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from the it's-not-you-its...actually-yes,-it's-you dept.
Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill is taking advantage of her position as a reporter to do something the rest of us only dream of. (If you get paid to write about it, why not?)
She is trying to break up with big tech.
For one week each, she attempted to completely eliminate Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple from her life
Fail. Except for Apple
After that she attempted to eliminate all of them simultaneously for one week.
This was an attempt to completely block the companies in their entireties. For example all AWS hosted websites when trying not to interact with Amazon. Without further ado, her are the results:
AMAZON
"And it was as though a vast tract of the web blinked out"
"meant she couldn't use Lyft or Uber, which rely on Google Maps."
MICROSOFT
"coffee shop[s] put her at risk of coming into contact with Microsoft, if the shop used Windows to operate its payment system."
"left her feeling strangely isolated, pining for connection even at the cost of pervasive data surveillance."
APPLE
"when she gave up her iPhone and stepped out of Apple's "walled garden," she had no trouble staying away from the company"
ALL FIVE AT ONCE
even the one success of Apple presented challenges when the week of attempting to block all five came around.
"'Google and Apple have a duopoly on the smartphone market,' she said. 'So when I went out trying to find a smartphone that was not made or touched by either tech giant, it wasn't possible.'"
She had to use a 'dumb phone', a Nokia 3310, which left her...unsatisfied.
"I would grab my iPhone and just start scrolling," she admitted. "It's how I started the day, every day."
There was nothing worth scrolling through on the Nokia 3310, so she didn't bother.
While I suspect some things like Apple's Quicktime, iTunes, or 'Bonjour' didn't make her radar, and does she work on a Linux box? She still admits to 'slip ups' where contact happened despite her best efforts, for example.
[having a parcel] show up at her door in an instantly recognizable package. The seller had used Amazon to fulfill the order.
In short
"It's not possible to navigate the modern world without coming into contact with these companies," she said. "It made me certainly sympathetic to some of the critics who are saying these companies are too dominant in their spaces."
So what companies do people avoid?
I manage to mostly avoid Apple and Facebook myself. But Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are lost causes for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @10:11PM (4 children)
But why totally dump ultra-portative computing? It;s a part which allows productivity too. I do not own smartphone for security reasons and I just have an old Samsung which lasts a month on one charge, but I use a small UMPC which works as well as smartphone, but has Linux. I found G maps hard to abandon, but OSM is also reliable in cities. What's more interesting it is possible to off-line a complete OSM region and use it later.
The problems I got with finally dumping most of "proprietary" (but my criterion was more "personal data harvesting") was with open source software. Many of these programs look like they stopped in the happy times of CP/M software, when software package came with 3 books of documentation: For administrator, user and for customization. The problem is: Open source software is rarely documented.
Also, it's hard to dump the "social media" - the network effect comes in here, and the networks which focus on user's privacy, usually free software-oriented, are quite deserted.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @10:45PM (1 child)
Deserted? or Private?
Maybe you don't see anyone on them because most people on them don't want to be seen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @11:05PM
How could you possibly tell?
Stackoverflow communities are my social media now.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hyper on Monday February 11 2019, @11:12PM (1 child)
I was driving around another city using OSM maps. It worked really well. I have have Google Maps (usually disabled) on my phone, but the OSM was better. Gmaps for accuracy. OSM for features, in particular l offline mode. Due to navigation disagreements I was at the point of it being worth shelling out a few hundred for a car GPS navi. Turns out that a cheap phone with a spare sim mounted on the dash is far better.
Yes, it is possible to avoid the big guys. How do you avoid captcha and sites that load content from them? Just avoid them altogether?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @11:38PM
http://erinlyyc.com/2017/05/17/how-to-save-google-maps-directions-for-offline-use-when-travelling/ [erinlyyc.com]