Comparing Google with aggressive governments? Last I knew I was not forced to be a user of Google products. Also: Google does not track and arrest/beat up people with other opinions than the rulers.
I find it extremely difficult to avoid interacting with Google products:
- a LOT of the web employs google analytics to track you
- very many of my contacts use Gmail, so perhaps the majority of my email ends up on their servers
- Friends take photos of me that are uploaded to Google+
- My home and car have been captured by the GoogleMaps surveillance van
I agree that it's important to distinguish Google vs. governments. But let's not pretend that you can "opt out" of Google's surveillance on you, even if you aren't using their products.
Edit: Let's also acknowledge that whatever Google collects, the governments have access to.
Yes, Google Analytics is on most of the web. Guess what else is? AdSense. Even if a site doesn't have Analytics, if it has AdSense, then most of the same tracking comes into play.
A massive fraction of the web - at least, the websites that get traffic - has either or both of these built in.
> I find it extremely difficult to avoid interacting with Google products
I think that's not what digitalengineer was talking about. He was saying you can't opt out of governments and violent or unfair law enforcement, whereas you can opt out of Google products. So the OC reminds us Google is pretty tame compared to govts.
Well forced is perhaps a little strong, but it's nearly impossible to avoid giving information to Google if you use the internet. Not using the internet is increasingly not a choice available to people in modern society. The argument here about mobile phones applies just as much to the internet in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6707202
>Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own results from a research project I did using the Common Crawl[2] corpus estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them.
>The real key to tracking is the referrer data. For the vast majority of clicks, you land on a site that has Google Analytics or you've just left one that did. As Google Analytics tracks your referrer, that means they still have your full browsing history if you jump from GA => !GA => GA => !GA => …
Besides the Gmail part, blocking GA and using Bing or DuckDuckGo isn't the end of the world. I use Bing because of Bing Rewards, and I haven't had to do a Google search in ages. I've heard really good things about DDG as well.
>Maybe you could use this handy open source Chrome extension
And how exactly does that help me when a gmail user emails me (or replies to my email) without using pgp? Perhaps you meant to say "Maybe you could persuade every person you might ever contact over email to use this obscure Chrome extension".
If you think this is a solution then you have massively misunderstood the problem. Communication is an issue of social groups. What matters is what most people are doing. The choices made by any individual are irrelevant unless most other people do the same. I know that is probably difficult to fit into your existing individualistic model of how the world works.
It's obviously a solution. You don't like it because you suspect correctly that the people you want to communicate with care less about the issue than you do, but that doesn't mean it's not a solution. Indeed it's the only solution possible ...
