
Dear Google, it's not me. It's definitely you. - fuzz_junket
https://www.stjohnkarp.net/dear-google/
======
glogla
> For those who want to take their lives into their own hands, hosting your
> own email is always an option. It’s difficult to set up, but it’s not that
> hard to maintain.

Actually, sadly, my experience is the other way around. Setting up mail server
is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work, and you
always have to wonder whether this time the mail will arrive, or whether some
server on the way is going to have a bad day and drop your email without
telling anyone. And of course, since it's your mail, everyone assume you're
the one at fault.

At least, that's how it worked few years ago, but I don't think the situation
got better. Some things only get worse.

~~~
__david__
Meh, I don't find it difficult at all. I've run my own mailserver for years
and years. I generally spend about 3(ish) man-days per year working on it.

The only frustrating part is that I generally don't get to choose _when_ those
3 days happen—most all time spent is putting out fires. But then again that's
sysop life in general…

~~~
VikingCoder
"3(ish) man-days per year working on it."

Wow, that's way worse than I would have guessed.

If your salary is $100,000 a year, and you work 40-hour weeks for roughly 50
weeks a year, that's the equivalent of $1,200.

I can't imagine spending $1,200 a year just to run my own mail server. The
costs vastly outweigh the benefits. Especially considering that I'm far more
likely to screw up all the rest of the security involved.

~~~
__david__
If you consider it work, then it's probably not a good investment for you. I
like doing it. It's like telling Jay Leno that restoring an old car isn't
worth the money since it costs less to get someone else to do it (especially
at his Salary). Some things are their own reward. Running my own mail server
is _very_ much worth my time.

Also, my quoted 3 man days is a huge guess. I don't keep track of that stuff.
It's 15 minutes or an hour here and there...

------
waqf
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSTwSFH...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSTwSFH40Q4J:https://www.stjohnkarp.net/dear-
google/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

~~~
untog
Oh the irony

~~~
sudorank
Oh dear, if ever there was an example of Googles reach.....

~~~
bhhaskin
I often wonder what would happen if one day google was just gone. I would
imagine the internet would be in complete chaos.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Only very briefly. There are good alternatives for everything Google does. In
some cases, the alternatives are better.

~~~
swasheck
perhaps a list of these good alternatives is in order?

------
kllrnohj
> That is their top priority — they assuredly do not have your best interests
> at heart.

Choo Choo! Here comes the BULLSHIT TRAIN. All aboard!

For what it's worth I'm pretty sure the change was you, not Google. Google's
business model hasn't changed. They are still an ad reseller, just like they
always have been. They still don't sell your data, just like they never have.

Automatic account merging still doesn't happen, just like it never did. Google
didn't link your friends accounts together, your friend did. And if you for
some reason really, really want a different account for youtube and gmail,
Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that. And there's somewhat
reasonable multi-user support to help you do exactly that. And chrome's multi-
profile support allows for even stronger walls between accounts. In the
particular case of youtube they even let you use a different identity for
youtube from the rest of Google, your "gangstakilla999" friend just didn't
choose that option when asked when he was merging accounts.

~~~
euank
I like google, but your point that "different account for youtube and gmail,
Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that" is false.

It might be true in the general case, but Google did make a significant effort
to require real names on Google+ (and by extension youtube / gmail). It didn't
affect the large majority, but you can find some people it did affect. Google
cared in some cases.

~~~
kllrnohj
> I like google, but your point that "different account for youtube and gmail,
> Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that" is false.

I have way more than 1 Google account, and I've had no issues with it at all.
What evidence do you have to support your claim that Google is not happy with
people having multiple accounts? Because the variety of ways Google _helps_
you have multiple accounts is pretty strong evidence they are OK with this.

> Google did make a significant effort to require real names on Google+ (and
> by extension youtube / gmail).

Your "by extension" is false. YouTube never had the real names push like
G+/gmail did. My account with a real name has always and continues to show a
completely different pseudonym on YouTube, which was one of the options Google
provided.

~~~
euank
It didn't affect the large majority, as I said.

Youtube and Google+ have merged (in case you didn't miss the large outrage
over that). It was after Google softened its enforcement a bit, and the
enforcement was never good.

I also have multiple google accounts and had no troubles, but we're just
anecdotes, we're not everyone. The few cases where it did happen were well
publicized: [http://gizmodo.com/5830463/if-you-use-a-fake-name-on-
google%...](http://gizmodo.com/5830463/if-you-use-a-fake-name-on-
google%252B-your-account-is-about-to-be-suspended)

The fact that Google+ and Youtube accounts have been merged is common
knowledge at this point.

Sure, the people probably did click "Update my details", but you can't expect
regular users to read everything and google's actions sorta "sets you up for
failure" in terms of identity.

Your argument that "I had no trouble so it's okay" is a bad one because it's
an anecdote.

Your "evidence" that they help you manage multiple accounts is a good point.
What I really meant is "Google has tried to prevent you from having false
identities". Multiple accounts supports e.g. having a company Google Apps
account and a personal account, or having a school account and personal, etc.
Places where you have one identity and switch between multiple accounts.

------
saidajigumi
I understand and sympathize with this lament, but I think Ben Thompson nails
it in his recent article "Privacy Is Dead"[1]:

 _There are other services that can’t even realistically choose between
advertising and member-supported. Facebook is a great example: the utility of
Facebook is directly correlated with how many people you know who are also
using Facebook, and the only way to maximize that number is to make the
service free, supported by advertising. Google is in a similar boat: the
efficacy of search is in many ways tied to how many people are using search.
Queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google improving its algorithm, and
the more the better, which means making queries free._

I'd like to emphasize that latter point, "queries and clicks are the raw grist
for Google." Approaches like PageRank and tf-idf[2] are only part of the
story. A really fascinating and vital point is that the search user activity
itself is an amazingly valuable source of relevance data. E.g. one can build a
matrix over (search term, number of clicks for URL) as a search index. This
supplements the other algorithmic relevance factors, is driven directly by
human feedback.

Google employees have mentioned that they've worked on other aspects of
relevance analysis based on user actions: it's possible to suss out situations
such as: you clicked on a link, but clicked right back to the search results
because that link sucked. Eventually you found a good result and it "stuck".

So user activity itself is very powerful source of search relevance and having
more users just makes it work better. In fact, it's a bit startling to realize
you can, in theory, build a search index without _any source document data_
based solely on which links were clicked the most. In practice, we need to
seed relevance with the purely algorithmic factors then improve it with the
feedback data.

Given that, an incumbent search engine with a large user base has a big
advantage over competitors: they own the base of user activity data. Google's
advantage is not just the technology expertise that they've amassed over the
years, but also the raw fact of its search market share leadership that any
would-be competitor must overcome.

[1] [http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-
dead/](http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf)

~~~
VikingCoder
"they own the base of user activity data"

They don't necessarily OWN the base of user activity, if others figure out how
to sniff it out:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-
uses-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-
search.html)

------
opendais
I'm curious why people don't pay for Google Apps. Its cheap enough and
basically turns off the Ads and at least some of the data collection.

[http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html](http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html)
"1.4 Ads. The default setting for the Services is one that does not allow
Google to serve Ads. Customer may change this setting in the Admin Console
which constitutes Customer's authorization for Google to serve Ads. If
Customer enables the serving of Ads it may revert to the default setting at
any time and Google will cease serving Ads."

~~~
evv
That is Google Apps for business. What about a @gmail.com account? Its been my
primary account for the past 10 years, but to my knowledge, I have no way of
paying for it.

~~~
opendais
Correct, you'd need to get a domain and switch. It is what I did.

------
r00fus
I'm over Chrome. I don't use it at work [1], and consequently, not much at
home either.

Once Chrome the browser became the seed of Chrome the OS, the writing was on
the wall - Google didn't feel it needed to prove anything anymore, innovation
turned to stuff it wanted, not what users wanted.

[1] Chrome, at least v25 and earlier, crashed parsing 10MB XML files - I have
to test with much larger files all the time. At some point FF started to not
suck, and recently it's got speed parity with Chrome for most actions on OSX.
Not looking back.

------
saucetenuto
> ... there are the numerous stories of trans folks who were unceremoniously
> outed to their work colleagues [by Google's various service integrations].

Anybody know what the author's referring to here?

~~~
opendais
[http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-
me-7000025416/](http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-me-7000025416/)

~~~
saucetenuto
Hell of a story. Thanks.

------
junto
The one service i can't seem to replace is Google+ Photos, formerly known as
Google Picasa Web Albums.

I'm yet to find an alternative that has such a good UI and sharing features.

My use case is sharing my family photos with my wider family. All photos are
private. i'd like a self hosted option ideally.

Any suggestions?

~~~
r00fus
The management/upload process leaves much to be desired, but we still host on
Smugmug for sharing with FoF and kids classmates. More recently due to iOS
being prevalent in our extended family net, we use PhotoStream more and more
often - most folks have at least one iOS device in their household.

~~~
X-Istence
My family almost exclusively uses iMessages for communicating with each other,
and we share pictures using iMessage or PhotoStreams.

It's so simple, just works, and new photos can be added and are automatically
synced.

------
marincounty
I think they need to stop hiring such "clever" people? They crossed the line
with me a longtime ago. They did one think I still can't figure out and this
is true, or I am losing my mind. Somehow, they went into my pictures app on my
Ipad, and took a picture of me out, and stuck it up on their Google plus
profile? They didn't scrap it from Facebook either, I use a fake picture, or
did they scrape it anywhere else. It was one of the few pictures I have of
myself on my Ipad.

If you requested Google blur your residence, Google just decided to invalidate
your prior wishes, and you need to contact them again.

Google--some of us paid attention to the McCarthy Era in high school--hold a
fun luncheon and go over that period in history with all your clever,
brilliant employees?

I am waiting for DDG to get some real money and kick Google. And yes, you were
Mila Kunis--now you're Kriss Jenner. "Your too controlling and I don't need
that in my life now!" Yes, I finally saw Bruce stand up to her.

~~~
Oletros
> They did one think I still can't figure out and this is true, or I am losing
> my mind. Somehow, they went into my pictures app on my Ipad, and took a
> picture of me out, and stuck it up on their Google plus profile?

Still trying to grasp if this is serious or just a parody

~~~
MaysonL
I deleted my Google+ profile picture and yet it still shows up as me on Google
image search, so I'm not so skeptical about it.

------
dreamweapon
What's with the ligatures on the 'ct' and 'st' pairs?

------
whiddershins
Vimeo is great, in response to the question near the end of the article.

------
cheshire137
Ugh that font. The "st" is so distracting.

------
chris_wot
Your database is down.

~~~
chris_wot
And what's with all the diacritics in the text?

~~~
xentronium
I believe that's ligatures, not diacritics right there.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature)

~~~
chris_wot
It's incredibly distracting!

