> The claim states that Meng's rights under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms were violated. Meng, who remains under house arrest in Vancouver, suffered "mental distress, anxiety and loss of liberty", it says. The claim seeks declarations that her Charter rights were infringed, various damages and costs, all unspecified. [https://www.afr.com/news/politics/world/huawei-cfo-files-sui...]
You shouldn't.
I live in Korea and haven't really noticed anything like the "have a gmail account or be excluded from life" dichotomy you have described. Not sure what "upvoting a president e-petition" is, but you don't need neither FB nor Google for voting in elections.
While off topic, the e-petition I said about is actually pretty popular, after the new government came in in 2017. (I’m talking about “국민청원”, if you read Korean.) To express your opinion, you need a Google/FB account.
Basically, you can start by coming up with a list of those Google/FB services that you use, and then figure out what alternatives (ideally open source, or self hosted) might be able to replace them. Don't feel pressured to do this all at once, just keep an eye out for alternatives and give them a try as time permits. The idea is not to keep all your eggs in one basket: what happens if Google decides one day to delete your account? You should ideally be able to brush that off and keep going.
If you're technically minded, a lot of those services can be self hosted on a cheap VPS. Granted means you're now trusting your VPS provider, but there are ways to mitigate much of that risk and since you're in greater control, it's easy to spread out. This is a good place to start:
https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
For email, I personally use a privacy-conscious provider, because I find self-hosting email is more complicated than I care to keep up with. I'm using Fastmail and have been pretty happy with them so far. It helps that they're not ad-supported, and their entire pitch is built on that trust, so I feel that they're a bit less likely to violate it; the PR backlash would ruin them. To each their own though.
And of course... some of the big services are genuinely useful! Even though I've reduced my reliance on Google, I still have that old account for the small handful of places where it's needed (rare) or where I personally find that it's the best choice on the market (Maps and Docs) which makes the risk worth it for some of my tasks. Just because I use their services sometimes though doesn't mean they're the only option; by this point I've got an alternative lined up for everything on my list.
Each task is independent, and each risk its own. Take the time, do the research, and learn to make your own informed decisions. You'll be glad you did.
The implicit value judgment of the US as necessarily superior has the opposite effect of what you probably intended.
It means you don’t let your guard down and don’t give that service anything more than you need to make it work.
What I’m saying is to never give Google or FB something and assume they would always be on your side. Assume the worst even if you continue to use their services.
Was it all because of money? Wouldn't they (the companies and their executives) have faced consequences if they turned down an "offer" by the Nazi government?
You're generally right but I don't think bringing Nazis into this discussion is a good idea.
a more cogent rebuttal is to point out that US companies like IBM didn't really need to do business with Nazi Germany for their survival.
I trust Google to not be generally evil, but when they still do something evil or with bad consequence we should still hold them (and any other capitalist behemoth) accountable.
Actually, there is a lot of censorship going on to appease the US government [0]
I wish there was a free source for this, but for whatever reason, it's really hard to find one for that particular documentary.
Which is all the more annoying considering that my payments for German public broadcasting actually financed the production of it.
But that documentary made me question my understanding of the Internet and had me realize how much of our "reality" is nowadays mostly perceived and shaped through social media. If it doesn't exist on social media, it might as well never have happened.
To give one of the worst examples: Pictures of "enhanced interrogations", performed by US soldiers on "terrorist suspects", are being deleted from social media with the reasoning "This is a known torture method by ISIS, deleted for being terrorist propaganda" because these Phillipino moderators, many just young students, often completely lack any real context or understanding of what they see.
In practice... maybe. In theory, it's still there in their Code of Conduct, right at the bottom.
I'd add "at this moment"
How should I trust that they won't "sell" my personal data to a government paying the most for that? How should I trust such an entity which makes the government happy, not the people? Are we really just the product sold to the people who have power?
It's hard to avoid Google totally as many of the emails I send are stored later on Google's servers, even if I don't send it from a Google account.
"Don't be evil" should rather be changed to "Don't be evil (whatever makes money is fine)".
At the same time China switched off the corruption AI, the rumor says that because it was too efficient in tracking the officials. If Google supports such a system, what would be next? Covering for selling children?
On the other hand, when Nazis were making the death camps, many companies happily provided lots of help, all for money. Seems like for too many stakeholders the money is the only thing that matters, not the people. Even if this is behind "don't be evil" faded unreadable flag.
I'm not living in the USA, should I assume that Google will work with my government to do evil against me?