Comment by HL33tibCe7
4 years ago
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…
>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.
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.
Nothing says “common man” like 500k in stock options.
Big Tech monopolies need to be resisted
>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.
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.
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.
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.
But there's nothing that says you have to use that smartphone and services for anything other than government communications.
Which country are you speaking of?
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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.
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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.
I don't buy this. This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services.
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How would you (for example) apply for a job without the Internet?
Speak with recruiters.
Most of the jobs I've worked for have come via old school phone calls.
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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.
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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.
The sentiment is noble, but that's not really true.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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>> much for may family's
I would better let Google have all my photos and track my location than my father ...