Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account.

Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment

It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.

But you can still reduce your exposure. Giving in to hopelessness seems suboptimal.

The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.

What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.

Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

his app has also Google, Apple logins and for first time I have seen, login with meta button.

https://app.wordsunite.us/

Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.

I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.

It really depends where the restaurant is located.

I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing.

Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?

My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.

I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.

A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.

I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.

You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight

I see what you're saying but I don't think that's the answer for everything, because people also pay for conveniences, like a Ring subscription so that Amazon stores footage in their cloud for you.

The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.

Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.

Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.

DuckDuckGo is free to use, and is proof that you can have privacy respecting search. They make their money like Google used to by selling rankings, not by having users log in so that they can be followed across all their devices.

People pay for things and are still spied on.

It's easy to say we should all start paying for things.

Most people don't have much of a disposable income.

>People need to start paying for things

...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.

<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>

And the problem with that is, all the money has been siphoned off by the people at the top.

That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).

We could

- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.

- enforce laws on the books

- Break up firms

Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.

Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.

I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.

> So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."

You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.

People before Facebook found themselves in exactly the same situation as you and managed to survive.

People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.

People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.

Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.

Where are you that Facebook (the network, not meta as a company) is still minimally relevant ? I haven’t logged in in about a decade.

Agreed.

That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.

I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.

Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."

My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.

For others', that might be an impossible task.

"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.

The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.

You can self host AI but speed and quality aren’t going to be as good as what companies can offer.

And the upfront cost will be quite high.