This reminds me of when sports fans say things like, those odds are meaningless, they’re just set by bookies to get action.

True from a naively pedantic POV, but also ignores that betting odds happen to end up efficient also. Like saying shopkeeps set prices to drum up business and aren’t subject to the principles of supply and demand.

Google is an advertising company, but as part of its strategic goals it develops a high quality email client that beat out competitors on its own. I bet you the Gmail team is full of brilliant people who don’t give a shit about advertising and just want to make an awesome email client and spend night and day thinking about just that.

It doesn't matter what brilliant ground level people want if they don't get to do anything about it because of pressure from management.

I have seen this first-hand. I bet you have too. A brilliant user friendly idea stays at the bottom of the product log, as middle and upper management product asks get piled on top of it, pushing it deeper and deeper.

Sure, I guess you could donate the small amount of free time you get to your employer and do it after work, but I can't think of anything more demotivating than working for free for a company with revenue in the hundreds of millions.

This may be true, but follow the money. The facts of their business plan are a simple matter of public record. Users are the product and their customers are advertisers. As a company, they exist to service advertisers. Everything else is just noise. Sure, they have some incredibly talented engineers trying to create good stuff. None of that matters. The focus of the company remains the same. As potential users, we must choose to support that business model or not.

As long as someone understands the Faustian bargain and enters into it willingly, no problem. The difficulty is that it is unlikely most users really understand the details of the deal they are entering. "Hey, cool, free email." That's about the end of the thought process for most users. Google's approach is brilliant in its simplicity. "Free" stuff.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, but: I bet you the arms industry is full of brilliant people as well, but developing systems that are designed to kill people is still wrong.

> I bet you the Gmail team is full of brilliant people who don’t give a shit about advertising

I mean they better give a shit about advertising because it’s what lets them have a job at Google.

I think all of this is moot, because several big companies that have a business model arising from direct transactions with end users ... are also routinely losing sight of their obligation to end users. Did anybody want Windows 8 tablet UI on their desktop? Did anybody say, you know, this Macbook is great, but it'd be even better if it no longer launched my 32-bit software, and please make it phone home for everything I do?

I think this story is better told more simply, that when a company gets big it becomes arrogant, bad at social awareness and serving anybody. I'm sure you can find advertisers or would-be beneficiaries of what you call "data theft" that are fed up with Google breaking their stuff too.

Thing is, the value proposition proposed by "the cloud", whomever that may be (MS/Google/Apple et al), is quite the temptation.

Seriously, I am slowly and surely de-googling, such as storing all data locally (if I need offsite, I use encrypted backups). My calendar now uses caldav on a raspberry pi, my home network uses ethernet for fast data flow to a portable drive and I am using a web browser for many applications such as email; I use noscript and nextdns to selectively control my browsing experience. SSH is powering everything, including being able to access the device from any client connected to the network and if I wanted, from the internet as well (which can be quite useful, needs to be done sensibly however).

It's possible, but it does require effort, staying power (when installing a python package doesn't quite work because python 2/3 still...sigh) and is, quite simply, not something the average home user cares about.

Do they care an enforcement agent can access your documents via a warrant? or your metadata? or access your 'social circle' or profile you? Honestly, not really. But my threat model is that Google can and will use their AI army against you, and if you are unfortunate enough to get caught by them, there's little regards to you as an individual.

I can't risk my data being in a service with such little regard to humans, it's not acceptable and frankly, hosting everything myself is safer, more rewarding from a learning experience (such as how linux works and certain design decisions that are both good/bad and can be frustrating).

go de-google, it's a worthwhile venture.

[P.S: in a previous life I was vastly pro google. I used location history for years, google pay, play store, play games, stored youtube history and the whole works. Thanks to Snowden and forums like reddit/hackernews, I learnt that this was foolish. Giving up my data, for free, in return for little value back (why give them my financial information, for what? Google Pay is no different to my contactless card and that goes to bank directly). Cutting all these data flows was refreshing, and is part of the plan to delete or make my account dormant altogether. I am vastly more pro-privacy and take strict measures to reduce my digital footprint, which is entirely possible but requires additional effort, where the temptation of letting the "nice guy" handle all the work is always there. Paying in cash is still a thing and leaves less of a trace to 'you' as a person than digital]

The only main Google service I still used was Gmail (and occasionally search when DDG doesn't return something immediately useful). I'd seen comments about Fastmail over the years, but moving seemed like it would be a hassle.

With more at home pandemic time I decided to just do it and have been super impressed. The Fastmail docs are really good, setting up DNS to use my custom domain had explicit steps and pictures for my specific provider (gandi.net) along with a ton of others.

They have super easy to setup import from Gmail to get things over initially and to keep things coming as you convert accounts.

They have really good instructions for all IMAP clients and it's been painless to set those up.

I did have to spend a day going through every account in 1Password and changing emails, but the super simple aliases you can setup in Fastmail make this great. I have a bunch of different ones for different types of sites (some very specific, some general catch-alls) on my domain which I can now blacklist in the future if I need to.

The main issue is that you realize a lot of sites are just terrible, many don't let you change your email at all and require contacting support. Some don't even let you change after contacting support (postmates just says to 'create a new account under your new email and abandon the old one').

In general though I'm happy I did it and the Fastmail site has been pretty impressive. I like paying for software I think is high quality and valuable (where the business and customer have aligned incentives).

There's a fairly general way to do mail import that works fine with Fastmail, and might be more flexible if you would like to combine the import with reorganization your mail folders. This assumes both providers support IMAP.

1. Set up both providers on an IMAP client that supports multiple simultaneous accounts.

2. Copy messages from the old provider to the new by simply selecting them in the old provider's folders in your IMAP client and dragging them to wherever you want them in the new provider's folders.

As long as you pick an IMAP client that supports copying between IMAP servers, this should do it. I used either Apple Mail or Outlook for this. I don't remember which.

I went through a similar process during quarantine, but for bluehost.

I found the process of changing emails over meant I also was able to make Pass entries for them (another way I'm taking control of my data), and at the same time delete my account for websites I don't need anymore. It's been very cleansing.

What is a pass entry and what do you use it for?

Another thing I should mention is I wanted to try hey.com since it looks like they’re doing some interesting things (alerting users to tracking pixels to push back on clients like superhuman, whitelisting incoming mail, etc.) but they make it hard to get an invite so I gave up trying and paid for fastmail instead.

Not GP, but I’m assuming https://www.passwordstore.org/. Pass is a CLI password manager using Git and GPG to store and manage your passwords. I use it and sync passwords across devices through a git repo on self-hosted Gitea. Works really well if you’re comfortable with the CLI.

Also switched away from Google to Fastmail with my own domain about a year ago. Happy with the move, although Gmail still sees some activity because I never took the effort of migrating historic mails and all non-primary accounts.

Thank you, this is what I meant.

Makes sense - thanks, I thought it was some domain level thing.

Re: Tracking pixels - disable images by default in your email client. I get emails now from people like "we've noticed you haven't been opening our emails..."

Hey, i recently switched to Fastmail too! It's been surprisingly painless, even with importing mail, calendars and what not. Like you mention, the most time consuming part has been going through my accounts to update the email address to the new one.

What is a truly private European based alternative to Fastmail? Other than Proton ail.

I've started to switch all my email stuff to https://uberspace.de/en/

It's a kind of shared hosting with full ssh (non-root) access. They offer a pre-installed Roundcube Webmailer, but you can host your own one as well.

I run my own Roundcube with my own Domain and configured a maildrop instance to sort incoming mails.

So far it works as a charm. The hoster is based in Germany and I trust them to be privacy-aware.

I like

https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html

You pay based on traffic rather than per account/domain.

My wake up call came in May 2018 when I was starting a cannabis dispensary YouTube channel and they decided to terminate all content creators. But this also included the gmail account. Completely. Flipping the switch off just like that made me realize I’m an idiot for using Gmail as my “central” email address (I’ve navigated all my critical emails offline and now use my own email server.)

Not wanting to rely on Google - especially Gmail - as my central identity provider is why I switched to Fastmail. Sure it costs and the migration took a couple of days but it's been worth it.

> The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider.

This is all well and good, but they cornered the market for email, webapp, cloud storage and online translation products (and most importantly smartphones and web browsers). So until there is a viable alternative that the average person knows about, this will not change.

Generally speaking, the cornered the market through building good products that beat the competition. Do you remember free email providers prior to gmail? ISPs who you maintained a paying customer relationship with offered worse quotas and outdated web mails.

Yes, I remember plenty of free providers (as well as quality paid ones, and ISP ones, for example GMX and Ilse), including with IMAP/POP3, TLS/SSL support, anti spam features, anti virus features etc. Gmail was unique in three ways: it had a huge quota (for that time), and it offered a slick web interface. The other way Gmail was unique was the invite. If you gotta get invited to become part of the (secret) club, that makes it more special.

I remember postmaster.co.uk and hotmail.com, they were around way before Gmail, and were less invasive, but I got my own domain and I serve my own emails since 2000 so I got that covered. I like my emails like I like my newspaper: NOT to read them together with someone else. I do know that emails are clear text etc but it's not fun that I get an email about XYZ and then every website I visit shows me ads about XYZ.

I remember Hotmail

> they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider.

But they are: all of these are paid services Google offers. Presumably if you pay you get a different level/kind of support?

The last numbers I saw (2016-ish) put Advertising at 86% of Google's revenue (Or perhaps Alphabet's revenue? I'll admit that all that stuck in my head was this 86.)

If those numbers are still anywhere near close, Google is an advertising company with some interesting side hustles. Just because Harley Davidson sell t-shirts, doesn't mean you'd describe them as anything other than a motorcycle company.

A hilariously apt comparison - after looking up Harley's breakdown, it looks like merch was ~10.5% of the revenue brought in by motorcycles (not parts/maintenance) in 2015.

Granted, I'm not well-versed in looking at corporate financials, but the basic breakdown shown here [1] isn't terribly complex

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/harley-davidson-rep...

I didn't realise it was actually that much - it's just the only HD product that anyone I personally know has ever bought, which was why it came to mind.

You did inspire me to go look up actual numbers for google though. Looking at FY Q4 - https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...

If I'm reading the first table correctly, the number for "google advertising" is the sum of all the lines above it, so that's the number I'll take. If we compare that against the bottom line, we get 82.3% for Q4, or 83.2% for FY19.

So either it's improving (from the viewpoint of someone with a distaste of the ad industry, at least), or I mis-remembered 2016's 86% - either way I can update or correct my claim.

Lol. You get different support yes, but it’s equally as shitty if not more so.

I’ve been an enterprise customer of Googles services. When you have a problem simply finding the link, to the obscure dashboard login, to post an issue may take hours. I’m not even joking. Like Google is built to prevent you from using it discover useful support pages with contact information. “Account Executives” otherwise known as sales people, provide zero support after the contract is signed and I mean zero.

Once you write in, you wait, and hope. It’s kind of like filing a radar with Apple but a bit shittier because you have still idiotic, naive, hope you’ll get a reply or help.

If you ever do get a reply it’s likely a bot. If you ever have to disagree chances are it won’t be seen or acknowledged. Google is by far the worst service provider on the planet if you ever have an issue.

Developers who publish Chrome Extensions also pay for them. I paid $5 initial fee twice for publishing Kozmos extension. In return, I can't even see a contact information to reach out about a bad review made.

are you suggesting that if you paid, then they would not trade in your data?

I'd go further and suggest that some of those services don't trade in your data even at the free tier.

I guess you might be right. For example, here is a semi-official answer on how Google makes money out of Google Docs:

https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-Docs-and-Drive-generate-an...

It's not unlikely that in this case they use the more traditional business model of having the free tier do the marketing for the premium option.

The point of that statement was not to say that they don't provide those services at all, the point was that providing those services aren't their "thing". There is not a paid tier of any google product that will stop them from spying on you. Any payment you make is just to subsidize their spying so they get your data at little or no cost to themselves. If you are paying for google services you are not only giving them your data, you are paying for the privilege.

Google is a provider of all those things. Advertising is the biggest revenue line and supports free access (to products that are still best in class) but they also sell paid versions to both consumers and businesses.

Bureaucracy and customer support problems with large companies is not a new or unique to Google.

Yup, take a look at their financial statements. I haven't done it in the last few years, but for most of their existence advertising revenue has been >95% of their total revenue.

Everything else is a loss-leader or a rounding error.

> I'm sure you will get a real human employee if you are interested in buying ads from them.

That’s a fact. Speaking from personal experience, Google Ads/Admob seem to be the only services where human support exists.

We had a problem at work with receipts and support request replies to all our customers on a certain popular free email provider that also had a big ad business (but was not Google or Microsoft...) getting filtered out as spam. We'd contact them, and they'd say they would fix it, and in a few days the mail would start going through--for maybe a month then it would go back to getting blocked as spam.

Word of this got to our guy who handled ad buying. He called our ad rep with them, and asked pointedly "why the fuck am I spending $X thousand dollars a month to buy ads from you to get new customers, and then you are blocking those new customers from getting their receipts and support replies???".

The ad rep put our guy on hold for a minute, then came back and said he had their head of IT on conference. He asked the head of IT that question. The head of IT put us all on hold for a couple minutes, then came back with a couple engineers who worked on their email system on the line, and told them to whitelist us so that nothing of ours could be blocked as spam, and promised it would be done in something like half an hour.

It was, and we never had a problem there again.

This is why I have slowly de-googled the last year. Finally switched away from Gmail after 15 years. I've removed pretty much all Google from my life except some searching at times.

If only the experience was good on the ads buying side with Google, it is not.

They lost their way but keep riding their initial wave.

> They use their products to steal your information.

They aren’t stealing from me. I get to watch YouTube videos, store my files in Drive, and use gmail — all things that I like quite a lot. Yes there are alternatives to gmail and Drive, none of which are good enough for the hassle of switching. There is no YouTube alternative.

A lot of people aren't aware of the data collection. In those cases I think calling it stealing is fair.

Why exactly? You’re not getting a better deal on milk if you understand the economics and logistics of the dairy industry.

Sure but people understand the basic transaction (give money -> get milk). If on the other hand they gave you free milk but tracked your milk usage without telling you, I'd argue that's a non-consensual transaction and falls under stealing (roughly).

What about if someone gives you a free lunch but doesn’t tell you that they’re going to film you eating? Is that stealing?

> What about if someone gives you a free lunch but doesn’t tell you that they’re going to film you eating? Is that stealing?

More sinister than actually, "film you taking a shit and then sell it". As perverse as it sounds, but you won't even know it.

> film you taking a shit and then sell it

I actually got rejected from YC Summer 2019 with this idea. Demo Day would’ve been one to remember.