Imagine having to live your life with this irrational paranoia that your email is so important that you make irrational decisions of making your email less secure(by trying to host it yourself), more hassle (setting personal email servers).
To what end? Unless you are in the top 20,000 or so people who are actively being snopped on, it's just a waste of life to spend so much time to de-google, de-openai, de-meta, de-microsoft your life.
But of course this is a highly unpopular opinion on HN, but I have yet to see a single instance of a person whose life dramatically changed because they hosted their own email server instead of just using gmail. (unless you sell those services to other paranoid people and make money)
You are really claiming that Google doesnt want your data? And claiming that big companies in general don't want your data? It's so absurd that i am not sure i understand your comment correctly.
It is an absolute 100% guarantee that Google wants your data
I think the person you're replying to is trying to make the point that people are generally OK with this, as long as it does not have an adverse impact on their personal lives. The hacker cloning the hard drive is likely to leverage this data to defraud or blackmail them, but Google et. al are not.
This is like the 'I have nothing to hide' argument against strict privacy measures. Individual bits of your information may not have much value. But the aggregate of all your information is something else. It may yield data that you don't expect it to contain. I can easily get your health, wealth, politics, relationship and even your exact address from it even if you never mention any of it. And the ways in which they can be used against you is also something you're unlikely to consider unless you're in a profession that does it - law enforcement, insurance companies, racial profilers, PR companies, lobbyists, ...
Another issue is that you are just worried about only your own data. But if Cambridge Analytica is any lesson, its that an entire section of a population can be targeted all at once using such data. And the outcome is no less disastrous than targeting individuals.
> They want some statistics. Not my personal information
I can guarantee you that's wrong - after the shenanigans they pulled to force me to register my CC and to prevent its deletion. But what's more pertinent here is that statistics is a sort of mathematical summary of a raw data. And that summary changes (into a different type of information) based on the statistical analysis you do on the raw data. I don't think you need an elaboration for this. But this is precisely the reason I believe that they will keep all your personal data in their raw form for as long as their resources permit.
> Maybe they want it for a good cause, who knows?
As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
That's hardly a corroboration of your assertion. Google is a targeted ad company who offers free and paid services as a honeypot for personal data. Numerous prior incidents prove that. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is imprudent at this stage.
Absolutely! We need those people and I'm thankful they exist. I'm only opposed to their smug, high-horse attitude that they are somehow better than others because they de-googled and make that as their identity.
Oh, BTW, when I ran my affiliate marketed website a few years ago, my highest conversion rate came from people who came from DuckDuckGo. These people are actually advertisers dream and fits a profile and target market like a T for certain products.
I think of it more of an aesthetic preference. While I use gmail today I don't negatively view people who choose to self host.
Some people are militant about editors, others are "discerning" (snobbish?) about operating systems or ONLY using free software. It takes all types and they help keep the world going.
It's like a high maintenance garden feature. It signals a few things about you: high technical capacity, unusual amounts of free time, unusual priorities.
When the panopticon eventually processes all if its collected data, and winds up scoring you as above some threshold of having the wrong opinions, or being associated with those who do, you may come to a different conclusion.
We're now very much living in the time when this kind of thing is likely to happen, it's no longer theory or paranoia anymore. Why would powers that be stop at snooping on 20k when we can now basically do it to everyone? I mean, look at the present news cycle and think for a second.
It's nice to feel like you have some semblance of control in your life, even if it's in a very small way. Everyone has to draw the line between security and convenience somewhere, but I still feel catharsis when I see someone taking a stand and doing the hard thing, even if I myself choose not to do that.
Oh thank god Google has stayed so principled under political pressure! Even with the threat of being broken up, they’ve been a rock. And rest easy—your Gmail definitely isn’t being quietly indexed and funneled into some RAG system to help certain friendly agencies flag “disloyal” citizens for... let’s say, enhanced oversight.
As for “Don’t be evil” disappearing from their core values? Totally normal. Just streamlining the brand, I’m sure.
And of course, I hardly know anyone who’s lost years of email, only to have Google’s famously responsive support team leap into action and do absolutely nothing to recover it.
You don't have to have paranoia or self-host, I think it's enough to just use a smaller email provider to try and keep some diversity in the ecosystem, so I use Fastmail instead of Google Apps (now Workspace or whatever) that I used to use.
Some people choose to have principles and live by them. Self-hosting email isn't really worth the hassle IMO, but switching to a smaller provider is (I moved to Fastmail).
Individually, yes, our email doesn't amount to much. But when you can aggregate it, feed it into an LLM, etc.
Kind of like how individually, our little lives and our circle of boring friends doesn't amount to much, but Facebook is one of the most profitable companies in history.
The flip side is that no one person can really do anything about it. If I delete my facebook account, so what? There would need to be aggregate and mass action--against which there are so many prisoner-dilemma-esque barriers that its never going to happen.
I mean, it's not that hard to "de-google, de-openai, de-meta, de-microsoft your life"
- Don't use gmail
- Don't use chatGPT
- Don't use facebook
- Don't use windows
That's pretty easy if you use a Mac, and I qualify for all of those just because I don't want to use any of the above. I also don't use Twitter, so bonus!
Not that my email is of any value to anyone other than myself, but just not liking any of the services above is sufficient...
Apple puts on a good face, and I will admit I think there are probably better than the rest. But they sill put you in a walled garden that can be a little difficult to step out of.
>Imagine having to live your life with this irrational paranoia that your email is so important that you make irrational decisions of making your email less secure(by trying to host it yourself), more hassle (setting personal email servers).
>To what end?
Because my business is my business and not that of some corporate entity for whom I am the product to be sold.
All the comments reacting with hate because they know, deep down, it’s true. They’re not the main character. Nobody cares about their hyper encrypted nix home server with the perfect firewall setup. And they’re certainly not getting those hours of their life back.
To what end? Unless you are in the top 20,000 or so people who are actively being snopped on, it's just a waste of life to spend so much time to de-google, de-openai, de-meta, de-microsoft your life.
But of course this is a highly unpopular opinion on HN, but I have yet to see a single instance of a person whose life dramatically changed because they hosted their own email server instead of just using gmail. (unless you sell those services to other paranoid people and make money)