It's not that hard to do without Google, except for search. My phone has all Google user-facing services removed. Mail is on an Sonic IMAP server and accessed with K-9 mail. Browsing is is with Fennec. Apps come from F-Droid. Navigation is based on Open Street Map. GPS assistance comes from Mozilla's location provider. No Facebook on mobile. Messaging is SMS and email.<p>On desktop, documents are in Libre Office. Privacy Badger blocks most of the junk. Browsing is with Firefox. Mail is via Thunderbird, talking to the same IMAP server. Haven't looked at Facebook this week yet.<p>ISP is Sonic.net, which just moves bits, and doesn't MITM anything. They're pro net neutrality.<p>Who needs Google?
The people who feel that they cannot quit Facebook seem to think that quitting Facebook means replacing it with something else. Most people who have quit do not move 2000 contacts to new platforms - they simply stop using Facebook.
> " They are willing to give up privacy for free email. "<p>How exactly does Google/GMail violate the users' privacy with email?<p>They process the messages, show hyper-targeted ads. End of story.<p>But is there a Cambridge Analytica for GMail? Can some "app" exfiltrate the emails? Or the contacts of users?
lmao, or: it is actually hard to quit these companies even if you're educated, well-informed, and set to do it. Aside from many articles[1] written precisely about this, casual conversations with anyone who tries to exercise their consumer agency and giving them up talk about why it's hard to do.<p>Has this author ever spoken to anyone who's tried using a smartphone or OS that isn't Apple or Google? "People love free stuff" isn't a sufficient explanation, it reads like someone trying to blame consumers, to say nothing of the ethical implications behind the conscious, deliberate decisions behind each of the scandals they're happy to wave away.<p>[1]: <a href="https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five</a>
> But after more than a decade of abuse, we should look deeper at our analysis and perhaps conclude that these issues aren’t abuse at all, but rather a bargain, a negotiation, and one that people are quite willing to live with.<p>No. We shouldn't <i>conclude</i> anything. The author gives the mass market way too much credit in knowing the extent of tracking, data-harvesting, data-sharing, MITM access (ie, ISPs, cell companies), the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, the backdoor collusion with government and an entrenched news media that has a vested interest in protecting their ad revenue.<p>In the grand sleazy scale of things, they are nearly ignorant compared to knowledgeable: basing their consumerism on PR statements, selfies and memes. It remains for most of them... A Brave New World.
Would a solution to Facebook's monopoly be allowing other companies to interface into their systems and databases as it's more of a public good than a private one people can reasonably opt out of?<p>So I'd expect something like a company coming out allowing you to do everything Facebook does and use the same data with events and everything, but that does not ask you to give away your data.
The irony, of course, is that when you open TechCrunch in the EU the first thing you see is a GDPR disclaimer saying “hey we’re gonna collect your data to do whatever we want with”, which 95% of consumers will just click through. This isn’t a Google or Facebook problem as much as it is an internet problem.
clickbaity title, it's article actually about lazy people, I quit Facebook completely and pretty much Google besides search in browser, so not sure what's the point of article
> Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.<p>I still fundamentally disagree with Europe's stance on data ownership. If I collect data on a person in a public location, I believe I own that data, not the person. If a person walks into my store and I take a picture of them, I don't believe I've "stolen" anything from them, nor do they have the right to demand I give them a copy of the picture I took and delete the picture from my hard drive. This fantasy world where everyone should be able to be perfectly anonymous and erase all evidence of their existence anytime they want is a bad idea. There has to be a balance between publicly available information and private information. If you are in a public location, I should be able to glean information from observations.