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Trying to do without Google to see how hard it can be is a way to understand just how much Google's tentacles are intertwined in everyday's life
As part of an experiment to live without the tech giants, I'm cutting Google from my life both by abandoning its products and by preventing myself, technologically, from interacting with the company in any way.
Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra built a virtual private network, or VPN, for me that prevents my phone, computers, and smart devices from communicating with the 8,699,648 IP addresses controlled by Google... Because I'm blocking Google with Dhruv's VPN, I have to find replacements for all the useful services Google provides and without which my life would largely cease to function:
- I migrate my browser bookmarks over to Firefox (made by Mozilla).
- I change the default search engine on Firefox and my iPhone from Google—a privilege for which Google reportedly pays Apple up to $13 billion per year—to privacy-respecting DuckDuckGo, a search engine that also makes money off ads but doesn't keep track of users' searches.
- I download Apple Maps and the Mapquest app to my phone. I hear Apple Maps is better than it used to be, and damn, Mapquest still lives! I don't think I've used that since the 90s/a.k.a. the pre-smartphone age, back when I had to print directions for use in my car.
- I switch to Apple's calendar app.
- I create new email addresses on Protonmail and Riseup.net (for work and personal email, respectively) and direct people to them via autoreplies in Gmail. Lifehack: The easiest way to get to inbox zero is to start a brand new inbox.
...
This experiment is not just about boycotting Google products. I'm also preventing my devices from interacting with Google in invisible or background ways, and that makes for some big challenges.
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One morning, I have a meeting downtown. I leave my apartment with enough time to get there via Uber, but when I open the app, it won't work. Same thing with Lyft. It turns out they're both dependent on Google Maps such that I can't even enter my destination while blocking Google. [and late for the meeting]...
Google is a behemoth when it comes to maps. According to various surveys, the vast majority of consumers—up to 77 per cent—use Google Maps to navigate the world.
...
"Your smart home pings Google at the same time every hour in order to determine whether or not it's connected to the internet," Dhruv tells me. "Which is funny to me because these devices' engineers decided to determine connectivity to the entire internet based on the uptime of a single company. It's a good metaphor for how far the internet has strayed from its original promise to decentralize control."
...
Most of the websites I visit have frustratingly long load times because so many of them rely on resources from Google and get confused when my computer won't let them talk to the company's servers. On Airbnb, photos won't load. New York Times articles won't appear until the site has tried (and failed) to load Google Analytics, Google Pay, Google News, Google ads, and a Doubleclick tracker.
As I sit staring at my screen and drumming my fingers, I get flashbacks to computing via dial-up in the '90s, when I used to read a book while waiting for websites to open.
...
Mere hours into the first day of the Google block, my devices have tried to reach Google's servers more often than the 15,000 times they tried to ping Facebook's the entire week before. By the end of the week, my devices have tried to communicate with Google's servers over 100,000 times, comparable to Amazon, at 293,000 times during its block. Most of Google's pings seem to be in the form of trackers, ads, and resources built into websites.
...
To figure out why Dropbox isn't working, I look at the HTML of its home page — the otherwise invisible code that makes up the website — and discover Google is mentioned dozens of times. Dropbox even links out to Google's privacy policy from its own homepage, because it uses Google to make sure a web visitor is a real person. Because I'm blocking Google, Dropbox thinks I'm not a real person and won't let me sign in.I am trying to do research for a story that will take me to South Africa and need to see street-level views of buildings there. I realise I don't know how else to do that without Google Maps' Street View, so the research has to wait.
...
And one day, blocking Google could be even harder. With Footpath Labs, a product from the company to "smarten up" urban areas, Google's trackers will extend into the real world, tracking not just how we move around the web but how we move around our cities. That would lead to tracking that Dhruv and I might not be able to stop.
See also Google Launches "Sidewalk Labs" Spinoff Company
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:59AM (8 children)
Only if I specifically want something from them. Which, coincidentally is almost always maps, as mentioned in the fine article.
It IS annoyingly pervasive, and the most annoying thing might be the way that, even with a forked gecko browser that claim(s/ed) to care about such things, even with noscript, the moment I allow it in a single tab for a map every tab reloads and starts talking to skynet.
That said, it isn't nearly as annoying for me as it appears to be for you and the original author, perhaps because I don't frequent cesspools like uber and twitter and facebook.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by optotronic on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:45AM (3 children)
That's why I use a separate browser when I want to use Google Maps. It also works on the rare occasion that I don't have the patience to determine by trial and error which domains I have to allow to use a single-use store or website.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:27AM
It annoys me because pages that used to work fine without doing that, now require I allow google or switch browsers.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:00PM
That is the default behavior, you can change that so that it only reloads the current tab, in fact you can also disable the automatic reload if you please, it is on the general tab of the options.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 31 2019, @04:17PM
That's when I find a different store / website to do business with. Newegg is great in that aspect, especially when compared with the likes of Amazon. Amazon triggers a bunch of blocks in uBlock Origins, while Newegg, just one or two.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:06AM (1 child)
You should look at ublock origin and umatrix. When you discover that you must allow some script to get the information you want/need, you can "CTRL-click to allow scripts on this page only". With NoScript, allowing the script on one tab also allows the script to run in all of the 157 other tabs you have open. That kinda sucks.
Then, optotronic suggests using multiple browsers to defeat some of that nonsense. I do the same thing. My installation of Opera is the least locked-down browser on my machine, and holds the least real information on me. That is, it has NEVER signed into a registered account, anywhere. Nor do I use it for searches. All it is used for, is to copy/paste a URL, and go to that URL. Scripts and tracking and all that crap runs, I read the page, cookies deleted, close the page. It may be days before I open that browser again, but rinse and repeat as needed.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:28AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @04:35AM (1 child)
That is a noscript config option. At least in the version I use with palemoon.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:55PM
I am sure I have seen it in the options too in the past, but I just checked and it is no longer in version 10.2.1 on firefox.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.