5 ms·

Dear Google, it's not me. It's definitely you.

49 points by fuzz_junket 12y ago

waqf 12y ago
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSTwSFH40Q4J:https://www.stjohnkarp.net/dear-google/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSTwSFH...
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  I was looking precisely for that, thank you. :)
- untog 12y ago
  Oh the irony
  - sudorank 12y ago
    Oh dear, if ever there was an example of Googles reach.....
    - bhhaskin 12y ago
      I often wonder what would happen if one day google was just gone. I would imagine the internet would be in complete chaos.
      - leaveyou 12y ago
        nah, people would just google yahoo with bing.
      - libraryatnight 12y ago
        The people who don't know what the address bar on their browser is would be in some serious trouble. (Not being a smarty pants. As someone who works with a lot of computer illiterates I've become painfully aware that there's a large user-base who don't know you can get somewhere on the internet without Google)
      - LeoPanthera 12y ago
        Only very briefly. There are good alternatives for everything Google does. In some cases, the alternatives are better.
        swasheck 12y ago
        perhaps a list of these good alternatives is in order?
  - colmvp 12y ago
    It's not Google, it's you.
- cpbotha 12y ago
  Maybe he should have hosted his page on Google Sites?
opendais 12y ago
I'm curious why people don't pay for Google Apps. Its cheap enough and basically turns off the Ads and at least some of the data collection. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html "1.4 Ads. The default setting for the Services is one that does not allow Google to serve Ads. Customer may change this setting in the Admin Console which constitutes Customer's authorization for Google to serve Ads. If Customer enables the serving of Ads it may revert to the default setting at any time and Google will cease serving Ads."
- dublinben 12y ago
  If you're concerned about how much information and control Google has, why would you pay them for their email service?
- aenario 12y ago
  I remember reading that it does turns off the Ads and do absolutely nothing to data collection.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Well, nothing for analytics or the like. By why would they automagically scan your email and the like if they aren't serving ads? Personally, I don't care how much data anyone has on me as long as it isn't someone capable of putting me in prison. :P
    - guyzero 12y ago
      They scan email for spam detection and to auto-classify emails into categories and their "Important" flag.
      - opendais 12y ago
        I suppose. I think my lack of caring/thought about it is what set me up for such an obvious rebuttal. Thanks. :)
glogla 12y ago
> For those who want to take their lives into their own hands, hosting your own email is always an option. It’s difficult to set up, but it’s not that hard to maintain. Actually, sadly, my experience is the other way around. Setting up mail server is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work, and you always have to wonder whether this time the mail will arrive, or whether some server on the way is going to have a bad day and drop your email without telling anyone. And of course, since it's your mail, everyone assume you're the one at fault. At least, that's how it worked few years ago, but I don't think the situation got better. Some things only get worse.
- lazyant 12y ago
  exactly: easy to setup, a pain to maintain
- stormbrew 12y ago
  Yep. And one mistake can result in your server on blacklists it's not clear at all how to remove yourself for (sometimes the process is designed specifically for true bulk mailers and not small-fry "run your own email server" kinds of things). Eg., set up an alias that forwards to gmail and do your best to make sure spam doesn't get forwarded to gmail and put your entire server on their blacklist? Probably you didn't do good enough.
- opendais 12y ago
  Always https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html $20/year gets you decent email.
- __david__ 12y ago
  Meh, I don't find it difficult at all. I've run my own mailserver for years and years. I generally spend about 3(ish) man-days per year working on it. The only frustrating part is that I generally don't get to choose when those 3 days happen—most all time spent is putting out fires. But then again that's sysop life in general…
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
dbwat 12y ago
(long time lurker) Sigh. Another hyperbole-laden overwritten "Google was good. I think it's bad now. I will stop using it" on the HN frontage. Is there anything new left to say about the subject? Is it really that interesting that every such entry gets ddosd and cached copy is in order? I don't get it. Do new Google launches correlate with this phenomenon?
saucetenuto 12y ago
> ... there are the numerous stories of trans folks who were unceremoniously outed to their work colleagues [by Google's various service integrations]. Anybody know what the author's referring to here?
- opendais 12y ago
  http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-me-7000025416/ http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-me-7000025416/
  - saucetenuto 12y ago
    Hell of a story. Thanks.
kllrnohj 12y ago
> That is their top priority — they assuredly do not have your best interests at heart. Choo Choo! Here comes the BULLSHIT TRAIN. All aboard! For what it's worth I'm pretty sure the change was you, not Google. Google's business model hasn't changed. They are still an ad reseller, just like they always have been. They still don't sell your data, just like they never have. Automatic account merging still doesn't happen, just like it never did. Google didn't link your friends accounts together, your friend did. And if you for some reason really, really want a different account for youtube and gmail, Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that. And there's somewhat reasonable multi-user support to help you do exactly that. And chrome's multi-profile support allows for even stronger walls between accounts. In the particular case of youtube they even let you use a different identity for youtube from the rest of Google, your "gangstakilla999" friend just didn't choose that option when asked when he was merging accounts.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  That first sentence was entirely unnecessary and detracts from the rest of your post.
- euank 12y ago
  I like google, but your point that "different account for youtube and gmail, Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that" is false. It might be true in the general case, but Google did make a significant effort to require real names on Google+ (and by extension youtube / gmail). It didn't affect the large majority, but you can find some people it did affect. Google cared in some cases.
  - kllrnohj 12y ago
    > I like google, but your point that "different account for youtube and gmail, Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that" is false. I have way more than 1 Google account, and I've had no issues with it at all. What evidence do you have to support your claim that Google is not happy with people having multiple accounts? Because the variety of ways Google helps you have multiple accounts is pretty strong evidence they are OK with this. > Google did make a significant effort to require real names on Google+ (and by extension youtube / gmail). Your "by extension" is false. YouTube never had the real names push like G+/gmail did. My account with a real name has always and continues to show a completely different pseudonym on YouTube, which was one of the options Google provided.
saidajigumi 12y ago
I understand and sympathize with this lament, but I think Ben Thompson nails it in his recent article "Privacy Is Dead"[1]: There are other services that can’t even realistically choose between advertising and member-supported. Facebook is a great example: the utility of Facebook is directly correlated with how many people you know who are also using Facebook, and the only way to maximize that number is to make the service free, supported by advertising. Google is in a similar boat: the efficacy of search is in many ways tied to how many people are using search. Queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google improving its algorithm, and the more the better, which means making queries free. I'd like to emphasize that latter point, "queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google." Approaches like PageRank and tf-idf[2] are only part of the story. A really fascinating and vital point is that the search user activity itself is an amazingly valuable source of relevance data. E.g. one can build a matrix over (search term, number of clicks for URL) as a search index. This supplements the other algorithmic relevance factors, is driven directly by human feedback. Google employees have mentioned that they've worked on other aspects of relevance analysis based on user actions: it's possible to suss out situations such as: you clicked on a link, but clicked right back to the search results because that link sucked. Eventually you found a good result and it "stuck". So user activity itself is very powerful source of search relevance and having more users just makes it work better. In fact, it's a bit startling to realize you can, in theory, build a search index without any source document data based solely on which links were clicked the most. In practice, we need to seed relevance with the purely algorithmic factors then improve it with the feedback data. Given that, an incumbent search engine with a large user base has a big advantage over competitors: they own the base of user activity data. Google's advantage is not just the technology expertise that they've amassed over the years, but also the raw fact of its search market share leadership that any would-be competitor must overcome. [1] http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/ http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  "they own the base of user activity data" They don't necessarily OWN the base of user activity, if others figure out how to sniff it out: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...
marincounty 12y ago
I think they need to stop hiring such "clever" people? They crossed the line with me a longtime ago. They did one think I still can't figure out and this is true, or I am losing my mind. Somehow, they went into my pictures app on my Ipad, and took a picture of me out, and stuck it up on their Google plus profile? They didn't scrap it from Facebook either, I use a fake picture, or did they scrape it anywhere else. It was one of the few pictures I have of myself on my Ipad. If you requested Google blur your residence, Google just decided to invalidate your prior wishes, and you need to contact them again. Google--some of us paid attention to the McCarthy Era in high school--hold a fun luncheon and go over that period in history with all your clever, brilliant employees? I am waiting for DDG to get some real money and kick Google. And yes, you were Mila Kunis--now you're Kriss Jenner. "Your too controlling and I don't need that in my life now!" Yes, I finally saw Bruce stand up to her.
- Oletros 12y ago
  > They did one think I still can't figure out and this is true, or I am losing my mind. Somehow, they went into my pictures app on my Ipad, and took a picture of me out, and stuck it up on their Google plus profile? Still trying to grasp if this is serious or just a parody
  - MaysonL 12y ago
    I deleted my Google+ profile picture and yet it still shows up as me on Google image search, so I'm not so skeptical about it.
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
dear stjohnkarp.net, it's not me. It's definitely your database. you suck.
chris_wot 12y ago
Your database is down.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  And what's with all the diacritics in the text?
  - xentronium 12y ago
    I believe that's ligatures, not diacritics right there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature
    - chris_wot 12y ago
      It's incredibly distracting!
junto 12y ago
The one service i can't seem to replace is Google+ Photos, formerly known as Google Picasa Web Albums. I'm yet to find an alternative that has such a good UI and sharing features. My use case is sharing my family photos with my wider family. All photos are private. i'd like a self hosted option ideally. Any suggestions?
- snarfy 12y ago
  http://imgur.com http://imgur.com
- r00fus 12y ago
  The management/upload process leaves much to be desired, but we still host on Smugmug for sharing with FoF and kids classmates. More recently due to iOS being prevalent in our extended family net, we use PhotoStream more and more often - most folks have at least one iOS device in their household.
  - X-Istence 12y ago
    My family almost exclusively uses iMessages for communicating with each other, and we share pictures using iMessage or PhotoStreams. It's so simple, just works, and new photos can be added and are automatically synced.
r00fus 12y ago
I'm over Chrome. I don't use it at work [1], and consequently, not much at home either. Once Chrome the browser became the seed of Chrome the OS, the writing was on the wall - Google didn't feel it needed to prove anything anymore, innovation turned to stuff it wanted, not what users wanted. [1] Chrome, at least v25 and earlier, crashed parsing 10MB XML files - I have to test with much larger files all the time. At some point FF started to not suck, and recently it's got speed parity with Chrome for most actions on OSX. Not looking back.
whiddershins 12y ago
Vimeo is great, in response to the question near the end of the article.
dreamweapon 12y ago
What's with the ligatures on the 'ct' and 'st' pairs?
cheshire137 12y ago
Ugh that font. The "st" is so distracting.

49 points by fuzz_junket 12y ago

waqf 12y ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSTwSFH40Q4J:https://www.stjohnkarp.net/dear-google/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSTwSFH...

giancarlostoro 12y ago
I was looking precisely for that, thank you. :)
untog 12y ago
Oh the irony
- sudorank 12y ago
  Oh dear, if ever there was an example of Googles reach.....
  - bhhaskin 12y ago
    I often wonder what would happen if one day google was just gone. I would imagine the internet would be in complete chaos.
    - leaveyou 12y ago
      nah, people would just google yahoo with bing.
    - libraryatnight 12y ago
      The people who don't know what the address bar on their browser is would be in some serious trouble. (Not being a smarty pants. As someone who works with a lot of computer illiterates I've become painfully aware that there's a large user-base who don't know you can get somewhere on the internet without Google)
    - LeoPanthera 12y ago
      Only very briefly. There are good alternatives for everything Google does. In some cases, the alternatives are better.
      - swasheck 12y ago
        perhaps a list of these good alternatives is in order?
- colmvp 12y ago
  It's not Google, it's you.
cpbotha 12y ago
Maybe he should have hosted his page on Google Sites?

opendais 12y ago

I'm curious why people don't pay for Google Apps. Its cheap enough and basically turns off the Ads and at least some of the data collection. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html "1.4 Ads. The default setting for the Services is one that does not allow Google to serve Ads. Customer may change this setting in the Admin Console which constitutes Customer's authorization for Google to serve Ads. If Customer enables the serving of Ads it may revert to the default setting at any time and Google will cease serving Ads."

dublinben 12y ago
If you're concerned about how much information and control Google has, why would you pay them for their email service?
aenario 12y ago
I remember reading that it does turns off the Ads and do absolutely nothing to data collection.
- opendais 12y ago
  Well, nothing for analytics or the like. By why would they automagically scan your email and the like if they aren't serving ads? Personally, I don't care how much data anyone has on me as long as it isn't someone capable of putting me in prison. :P
  - guyzero 12y ago
    They scan email for spam detection and to auto-classify emails into categories and their "Important" flag.
    - opendais 12y ago
      I suppose. I think my lack of caring/thought about it is what set me up for such an obvious rebuttal. Thanks. :)

glogla 12y ago

> For those who want to take their lives into their own hands, hosting your own email is always an option. It’s difficult to set up, but it’s not that hard to maintain. Actually, sadly, my experience is the other way around. Setting up mail server is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work, and you always have to wonder whether this time the mail will arrive, or whether some server on the way is going to have a bad day and drop your email without telling anyone. And of course, since it's your mail, everyone assume you're the one at fault. At least, that's how it worked few years ago, but I don't think the situation got better. Some things only get worse.

lazyant 12y ago
exactly: easy to setup, a pain to maintain
stormbrew 12y ago
Yep. And one mistake can result in your server on blacklists it's not clear at all how to remove yourself for (sometimes the process is designed specifically for true bulk mailers and not small-fry "run your own email server" kinds of things). Eg., set up an alias that forwards to gmail and do your best to make sure spam doesn't get forwarded to gmail and put your entire server on their blacklist? Probably you didn't do good enough.
opendais 12y ago
Always https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html $20/year gets you decent email.
__david__ 12y ago
Meh, I don't find it difficult at all. I've run my own mailserver for years and years. I generally spend about 3(ish) man-days per year working on it. The only frustrating part is that I generally don't get to choose when those 3 days happen—most all time spent is putting out fires. But then again that's sysop life in general…
- VikingCoder 12y ago

dbwat 12y ago

(long time lurker) Sigh. Another hyperbole-laden overwritten "Google was good. I think it's bad now. I will stop using it" on the HN frontage. Is there anything new left to say about the subject? Is it really that interesting that every such entry gets ddosd and cached copy is in order? I don't get it. Do new Google launches correlate with this phenomenon?

saucetenuto 12y ago

> ... there are the numerous stories of trans folks who were unceremoniously outed to their work colleagues [by Google's various service integrations]. Anybody know what the author's referring to here?

opendais 12y ago
http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-me-7000025416/ http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-me-7000025416/
- saucetenuto 12y ago
  Hell of a story. Thanks.

kllrnohj 12y ago

> That is their top priority — they assuredly do not have your best interests at heart. Choo Choo! Here comes the BULLSHIT TRAIN. All aboard! For what it's worth I'm pretty sure the change was you, not Google. Google's business model hasn't changed. They are still an ad reseller, just like they always have been. They still don't sell your data, just like they never have. Automatic account merging still doesn't happen, just like it never did. Google didn't link your friends accounts together, your friend did. And if you for some reason really, really want a different account for youtube and gmail, Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that. And there's somewhat reasonable multi-user support to help you do exactly that. And chrome's multi-profile support allows for even stronger walls between accounts. In the particular case of youtube they even let you use a different identity for youtube from the rest of Google, your "gangstakilla999" friend just didn't choose that option when asked when he was merging accounts.

chris_wot 12y ago
That first sentence was entirely unnecessary and detracts from the rest of your post.
euank 12y ago
I like google, but your point that "different account for youtube and gmail, Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that" is false. It might be true in the general case, but Google did make a significant effort to require real names on Google+ (and by extension youtube / gmail). It didn't affect the large majority, but you can find some people it did affect. Google cared in some cases.
- kllrnohj 12y ago
  > I like google, but your point that "different account for youtube and gmail, Google is perfectly happy with you doing exactly that" is false. I have way more than 1 Google account, and I've had no issues with it at all. What evidence do you have to support your claim that Google is not happy with people having multiple accounts? Because the variety of ways Google helps you have multiple accounts is pretty strong evidence they are OK with this. > Google did make a significant effort to require real names on Google+ (and by extension youtube / gmail). Your "by extension" is false. YouTube never had the real names push like G+/gmail did. My account with a real name has always and continues to show a completely different pseudonym on YouTube, which was one of the options Google provided.

saidajigumi 12y ago

I understand and sympathize with this lament, but I think Ben Thompson nails it in his recent article "Privacy Is Dead"[1]: There are other services that can’t even realistically choose between advertising and member-supported. Facebook is a great example: the utility of Facebook is directly correlated with how many people you know who are also using Facebook, and the only way to maximize that number is to make the service free, supported by advertising. Google is in a similar boat: the efficacy of search is in many ways tied to how many people are using search. Queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google improving its algorithm, and the more the better, which means making queries free. I'd like to emphasize that latter point, "queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google." Approaches like PageRank and tf-idf[2] are only part of the story. A really fascinating and vital point is that the search user activity itself is an amazingly valuable source of relevance data. E.g. one can build a matrix over (search term, number of clicks for URL) as a search index. This supplements the other algorithmic relevance factors, is driven directly by human feedback. Google employees have mentioned that they've worked on other aspects of relevance analysis based on user actions: it's possible to suss out situations such as: you clicked on a link, but clicked right back to the search results because that link sucked. Eventually you found a good result and it "stuck". So user activity itself is very powerful source of search relevance and having more users just makes it work better. In fact, it's a bit startling to realize you can, in theory, build a search index without any source document data based solely on which links were clicked the most. In practice, we need to seed relevance with the purely algorithmic factors then improve it with the feedback data. Given that, an incumbent search engine with a large user base has a big advantage over competitors: they own the base of user activity data. Google's advantage is not just the technology expertise that they've amassed over the years, but also the raw fact of its search market share leadership that any would-be competitor must overcome. [1] http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/ http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

VikingCoder 12y ago
"they own the base of user activity data" They don't necessarily OWN the base of user activity, if others figure out how to sniff it out: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...

marincounty 12y ago

I think they need to stop hiring such "clever" people? They crossed the line with me a longtime ago. They did one think I still can't figure out and this is true, or I am losing my mind. Somehow, they went into my pictures app on my Ipad, and took a picture of me out, and stuck it up on their Google plus profile? They didn't scrap it from Facebook either, I use a fake picture, or did they scrape it anywhere else. It was one of the few pictures I have of myself on my Ipad. If you requested Google blur your residence, Google just decided to invalidate your prior wishes, and you need to contact them again. Google--some of us paid attention to the McCarthy Era in high school--hold a fun luncheon and go over that period in history with all your clever, brilliant employees? I am waiting for DDG to get some real money and kick Google. And yes, you were Mila Kunis--now you're Kriss Jenner. "Your too controlling and I don't need that in my life now!" Yes, I finally saw Bruce stand up to her.

Oletros 12y ago
> They did one think I still can't figure out and this is true, or I am losing my mind. Somehow, they went into my pictures app on my Ipad, and took a picture of me out, and stuck it up on their Google plus profile? Still trying to grasp if this is serious or just a parody
- MaysonL 12y ago
  I deleted my Google+ profile picture and yet it still shows up as me on Google image search, so I'm not so skeptical about it.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

dear stjohnkarp.net, it's not me. It's definitely your database. you suck.

chris_wot 12y ago

Your database is down.

chris_wot 12y ago
And what's with all the diacritics in the text?
- xentronium 12y ago
  I believe that's ligatures, not diacritics right there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature
  - chris_wot 12y ago
    It's incredibly distracting!

junto 12y ago

The one service i can't seem to replace is Google+ Photos, formerly known as Google Picasa Web Albums. I'm yet to find an alternative that has such a good UI and sharing features. My use case is sharing my family photos with my wider family. All photos are private. i'd like a self hosted option ideally. Any suggestions?

snarfy 12y ago
http://imgur.com http://imgur.com
r00fus 12y ago
The management/upload process leaves much to be desired, but we still host on Smugmug for sharing with FoF and kids classmates. More recently due to iOS being prevalent in our extended family net, we use PhotoStream more and more often - most folks have at least one iOS device in their household.
- X-Istence 12y ago
  My family almost exclusively uses iMessages for communicating with each other, and we share pictures using iMessage or PhotoStreams. It's so simple, just works, and new photos can be added and are automatically synced.

r00fus 12y ago

I'm over Chrome. I don't use it at work [1], and consequently, not much at home either. Once Chrome the browser became the seed of Chrome the OS, the writing was on the wall - Google didn't feel it needed to prove anything anymore, innovation turned to stuff it wanted, not what users wanted. [1] Chrome, at least v25 and earlier, crashed parsing 10MB XML files - I have to test with much larger files all the time. At some point FF started to not suck, and recently it's got speed parity with Chrome for most actions on OSX. Not looking back.

whiddershins 12y ago

Vimeo is great, in response to the question near the end of the article.

dreamweapon 12y ago

What's with the ligatures on the 'ct' and 'st' pairs?

cheshire137 12y ago

Ugh that font. The "st" is so distracting.