September 2019 policy update: Archived links are preferred, but not required.
"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
For posts and comments, feel free to vent. Just remember: Solutions are better (and harder) than problems.
Discouraged:
- Mindless kneejerk "corporations are teh ebil"
- Advocacy of assault or destruction of property
Encouraged topics:
- Non-Google online service providers: Which are trustworthy and reliable?
- Running and hosting your own services: Which are easiest to deploy?
- Avoiding contact with Google: What really happens when you block those addresses?
For a start, instead of using Google "Groups", you can point an NNTP client at aioe.org, which allows reading and posting to Usenet with no authentication required.
The net is vast and infinite.
Let a million flowers bloom.
Even if you are not interested in Google, Google is interested in you.
view the rest of the comments →
[–] nonservator [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
aka Clearly you're not the target audience:
[–] [deleted] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
[–] j_ 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
I think it’s less “not knowing” and more “not thinking”.
At some level anyone with a credit card knows the credit card company has all this data on you, your spending habits, your location (based on where your card is swiped), things you buy in secret online that even your spouse doesn’t know about, etc… but who even thinks of it consciously? And more importantly, even when you do think about it, who is concerned about it? Very few people. The average person is thinking: “The credit card company is a large, faceless entity. What would they do with the knowledge that I’m at Taco Bell at 3am and that I just bought 100 dildos on Amazon?”
I find it very hard for anyone to claim complete, innocent ignorance. Even say, my grandmother, who has no concept of servers or tracking or how anything electronic works beyond using electricity, chooses not to think about where her data goes. It’s not magic. If you put your name into a box on your computer you must fundamentally understand that it goes somewhere, to someone or something. Most people just choose not to think about it. That’s different from ignorance.