alt Hacker NewsI know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better.
I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.
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> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.
That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.
Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free".
Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register.
People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.
In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription.
At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)
I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage.
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."
I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.
Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.
Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.
As if these tech giants are an aberration? Any company filling their niche will be under the same pressures.
> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?
This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.
It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?
None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?
Alone from that list, it means.
No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.
Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.
It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples:
- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.
- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.
- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?
- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.
- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.
Other people are using them.
You are surrounded by people using them.
Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode.
And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.
Meta was easy - nothing of value is lost. Google and Amazon are a bit harder.
They are everywhere
>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products.
I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.
"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
[0] https://wordsunite.us/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8
[2] https://wordsunite.us/terms
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698