It perplexes me that people are more worried about a foreign power with little direct interest in you and no meaningful control over your life having a small chunk of their data than the government they live under.
It isn't really surprising when those foreign powers are actively hostile not only to your country, but to fundamental moral principles you hold dear.
To be clear, it's definitely not at all better in any meaningful sense for Google/the US government to have your data. But sometimes it's about the principle of the thing.
I can understand it if you place a high degree in your own government to look out for your interests and distrust the foreign power.
However if you distrust your own government it makes little sense to put all your data eggs in their basket.
I don't understand where principles come into it. Privacy is about risk avoidance.
I think that it does well mostly because of the comments, not because of the content.
Sometimes I wonder how some random low quality article gets bumped up so fast, and then I think it's about keywords, but that doesn't explain the upvotes. Are people upvoting articles without reading both the article and the comments? I get the no-article part where you skip to the comments but if the comments shit on the article, why upvote?
Re:Google Alternatives
by 542354234235 on Friday December 11, 2020 @08:33AM
(#25385498)
> Are people upvoting articles without reading both the article and the comments
Absolutely. It is much less of an issue here than on, say, Reddit. But lots of people upvote posts because it sounds interesting, not because they have gone through it and determined it to be high quality.
I remember this tune during 90s and 00s with Microsoft, it was so cool back then...
* "Google search is malicious, send the same data to Russia with Yandex instead."
* Apparently Google Chrome is a search engine.
* "Google doesn’t care about users’ privacy that much. It collects your data and uses it for their own purposes." Might just be me, but this reads like a throwaway essay written by an 8th grader.
* The site uses Google Analytics.
Despite the clear lack of quality in this article, it seems like this type of post does well on HN simply because "Google == bad" is such low-hanging fruit.