> How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?

Legal protection is necessary, and that's what works in other industries. It's not a fair negotiation, between a company's teams of engineers, management, and attorneys on one side, and a lone individual on the other. Financial firms, for example, can't just put whatever they want in agreements or do whatever they want.

EDIT: The solution of informed consent doesn't work. Consumers don't have time to become informed, which requires not only reading every click-wrap agreement but understanding the technology (remember the solution must work for all users, not only the HN crowd but people who don't know what a web browser is), and understanding privacy and its consequences, and then starting that process over again to find an alternative that meets their needs - for every technology in the stack. It's unrealistic in theory, and in practice obviously doesn't work: Almost nobody, even the HN crowd, is informed.

People need to start thinking of web forms, solicitations for email address, etc. like people used to think of the Columbia House record/CD club.

There may be an instant-gratification payoff, but you'll regret it at leisure.

Or, would you take a free sample to munch on if they first presented you with a 34-page legal agreement?

People rarely regretted joining Columbia House, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here. They really did give you a billion records for a penny, and all you had to do was opt out every month (or opt in, they had a lot of really good records in that catalog in the 90s at least.) They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models.

http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-e...

I'm sure there were more than one person who liked it, so yes, I suspect it is true to say 'people' rarely regretted it. I know I did, when I joined them on a lark in college.

They were literally a joke (several, actually) at the time. Consumer reports was overflowing with complaints. The only people I knew who didn't regret it were the ones who were cheating.

> They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models.

I understand that others see things differently, and if you liked them, great for you. But businesses who rely on customers making mistakes about their own best interests are slime, in my view, and in that of many others.

Funny you should say that, because I loved Columbia House. Not just the cheap initial CDs, but the "surprise" CD picks they sent my way (94-99). Come to think of it, most of my CD 'collection' came from CH. Once listen.com launched (later Rhapsody, now Napster), I never bought another CD again.

Well, my wife and I just ordered dumb phones and an AWS 2FA key fob (remember those?) which will be here this weekend, we're selling all our screens except one family PC. I sold off my Oculus Rift and gaming PC a month ago. We're going to have to buy a flashlight, GPS or maybe just a map book, calculator, a CD player, a Blu-Ray burner, a day planner, a wristwatch, a kitchen timer, get a library card, a shared calendar on the wall, and we'll go from there. I'm excited but also nervous about it. A few months ago I spent 90% of my free time staring at a screen. I yelled at my wife if god forbid she wanted to spend time with me and not just shut up and watch whatever video game I was playing.

I figure it's a start.

I recently did this same thing as an experiment for a full year. No mobile phone actually, no music, no movies, no games, so a little more extreme.

The strangest feeling will come after you “reset” but everything and everyone else around you is still connected. That’s when you notice how different things have become.

Good luck. It’s a nice feeling actually, nothing to be nervous about. It gave me perspective and changed how I respect time and other people. I also appreciate technology a lot more, but it’s now in balance.

Just curious - why so extreme? There's never been a time in my life where there was "no music" and "no movies." Back in the 1970s we had record players and 8-track tapes and the radio. We had movie theaters and they even showed movies on TV from time to time.

As a musician, the "no music" part is really disturbing to me. It sounds like a strict religious cult at that point. I mean, even before I could walk or talk my parents would sing to me sometimes (I'm told).

I'm not the person you replied to but I've considered allowing nothing but live music. Maybe buying and learning to play an instrument. My very distant family (only met them once at a reunion) are farmers and they entertain themselves by playing their own music and have a band. It'd encourage me to actually go to concerts rather than have the instant gratification of electronic media. For me, at least, its about forming habits against that instant gratification digital media provides. We've decided on an middle ground, we're going to start buying CDs (which are really cheap these days!). I don't remember the last time I listened to an album all the way through instead of flipping from song to song. Even with movies, we were watching "Meet Me in St Louis" and it was interesting to learn that before TV people would put on skits for their family rather than passively being presented with a movie. We'll still be watching movies (in theaters) but only sometimes.

Not everyone is into music. Months go by sometimes when I have my head down working on a project that I realize I haven't listened to music the entire time.

Then there are times I can't go an hour without playing something. Losing music for a year though wouldn't be a noticeable change in my life.

I should clarify, no recorded media in the home or with a mobile device. It wasn’t a protest of strictly modern technology, as some of these things have been around for ages in other forms.

If I wanted to listen to music, I went to local shows. That was the mentality.

I'm okay with the fact that I spend more than half of my waking hours staring at screens.

It's the web I worry about.

(And maybe smartphones, but I've yet to own a smartphone. And, speaking of screens, I don't particularly like LED back lights: I use only fluorescent back lights with my computer.)

Some things I do to reign in my use of the web:

I wrote a command that disables my browser (by compressing /applications/firefox.app/contents/macos/firefox).

I wrote another command that uncomments any commented-out lines in the last paragraph of my /etc/hosts file (then restarts the browser to flush certain caches). Both of these "minor roadblocks" or "speed bumps" are easier to deploy than they are to undeploy.

I admire your dedication and would be interested in hearing more about your experiment in the future. Maybe some kind of update in the future here on HN?

Thanks for the kind words. I was with a group of developers in person last night and mentioned this plan casually and was amazed by how many questions everyone had. I'm start to feel like this disconnect is, paradoxically, going to result in me spending more time on social media talking about and setting up meetup groups with like minded people. I don't want to bury my head in the sand, and I'm not a Luddite – I just want to be more intentional about how I'm spending my time and go to sleep happy with how I've spent my day.

HN was a big part of the inspiration [0] and the few articles I've read about Tristan Harris have filled me with a desire to reclaim my life. We're in sort of a planning stage right now and are realizing there's quite a few things we're going to have to buy, which seems intimidating, but it'll be nice that my egg timer or flashlight won't become out of date in a few years. I was looking at a wristwatch [1] I feel embodies how I'm feeling I should live life lately. It seems a little silly at first but it really struck me as a timepiece that makes a particular statement.

We don't form memories of what life was like at 12:07 PM or 12:09 PM, at most we need to know the general time of day. I feel like even the exact time of day might be too much information. I've started checking email at work once a day and disabled the always visible clock in OSX and have yet to have any issues with this. If someone really needs me real time they'll come talk to me or send me a message on Slack.

I'm thinking about blogging about my experience, but it feels like that might be against the spirit of what I'm trying to accomplish. Then again blogging is a different sort of communication than writing 144 character responses, and may be appropriate to get the word out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12678325 [1] https://www.slow-watches.com/

Sharing your experience is a great idea. But I can see your concern with blogging it. Maybe just write in a physical notebook instead?

Sounds like they're trying to save their marriage after "screen addiction" became a problem. I had the same problem with video games. I ended up swearing off video games that didn't have an ending and have been all the better for it.

My marriage isn't in shambles or anything like that. Just not great. We just feel like we've been on autopilot for years. It never really "became a problem", it was just always a problem. We were both glued to our screens. We never did anything. My daughter is 18 months old and will sign and say "birds birds" because she loves birds and wants to watch videos on Youtube. If we turn it off she starts screaming she's so upset. Even that small amount of screen time causes behavior changes that we've found to be harmful.

I started with games that don't have an ending but realized I didn't personally have the self control to stick to it. Especially with a small child every minute is precious and I'm not going to get to have all these "firsts" again. This was really, really tough though. Maybe when I'm older with more free time I'll jump back into video games, I bet they'll be super cool and even more addictive by then.

I have similiar issues with games. I dread open ended ones - Witcher, Skyrim - because of the prospect of them never ending. But it's worse than that because the least resistance in gameplay and I will abandon the game. For instance, I've haven't been able to play more than 10 minutes of Cities: Skylines because it gets overwhelming.

At least now I accept that I don't have to finish games. That it's ok to even uninstall one after a couple of hours of play if they don't bring me any more joy.

Also, there needs to be a category of game guides for those of us who prefer small quality gaming experiences over fillers.

Please consider Board Games as an alternative to Computer Games. There has never been a better time to get into the hobby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKgz-UBEhss :)

Figured it'd be this video or the Shut Up and Sit Down New to Board Games video before I even clicked on it. Nice :)

But yeah. Board games are the best way to free yourself from screen addiction, in my opinion. And there's tons of interesting board games out there nowadays.

Seconding this. There are boardgames that are simple enough for small children, but are still interesting enough for adults. You can find casual games that you can play in five minutes while waiting for the bus, or you can find a game that'll occupy your family for an entire extended weekend.

And if we're including things like D&D and Pathfinder, that's easily months of entertainment.

I used to play non-ending games throughout most of my teen years. I think that taught me a lesson, because I started to get very depressed. I don't play that much games anymore, and when I do, I try to stick to something relatively short and with clear endings. First person shooters that I can finish in a weekend are good.

Addictive open ended games, sandboxes and competitive online games quickly lead to severe existential depression so I just don't play them. Sometimes people ask me to join them on MMOs. I have to refuse.

Maybe take a look at Gamebooks? Inkle's remake of the Sorcery! gamebooks [0] were something I was playing and enjoying quite a lot. I'm giving that up too for now, maybe I'll reintroduce it later. I was amazed to find out that physical gamebooks are still a thing and being published. If you encounter "resistance" in the game just turn to the next page.

I'd suggest if you're really dreading games so much, try giving them up for 3 weeks. That's about how long it took me to stop freaking out that I wasn't spending every waking moment playing Diablo 3 or literally ANY game. I felt really awful. It really surprised me how negative my initial reaction was, but lately I've been finding myself reading books for pleasure again, and I'm going out with my family more often. I realized I was implicitly choosing video games over spending time in the real world with actual people.

[0] http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/

Thanks for that link. That looks pretty interesting. Is that the same Steve Jackson that does the Munchkin / Illuminati card games?

Yep! If you check "Gamebooks" on Amazon you'll find all sorts of physical games. I think they popped up in the 70s and 80s and you use dice, sort of like a single player D&D game.

What about a camera or camcorder to capture memories with your daughter? That seems to be missing in your original list. Would it be digital or film?

Right that's also on the list! Might buy a DSLR or something. Also going to probably end up buying a cheap atom-based server to set up nextcloud or owncloud for storing and serving those images online to family. Part of this is also to get out of the endless subscriptions to cloud services and host all our own stuff.

Yep there's something to be said about being addicted to screens and how it changes our attention span and focus.

I've been trying to use my long commute to work to increase focus and be less agitated by distractions.

I'm just trying to grasp that second sentence.

They may be commuting by bike or foot.

missed a comma there!

Please write this up in a few months to share your experiences.

That's my plan. I'm hoping to find other people in my city (Kansas City) that want to start down a similar path. I want to write more but I'm at work and really need to get a few hours of productivity in today. I'll make sure to keep track of my experiences though!

I can't tell if you are being facetious or not but I applaud your efforts if you are being serious but your detailed post made me laugh, so true about the kitchen timer and a calendar on the wall. Back to basics. At least you don't need to charge them.

I've looked into going back to a dumb phone in the past. If you don't mind, what phones did you order?

Sure! We ordered these phones. If they're really awful I might buy some Nokia phones, but they're more expensive. We wanted talk, text, and MMS (just in case), but that's it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O5EU7TQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_HHLc...

Thought this was satire, but then I saw your other comment. Good on you two.

I'll be honest, I wrote all this out and read it to my wife before posting, and we both laughed at how crazy it sounds. It's the aggregate of lots of little decisions in the past year and we're not solid on any of it yet. We'll be using tech for a lot of things still, we'll have a server with our personal images, and I'm looking at some Arduino stuff for home automation things. I don't think tech is bad, just a lot of it is designed as a feedback loop of addiction.

I just read about noprocrast mode on HN, I might turn this on too. I guess it lets you spend 20 minutes on HN every 3 hours.

Until you open up incognito windows to get around the noprocrast. ;) It's still a good hurdle and a tiny reminder even when I bypass it, though.

> I don't think tech is bad, just a lot of it is designed as a feedback loop of addiction.

Totally agree with this. I turn off all most notifications on my phone and tell people that if they really want to reach me, a phone call or SMS is still the best. I've also been calling people more because generally we can arrive at solutions in a minute of talking instead of 10 minutes of half-minded replies.

Sometimes I feel like the best balance of technology/attention was around the early 2000s when things weren't totally vying for our attention. When there was a clear distinction being being online and offline. When you would type "afk", then go do other stuff uninterrupted.

Of course it's easy to romanticize as that's also the era when I personally started surfing the information superhighway.

Best of luck!

Use alternatives? For example, https://duckduckgo.com for search.

And if their search engine does not deliver what you're looking for, use the bang !sp to use Startpage, a search engine that fetches results from the Google search engine but does not give any personal user information to Google's servers. Startpage's servers are in the Netherlands.

Simply !s works too.

Unfortunately their results are pretty abysmal.

https://www.startpage.com/ or ixquick is a better option in terms of results.

Startpage is nice, too. I personally really like DDG, though.

I think people react that way to it because it is more literal, a la Google several years ago. I prefer that; I'm used to it and find that Google frustrates the hell out of me when I'm looking for something specific because of all the 'help' and the heavy bias towards recently changed pages. There have been times when I simply couldn't find things with Google that were much easier to locate in DDG.

Still wish there were an engine with a clone of Lexis-style searching. Yes, you have to learn how to use it. But it is incredibly useful.

And that's all before getting to Google's increasingly invasive behavior, and the reason why I refuse to use Chrome, block a lot of their utility-domains, etc.

Interesting, usually the searches I find Google is better at are very literal, but also very obscure things. Like when I'm trying to find a specific error message or obscure (often outdated and unavailable legitimately) pirated material. Maybe it just amounts to having more stuff in the index.

I've used them for years now and their search is rarely insufficient. When it is, I make my search more specific or I hop over to another engine for that specific search.

Really, I just like using products of companies that try to do "the right thing". Anything from the Mozilla Foundation and DuckDuckGo are two examples.

I'd say I do a Google search once or twice a month.

Same here. Been "ducking" for years now. I used to go to google when I couldn't find stuff on ddg, but lately I've noticed if it's not on ddg, it's not on google, either! I'd say about 1% of 1% of the time I find something on google that I couldn't find on google.

DDG has been my preferred search for years. I'd tried it pre-Snowden, off-and-on. Since Snowden or before it's been fully acceptible:

1. Results close to as good if not better than Google.

2. No tracking.

3. Bang searches. With the "too clever by half" search dialogs many sites are implementing (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Google Ngram Viewer) it's often superior to the native on-site search as I don't have to set focus 2-4 times to actually type in the bloody search dialog.

4. No tracking.

5. Did I mention no tracking?

6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage.

7. Search customisations -- light page (good for console and commandline search), night mode, and others.

8. Unmangled URLs. I can copy/paste URLs straight from DDG. No-can-do with Google.

> 6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage.

Or even Google.

I've seen comments online about DDG providing only an illusion of privacy. I haven't dug into this deeply. From what I've read this comes down to DDG (including bang searches like !g and !sp) stripping identifying information, which provides protection from tracking by entities like advertisers and social networks, but not law enforcement or agencies like the NSA that may have legal options or extralegal access. Is my understanding generally correct? Any corrections/additions/clarifications appreciated.

DDG don't track your IP or log activity against you. Bang searches are simply redirects as far as I'm aware and thus !g is equivalent to typing straight into Google.

But if you're using Google through DDG you're probably missing the point.

Using Google through DDG is useful because of the bang searches. It's actually faster for me to get to, say, image, scholar, books, ngram, or maps (though I prefer OpenStreetMap) searches from DDG than it is through Google's own web interface.

It's faster to do that, in further irony, on Firefox rather than Chrome (on Android), because Chrome/Android doesn't allow specifying DDG as a default search engine.

(I prefer Firefox for multiple features including extensions (adblock, hul-fucking-lo), and Reader Mode, but motherlovin' heck is Firefox every laggy and slow on Android...)

I'll run a DDG search, for all the reasons stated above, then re-run it to Google if I must. It's still faster than finding Google's search page and entering a search (and clicking past multiple nags and seeing multiple distracting animations).

Two more reasons for Google:

1. Specific date-bounds on search.

2. Counts of results by domain (Desktop only)

Has DuckDuckGo email and an app suite?

Do you want them to? So they can eventually turn into Google? Diversify and avoid cloud apps and closed source applications as much as possible.

Why does your search engine need to provide email? The two are pretty unrelated.

Just switched to FastMail this past weekend, and I recommend it. For an app suite, I recommend Sandstorm.io.

I've heard good things about both https://www.fastmail.com and https://protonmail.com so would be good to hear your experiences after a bit more use.

I've been a FastMail customer since their beginning. I will not use anyone else as long as they exist. I have several accounts with them. Very much worth the money.

Rob, Bron, and the FastMail guys are the best in the world at what they do. I have zero affiliation with FastMail except for as a happy customer. And with these guys, you are the customer, not the product. The do email, calendaring, etc. better than any other company out there. I've been in IT for 3 decades and I can tell you that the level of quality and care the guys at FastMail deliver is so very, very rare. Money more than well spent.

Recently I started a "paper evaluation" of paid, privacy protecting (to a good extent) email services. I found Fastmail to be quite expensive if one needs multiple accounts. Providers like Protonmail and Tutanota don't support IMAP or any other way to download mails (the web interface and apps are the only choices). That makes it very difficult (or impossible?) to move to another service and take one's older mails along. Protonmail does not support custom domains, whereas Tutanota does.

The cheapest solutions I like currently are posteo.de and mailbox.org. I have not started using either of them, but plan to move soon. Posteo does not support custom domains (it is heavily privacy focused and refrains from collecting or storing customer data as much as possible). So your only choice is to use one of many posteo.x domains for the email address. On the other hand, mailbox.org supports custom domains. Both support IMAP, web mail, migrating email from other providers, etc. Both these services and their websites are worth a look, IMO.

Protonmail doesn't have pop/imap/external app use. I've heard it's coming in the following months.

It's great apart from that, but this is a fairly big negative if you want to use a bunch of email accounts. There are some other negatives as well, but apart from this, it seems ahead of the pack.

> Protonmail doesn't have pop/imap/external app use. I've heard it's coming in the following months.

I checked perhaps a week or two ago and found that this has been in the "it's coming" stage for a couple of years, and Protonmail didn't seem to be willing to disclose when this may finally come (they may have good reasons for that).

Yeah, ProtonMail was the other one I considered, but the price for storage wasn't nearly as compelling, and both had reasonably strong privacy stories. And now that I'm in FastMail, I'm really amazed at the flexibility and control it gives you, especially with connecting your own domain and stuff.

Back in the day, Gmail's driving appeal was it's pro features, and I'd argue that FastMail makes Gmail look basic. Also, I've opened two support tickets this week to ask questions and got responses within an hour or two.

ProtonMail lost any cred when they paid to have some perps stop DDOsing them. Have their engineers or their Web host never heard of blackhole routing? Smart router engineers know about the concept of blackhole routing offensive traffic. It takes a couple of minutes and it works wonders.

Could you explain your use case with Sandstorm? I find their homepage to be ambiguous/not really sure what they're offering.

Yeah, so I do all my documents and spreadsheets and stuff on Sandstorm Oasis, which is their managed offering. I can do a bunch of other stuff on it, and it's easiest to figure out the extent of it by just trying the demo yourself (https://demo.sandstorm.io) and checking out the apps and stuff. But in my case, I mostly use it like I used Google Docs and Trello before, that I can easily control my data on, and migrate to a self-hosting solution easily later.

Sometimes it's hard to explain Sandstorm because they have a wide variety of good use cases for it, and there's really not a lot of comparable software packages to it. (It's like ownCloud but it's not like ownCloud, it's like Docker but it's not at all like Docker, etc.)

Curious: why use the managed hosting if you are a privacy enthusiast? Or are you just a sandstorm enthusiast? Why? Became nits not Google? Just curious since your every comment is about it...and it looks like you are wearing Google glass...

Heh, the Glass picture is really old. I used to be quite the Google fan, a few years back. Then I paid a bit more attention to the cost, and have been moving away since.

The managed hosting for Sandstorm is a good step in the direction, because it's very easy to me to move between Sandstorm servers, but I'm not super confident on running my own right now, and it's still in early development as a platform. But Sandstorm on their servers runs the same as Sandstorm on mine, and unlike leaving Google, where I have to figure out how to transplant my data from their proprietary apps to other apps, I can move my apps and data perfectly between Sandstorm servers.

I do place a high degree of trust in Kenton Varda (founder of Sandstorm.io) specifically to keep Sandstorm doing what they should. If I ever feel that trust is misplaced (and I keep a close eye), I'll move.

No, and that's a feature.

Google's path to the dark side hit a major milestone with Gmail, and the fact that you now had a reason to personally and identifiably log in to your search engine provider.

No, no, no, nope, fucking bloody hell no!

I'm thinking it's hard time to give https://Sandstorm.io a really good looking at.

tutanota, protonmail, fastmail, scrypmail.

If Google is part of your life, it's too late for you.

Just don't have Google account and clean cookies and history regularly[1], forbid saving 3rd party cookies (built-in in Firefox) and noise your canvas generator [2], block 3rd party JS, CSS, media and fonts [3], control your referals your browser sends on each click [4] use VPN or Tor on startup. You don't need to bother with those tools, they will just work in background (µBlock requires some configuration).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/expire-histor... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fin... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... [4] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

My Google account only runs in a separate browser. But I still do the things you mentioned (privacytools.io). For YouTube I'm using a RSS reader (no account) through a 3rd-party but I think they can still easily identify me.

I hope I can fully remove Google from my life in a few years.

I've also found it helps to use different Firefox profiles for different things, like hobbies, going to banks, going to anything google, programming stuff, etc. I have noscript, umatrix, and ghostery installed on each profile. I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but there is a Firefox command-line switch to bring the profile manager up when run.

Excellent list, here's one you may not know about which locally hosts 3rd party libraries (such as jQuery) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes... to plug that hole while restoring some enhanced functionality. This alone got me back on Firefox.

Google do provide a privacy checkup screen where you can review and tweak your settings: https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/1

And you can opt out of ads here https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated

Start paying for your services from companies that exist by charging. Don't do business with ad companies.

Any good search engines in the paid space?

Nope!

Yeah, get a G-Suite account and you're free from Google using your data for advertising purposes.

I got the screen today: http://i.imgur.com/HClXUy3.png

It only tells you that it will actually result in less privacy if you scroll down and read the fine print.

That’s seriously misleading.

Class action lawsuits.