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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the ubik-dept dept.

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.

---- continue after the break ---

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:27AM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:27AM (#794378) Journal
    That's what I've been doing too.

    It annoys me because pages that used to work fine without doing that, now require I allow google or switch browsers.
    --
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