside that nation. Perhaps some
kind of subsidiary model could be constructed, but the details of how are non-
trivial.

~~~
polskibus
We could make it more like NATO?

------
Animats
I've pretty much run in that mode for years. No big problems. With Ghostery
and Privacy Badger turned up to high, and third party cookies blocked, Google
doesn't get much through. My phone, a ruggedized Android model from
Caterpillar Tractor, has no Google apps other than the Google Play Services
middleware. I've never had Facebook on a phone.

Mail is on Thunderbird and an IMAP server at an ISP. My email address is on my
own domain. If I want to make something available to others, I put it on
Github, or an "outgoing" directory on my web site. Documents are edited with
LibreOffice. Browsing is with Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on the phone.
A few sites don't load properly, but they're marginal ones for which there are
better alternatives. More often, the site loads but the ads don't, which is
nice. I don't see many ads.

It's just easier this way. The junk level is way down.

------
YjSe2GMQ
I think we as a community need to embrace a more holistic approach to the
problem of privacy.

It's great that some of us can protect privacy by going crazy on each channel
that leaks our personal data. But the remaining >7B people on the planet will
still leak a lot of personal details, undermining their authority over their
choices. If the data creep continues we'll one day find ourselves in a
dystopia, and we'll be the people to blame. Much like the 2008 crisis is the
fault of bankers because it was easiest for them to figure out that the human
project is headed towards suffering.

------
ariwilson
This is a whole series. She already did Amazon and Facebook:

[https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five](https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-
five)

~~~
mrweasel
The Facebook one is weird. There are some strange thought processes going
though her head, which she kinda acknowledges. Stuff like:

> I have to admit that the enjoyment of a holiday dedicated to dressing up is
> somewhat degraded when not using Facebook’s apps.

------
jm_l
Worth noting that by blocking all Google IPs, the author is not only cutting
out Google services, but also any other application that relies on Google
services. For example, there's a bit in there about not being able to use
Dropbox because it uses Captcha.

~~~
auslander
Google fonts are used by all websites. And from Referrer header, Google has
your browsing history.

~~~
extra88
Google font logs are not dumped into their analytics and they take a number of
steps that greatly reduce requests made for fonts in the first place.

[https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...](https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users)

~~~
auslander
There is no mention of which browser they refer to. I don't use Chrome, and I
see requests to fonts on every website. And requests do contain Referer (what
I browse) and, of course, my IP.

And in Private browsing, no caches should be saved anyway.

~~~
extra88
They're not referring to what browsers do, they're referring to the Response
Headers they return with the resources, e.g. the max-age for the CSS files is
one day, the max-age for the fonts files is one year.

> And in Private browsing, no caches should be saved anyway.

That's one of the trade-offs the user is choosing to make and one of the
reasons why those that use Private browsing at all, use it selectively. I
believe Private browsing will not re-download web fonts if the browser has
already cached them in a non-private window but that's a performance and
bandwidth distinction, the CSS request will still be made.

The page explicitly states that they use Google Fonts log data in aggregate to
show font popularity, that's it. They don't set a cookie and request headers
and ips are relatively poor identifiers for individuals. I don't think they
use Google Fonts to track one's browsing habits, you're free think that I'm
insufficiently paranoid.

------
fencepost
For maps, I'd add Here ([https://wego.here.com/](https://wego.here.com/)) to
the Apple Maps and Mapquest options she chose. It's the mapping solution that
Microsoft got from Nokia, and is used by a lot of in-car navigation systems
IIRC.

It suffers by comparison to Google Maps mostly in the lack of integration with
the full database of businesses/reviews/etc. though I think it probably has
most of the business listings. I suspect its traffic info is weaker as well,
though I haven't really checked.

------
Spearchucker
I get the world's Google dependency. I really do. I tried most of their
mainstream services myself and they were indeed as good as I'd been told. But
they're online only. And their Office apps tank next to Microsoft Office. And
nothing I've seen matches the utility of Outlook. Besides, the prospect of
transferring all my meticulously collected birthdays from Outlook to Gmail
didn't float my boat at all. In the 00's I eventually switched from IE to
Firefox, and have never tried Chrome.

One employer used Gmail, and I happily used it whilst employed there, but that
didn't do nearly enough to change my mind.

And so I never did buy into Google like the linked article describes. To this
day I cannot imagine a scenario in which I'd trust my world to a single
vendor, in a single location.

It's no surprise that the non-technical great unwashed don't think this way,
but it surprises me that technically literate and able people do not care for
reducing or eliminating the risk posed by depending on a single vendor for...
everything.

Especially given what we know about Google.

------
ChuckMcM
I am guessing that if she has already dropped Microsoft that is why she can't
use Bing maps. Not as ubiquitous as Google Maps, or as featured as even Apple
maps, but still ahead of Mapquest :-)

------
johnchristopher
> I create new email addresses on Protonmail and Riseup.net (for work and
> personal email, respectively) [..]

I wouldn't do that. Riseup is providing email on a very tight budget. They are
activists and every free account they give out is using some precious
resources. Unless you really need it for specific purposes I believe it's
better to go to fastmail or protonmail for "general purposes" email needs.

------
wishinghand
A lot of commenters in here are saying "oh yeah, I've done something similar,
not that hard/different." What they're glossing over is how the author also
blocked all Google IPs, meaning that Google Cloud Platform is no longer
available, along with assorted services. This means authentication like
captchas, anything that uses maps besides Google's own offering (Lyft, Uber,
Yelp, etc), and photos being hosted on their version of AWS S3 is included.

There is a ton of web and data infrastructure being hosted/ran by Microsoft,
Google, and Amazon that we often don't think about. The only big service
provider I can think of besides those three is Digital Ocean, and it's not a
1:1 comparison, since they're more like infrastructure.

*edit: Basically, if you find Amazon so abhorrent that you want to cut them out of your life, you can't unless you eschew huge swathes of the internet. Which might work for you. But think about that: they own the digital land under our feet.

~~~
pbalau
jQuery foundation, nobody thinks about how much they might know about you...

------
Slippery_John
I've taken similar steps, though have not gone so far as to set up a vpn block
to all google ips. I do have as much fingerprinting and privacy protection as
possible enabled in Firefox though. I find the worst experience is captcha, it
will no longer give me free passes and I regularly have to sit there for
several minutes providing training data that they reject. It's to the point
where I just avoid sites that require it. Newegg is a particularly egregious
offender as they seem to require a very high degree of certainty.

~~~
ggpsv
What set up are you using in Firefox for fingerprint and privacy protection?

~~~
Slippery_John
Extensions: uBlock, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, DDG Privacy Essentials,
HTTPS Everywhere, and most importantly Containers

I try to keep as many sites as possible into relevant containers. Facebook and
Google get their own containers just for them (there are additional addons
which will handle this for you as getting all of Google siloed off is
cumbersome otherwise).

I also make use of the built in tracker blocking, blocking all third party
cookie use entirely. There's also an option to resist fingerprinting that I
enable, which does a ton of things [1]

[1]:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting)

------
CydeWeys
Is trading Google cloud products for Apple cloud products really such a big
change? I could see the truly privacy paranoid running away from all cloud
services and running their own everything, but just switching cloud providers
doesn't seem like a meaningful difference to me. OK, so now Apple has all of
your data instead of Google. Either way it's in the hands of a big
corporation, and by extension, the government.

~~~
bootlooped
Google's core business is advertising, while Apple's core business is
hardware. One has a much greater incentive to collect, store, and exploit
users' data.

~~~
bitpush
and yet Apple comes up with some of the biggest privacy blunders in their
offerings.

------
Klonoar
So much of this is overblown... and I say this as someone who goes out of
their way to avoid using Amazon/Google/etc for privacy reasons.

The biggest problem with debating privacy and security these days is the sheer
paranoia running rampant from people who don't understand the workings behind
the scenes, coupled with the people behind the scenes assuming defensive tones
from the get-go whenever stuff is brought up.

------
xamlhacker
For maps, I use HERE maps on Android and it works great. Offline capability is
particularly good. I am not sure if it is available on iOS.

------
pleasecalllater
... except that Google still has most of my emails as people who send me them
or whom I send to are using Gmail...

~~~
dylan604
This. Same with Facebook. Even if I choose to not use a particular service,
these services still know about me because so many other people I interact
with do use these services. I get that as a Gmail user, you've agreed to allow
them to read emails for whatever they choose. However, I did not. If I hit
reply to a Gmail account, I'm not agreeing to the ToS. Just because I visit a
site that has chosen to use G*/FB does not mean that I agree to the ToS. A
website's cookie notices give me the option to leave if I don't agree, but by
then, all of the tracking has already started without my agreement.

------
budadre75
This non-tech person's attempt looks to me is futile, just switching from
Google to Apple or other companies doesn't mean you won't be tracked. To me
the best solution will be self-hosting cloud services for email, calendar, and
using TomTom or Garmin GPS.

------
faitswulff
Anyone know why she chose RiseUp.net for personal email?

------
kradeelav
I feel like this comes from a good place, but a lot of it seems self-inflicted
and/or over-dramatized. Most privacy-conscious folks have been saying from day
one that smartphones and smart-homes are a bad idea in that regard. Dumb-
phones exist. Printing directions out is ... not that hard. Etc.

Overall, though, I am glad this is becoming more of a thing in terms of mass
appeal. Hopefully the pendulum will swing the other way to a greater awareness
of shiny-new-tech-that-comes-with-strings.

~~~
kodablah
> I feel like this comes from a good place, but a lot of it seems self-
> inflicted and/or over-dramatized.

Agreed, and too absolutist. You can take a reasonable stance without upending
your life. So you can't get away from maps integration in apps, that's ok,
still using the competition helps. Same with browser choice and others. I can
decry all the plastic waste and still type on a keyboard with plastic parts.

~~~
m4x
Taking an absolutist stance is the point of the authors experiment. You
wouldn't do this in practice if you were just trying to improve your privacy,
but in an experiment to see just how far Google's reach extends it makes sense
to block _everything_ and see what unexpected 3rd party services also fail -
such as Uber or Dropbox

------
aboutruby
> Next up: Microsoft.

That will be pretty easy. Only thing I used of Microsoft website for is to get
.NET for a one-off project that required it.

~~~
icebraining
And you never use GitHub either?

Don't forget:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft)

~~~
extra88
Yes, and that will include static sites hosted on GitHub Pages.

Avoiding Microsoft is often a problem when exchange documents with someone and
the files don't work well with whatever not-Office you choose (Apple
Page/Numbers/Keynote, LibreOffice, etc.).

I wonder if they can even attempt to block receiving or placing phone calls
from/to a number with Skype on the other end.

------
auslander
Why the title was changed from article's one? Mods?

------
auct
Turn off internet. Would be much easier xD

