You send emails to Google and Apple email servers at least.

You may also be recorded by Assistant or Siri when visiting friends or relatives, or even just when their phones are near you.

You likely hit Google's cloud every day when visiting websites on its platform.

I didn't mean to say that I have had absolutely no interaction with any existing Apple or Google service or technology. I'm neither a fundamentalist nor a hermit.

Rather, whenever it is my choice, I prefer to select products and technologies that don't belong to Apple, Google or similar companies.

Sorry, I did a poor job of making my point.

@hkarthik implied that it's impossible to use technology and also boycott Apple and/or Google. I agree with them.

You seemed to disagree by saying that you do boycott Apple and Google.

The point I was trying to make is that you're part of their revenue stream even if you yourself don't have any consumer relationship with them. That's why they feel like a monopoly to so many of us and why we criticize them rather than leaving their ecosystem. We can't leave their ecosystem!

I can see your point now. Indeed they can feel inescapable.

One thing I try to do is to minimize how much revenue they get out of me. For example, I use uBlock Origin and uMatrix to block their ads and scripts, their cookies, Google Analytics, etcetera. I hope they are losing money on me, that'd make my day!

What mobile phone and which operating system for it do you use, if I may ask?

I use a $20 LG feature phone. I don't know what OS it runs, but it's not Android.

Ok, but then you've given up on an entire technology set. You haven't avoided Apple and Android, you've avoided the tech entirely.

I have avoided commercial smartphone products entirely, yes, and very much on purpose.

I have not avoided technology in general, not by a long shot.

The statement wasn't "you avoided technology", it was "you avoided the technology".

To be more clear: I have avoided the commercial use of smartphone technology as it exists today, because for me its drawbacks are unacceptable. So, I am not a user of that technology, but I do not oppose the basic principle of mobile, universal, cheap computing and communication.

Doesn't this website use firebase?

You're not a user in any meaningful way of every subcomponent of a product.

Maybe, but you're still indirectly supporting them.

How?

In any free/freemium product/service, your attention is your primary currency (your wallet and your participation in the network effect are secondary). Marketing to HN viewers happens when a funded company announces hiring.

How does that translate into support for google?

If you spend money or attention on a site that pays Google as a vendor, that is quite obviously indirect support of Google.

Perhaps we are just quibbling about which definition of the word "support"? In which case I agree that there is one definition of support in which you are right and another in which your parent is right.

That's about as much support for Google as if I bought a product from a storefront that's in a building owned by a landlord who supports a cause I don't agree with. First of all, I (as a consumer) would have no idea who owned that building, and secondly the link between my purchase and money flowing to that unsavory cause is so far removed that it's not even worth considering.

Go far enough down any business transaction and you'll find a cause you disagree with. If the tree you planted makes oxygen for your worst enemy, will you cut down the tree to spite them?

> as if I bought a product from a storefront that's in a building owned by a landlord who supports a cause I don't agree with.

There are plenty of people who would look at this situation, and do whatever they can to make sure they don't enable that person.

My understanding is that Firebase is free. However, even if it wasn't I still think the link is tenuous to the point of meaningless. Spending attention on HN does not make google any richer, it stretches the definition of the word "support" in a way that misses the point within the context of boycotting a company. If every HN reader quit the site today only a Firebase SRE would take notice, if every HN reader quit using Gmail it'd cost google a considerable amount of money.