Growing discontent with Google?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Google has certainly lost a great deal of the goodwill it once held.

Basically we all knew Google was a company so we shouldn’t be surprised that they went funny. But the change hurt. A company that had previously offered services for the good of their users now started shearing their customers like sheep. I won’t say they fleeced us exactly, because they never exacted any money from us directly, but they started selling us to their advertisers. Someone said, “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product”1, and they were right. Our Web searches and our email became goldmines of data. This isn’t so bad just on its own, which is why we were all pretty much okay with ignoring a few ads for the sake of keeping our free services. But when you consider the fact that email, which is a part of every aspect of your life, is living on the servers of strangers whose intentions are becoming more and more dubious, then you start to feel like you’ve been co-opted into some Faustian pact without even realizing it.

What happens to your data in ten years’ time? You may have totally forgotten about it, but is it living twelve lives on different backup servers? If you delete an email, how deleted is it really? What happens if some rogue Google employee starts sticky-beaking around? And what if Google goes out of business? It wouldn’t be the first time a huge company has shut down and their internal data got bought up by others in the form of database sales and recovered hard drives.

What’s worse was when Google began integrating all of its services. You may have only ever signed up for Gmail, but all of a sudden that became linked with your YouTube account when Google bought YouTube, and then you found yourself with Google+ whether you liked it or not. Now separate accounts you’ve had for years are inextricably linked, and you can’t manage them with the same level of freedom that you used to have. You can only operate within the sphere of behavior that Google wants you to.

My boyfriend tells a story about someone whose YouTube handle was gangstakilla999, which became his “From” name when YouTube linked up with Gmail. He couldn’t figure out why suddenly no-one was responding to his job applications. Then there are the numerous stories of trans folks who were unceremoniously outed to their work colleagues. Aside from being a massive affront to those people’s privacy, this antic also jeopardized their livelihoods.

Google is famous for its corporate slogan of “Don’t be evil”. It’s a noble enough goal, but do you really trust a stranger to stick to it? They are a company whose existence depends on making money. That is their top priority — they assuredly do not have your best interests at heart. And even if they’re not strictly evil, that doesn’t mean they’re not shady, incompetent, or deceptive. Many of Google’s maneuvers of late have the ring of nerds with more power than they know how to wield. Just because they write good software doesn’t mean they know how to manage it. The fact that most of Google’s recent projects have gone tits-up says to me that this is a company which has jumped the shark. They’re making mistakes, shutting down services, and trying to corral people into products they don’t want. As the scramble gets more and more desperate, I think they’ll wind up becoming the next Yahoo! — an empty husk of an idea that used to be good, a circus after all the lions have gone. All that’s required to hammer the last nail into the coffin is a better alternative.

Disengage

So is it actually possible to disengage? I’ll grant you that the better alternative hasn’t quite come along and blown Google out of the water, but there are some decent services that give you what you pay for. Sure they might cost money, but having sampled the free versions and become Google’s bum-boy, are you really going to complain about $5 a month for email?

I’ve been slowly dissociating myself from Google for the past six months. It’s necessarily a slow process, especially when Google owns gigabytes of your correspondence, but things were going along at a nice pace. When I tried to shut down one of my Gmail addresses, I was taken aback to realize that by closing my Gmail account I had inadvertently closed all my Google services, including Voice, YouTube, Feedburner, and Analytics. So fuck it, if Google doesn’t want me to manage my accounts individually, then I’m not going to manage my accounts at all. Instead of signing back up and trying to claw those things back, I’m going solo.

Email

Your first priority as a Google expat will probably be email. This is a tricky one because it’s so central to our lives and if it’s not quite right then it just feels like Hotmail in 1998. The whole Snowden farrago has had a lot of benefits over the past year because it’s prompted a demand for Internet security and privacy. I’ve had people recommend a number of services like Hushmail, which seem legitimately good for users who just want to pay and get email.

For those who want to take their lives into their own hands, hosting your own email is always an option. It’s difficult to set up, but it’s not that hard to maintain. There has been a huge amount of buzz lately on the Interblag about Mailpile, which is a webmail tool for people who have their own email servers. I was disappointed to find out that it looks sexy as hell but the alpha is far to raw to be usable. RainLoop, on the other hand, may not be the most fully-featured webmail in the world but it’s got everything that Mailpile doesn’t, and has the right kind of UI thrown in for good measure. I swear to god, if I see one more mail client that stacks the inbox pane above the message pane, I’m gonna cut a bitch. That may have worked in the late 90s, but computer screens these days have horizontal real estate, not vertical. Put the panes side-by-side, for fuck’s sake. RainLoop and Mailpile get this, while a lot of other open-source webmail clients are stuck in 2002.

Post external references

  1. 1
    https://www.stjohnkarp.net/dear-google/
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