"they offer real value services without which you can't survive a day on the web"

This is just not true.

There are viable competitors in about every space that Google is in. Use local documents and sync via a different storage provider. Alternate email providers exist. The only place where they have a distinct advantage is search, and even then, DuckDuckGo is usually enough (and if it's not, just pass a !g flag).

YouTube is also a thing, but I've never felt that having an account really gave me anything over just bookmarking channels.

Bing is good in search, I switched to bing after google search showed a result directly in the top of search results after parsing an amazon shipment email. I realised they are tracking too much. Every company who depends on ad will do or eventually do that unless there are regulations in place. As a user it's up to you how much you want to share your data with third parties and advertisers.

use startpage.com google search without the tracking

Well - there are competitors but they aren't nearly as good. Usage and popularity of these alternate products tell a story.

Unfamiliarity also goes a long way. I recently switched to DuckDuckGo. In the beginning I would compare my search queries with results from Google.. found there wasn't all that much difference.

+1 for DDG. I’ve been experimenting with it as default in Safari and it’s so similar I often find myself wondering “when did google change their layout?”

I just heard someone mentioning above that it was based on Google, which I wasn't aware of.. I will do a search on that :)

checkout startpage and searx as well. better results than DDG

For the HN crowd, this may be an option. The general public doesn't really care about privacy, and is not going to use DuckDuckGo or any other service whose primary selling point is privacy. The best search engine will win the market, and the best search engine will tend to be the one that can generate the most money to invest in its service.

Even if someone comes in and beats Google at some point, they will do it by hiring a massive number of talented people and buying large quantities of data centers and servers. Those things can only be paid for through advertising and tracking, as few people will directly pay for search services. I suppose a socialist/communist government somewhere in the world might have the resources to build a search engine of Google quality that doesn't rely on advertising, but they would have their own hostile agenda - that would be far worse than having to put up with Nike trying to sell you some shoes while you search.

Sure, I agree that switching email providers or cloud storage services solely for the sake of privacy isn't going to be something that the average person will do.

I was just objecting to the sentiment that opening a Google account is a requirement for being productive on the internet.

I got a number of people to switch to DuckDuckGo by sending DDG query url's to them: "Hey, there is a ton of info on this subject!" (sends DDG query)

DDG uses Google.

If they grow too big Google will just switch them off..

DDG, in fact, uses Bing. [1][2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/4lgda4/duckduck...

[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/01/duckduckgo-yahoo-partnersh...

Curious if there is a source for this; I was just looking at this the other day and couldn't confirm they use Google but they did state that they use over 400 sources. Thx

Exactly why Google needs to be reined in.

I stopped using DDG a few days ago, when I noticed the !g flag is not encrypting traffic to google anymore, it just redirects to google.com. Do you know what is up with that? Using startpage now.

Okay actually, I would pay to use most of Google's good services. I expect them to do advertising and they do not (!) need that kind of data on me for their search result advertising to be relevant. They have my search term; that should be enough in isolation.

I would pay handsomely for Google Maps, but I have no such option. Again though, that is a service that works just fine without my individual data; they have my location and my search term, and any business that pops up is inherently relevant due to simple proximity.

Please do not call this entitlement. Please understand that my privacy is valuable to me. Please understand that I would gladly pay to keep it.

> actually, I would pay to use most of Google's good services.

A lot of people say this. You already can pay for Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Photos, and YouTube. Are you paying for them?

Does paying for these products disable tracking and provide strong privacy controls?

For G Suite, "Google does not sell your data to third parties, there is no advertising in G Suite, and we never collect or use data from G Suite services for any advertising purposes."

Also "G Suite's compliance with ISO/IEC 27018:2014 affirms our commitment to international privacy and data protection standards. ISO 27018 guidelines include not using your data for advertising, ensuring that your data in G Suite services remains yours, providing you with tools to delete and export your data, protecting your information from third-party requests, and being transparent about where your data is stored."

https://gsuite.google.com/security

Oh, huh. I might have to look into paying for that then.

> You already can pay

Where 'you' is a minority subset of the Internet population.

I am in the UK and use Google Search and YouTube. The only way to pay is with my data.

How do I pay?

G Suite for Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar + phone support + other stuff: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

Or, Drive storage by itself, which applies to most products with storage quotas such as Gmail and Photos: https://www.google.com/drive/pricing/

For YouTube, YouTube Red: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6305537

Another interesting experiment in the willingness of users to pay to remove ads is Google Contributor: https://contributor.google.com/

To add to this, since I've started using GSuite for my personal account, I feel a hundred thousand times more comfortable with Google.

1. My Google identity is now my real email, the one tied to my real domain that I myself own. That's so much better. I can comfortably sign in/sign up with Google to other sites, have them tied to that email instead of my @gmail.com one.

2. I feel way more comfortable sharing every single detail of my life to Google. In fact, it turns what initially comes off as really creepy, into a useful life service because I'm now using things such as my map activity etc as a service I have a paid contract with Google for. And if I don't like it, I can hard disable the entire service.

3. I have access to a lot of stuff that regular free Google doesn't offer. Things such as undelete email/drive (which has been useful on a couple of accidental occasions), and, get this, support. Live chat and phone!

This is pretty good. I've been considering moving over to Apple for everything to avoid Google, but this offers a partial solution.

If only I could pay a monthly fee to include search and maps!

You would now, but what if they had cost money in the first place? Like, you wouldn't have got used to their services for free for years? This is something people often forget when they are saying "of course I would pay money".

The world would be a whole lot different place (not necessarily any better) if Google services cost money instead of gathering data and selling it forwards.

I already pay them $5 a month so I can use [email protected] for e-mail (I believe this also exempts my inbox from their ad-based data mining, but I could be wrong) I would gladly up that to $10 or $15 a month to extend that across all of Google's products (Youtube, Search, Maps etc.) and have advertising stripped from the whole thing and my "peronalization" data sandboxed so it doesn't get leaked to the "free" version.

The difference that I see between FB and Google is that I would trust Google to get that right. I would expect FB to say they sandboxed or protected my data and then have it turn out in court in ten years that they did no such thing...

can i just use "[email protected]" rather than some company name? I'd really just be paying for the knowledge that google isn't plowing through my data and sending it to 3rd parties. My company name is already associated with another host provider.

That is totally fair. My main point here was the users have to pay one way or the other. Either via more seeing more targeted ads, which sacrifices their privacy, or via real $$.

I think it's time a model will come up where you have an option to choose between an ad supported and paid version.

Take a keyword like "mesothelioma". Are you going to personally reimburse Google for the $100 that an advertiser would pay them for your click that they will lose by not showing you an ad with this keyword?

The average click is worth much less though. And the main idea of subscription based flat-priced services is that in average, you profit.

try 1 cent.

While most Google searches aren't that valuable, there are specific searches (mesothelioma might be one, but I've heard local bail bonds and injury lawers) that have cpc in the range of $50-100. There's articles about this floating around.

I really don't mind Google as much when it comes to data collection.

Primary difference between them and Facebook is that I feel Google has a lot more transparency with what data they hold on you. With Google I just deleted all my account activity which is older than a week. Facebook gave me no such option, I even had to write a fucking 600 line python script using OCR to spam click delete buttons on timeline because there's no way to delete activity using the API.

I also agree with you that Google actually provides a service that Facebook doesn't. There's dozens of Google services I use on a weekly basis. I deleted my FB account because of privacy issues but leave my location on my Android for Google Timeline, despite them keeping a log of where I've been every second of my life I a) trust them more with that data than I trust FB to know my hair colour and b) I actually use that feature and think the payoff is worth it.

I just want to set my alarms and do some searches by voice. Why does this require my web browsing history?

Do you really think everyone relies on Google that much? I don’t have some vendetta against Google but I don’t count on their stuff much. Besides Gmail which I havent given the time to at least partially migrate from (only because I have multiple emails and would rather they be with multiple providers), I use the calendar for syncing and YouTube. Neither gmail nor calendars is something I need from google. It’s just I’ve never changed.

I’m sure the majority of people do rely on Google quite a bit. But not everyone.

It would seem, based on the numbers, that you are the exception here. Just look at how being precluded from Google’s services and apps can be a death sentence for some companies: One of the biggest reasons Windows Phone failed was that Google chose to ignore the platform. Google is perhaps the most pervasive tech company to date and it is nearly impossible to escape for the average user.

I wouldn't mind them using aggregate anonymous information, but they don't need to know my every move, so I turn off google everything and use alternatives.

Yeah I want to have a similar experience as with Linux. If they can't deliver that, and they can't, then they are only one more company holding us back.

Untrue, people are paying serious money for their Android phones. OEMs too pay Google. So customers are not 'demanding' anything for free.

But that doesn't stop Google's insatiable need for personal data and stalking people. Android is designed to leak like a sieve.

And this is yet another example for those who continue to make the false argument that if customers paid surveillance would go away. On the contrary companies will then make money from both sources.

This 'free' is not demanded by anybody but is the business model of some startups to gain market share. The fact that there are no regulations means they can operate without any ethical constraints.

Android does not leak like a sieve. All you have to do is not use Google services. There are plenty of others if you're willing to pay a little bit. Or pay for GSuite and they turn the tracking off. Nothing in this world is free except a mother's love.

The only thing you have to do is uninstall the Google apps you mean, handicapping your phone.

The Android platform itself is designed to siphon as much data as possible: contacts, pictures, locations, wifi hotspot information, etc.

If you think that you can avoid Google's greed for data just by not using GMail you are way way behind in the game and your misleading comment is harming others which might now feel safe using what is essentially a very evolved spyware OS. Sure, Google are nice and won't steal your credit card number and purchase stuff with it. They just take every bit of info they can get their hands on.