Being wary of Google is a luxury. They control much of the technology market, if not the Internet, in both width and depth. Not using Google isn't a practical alternative for most people. Essentially everyone who works at Google can get a different job though.

Here is the thing for me, I don't necessarily mind companies like Google doing business in China. But that isn't because I like the Chinese system, but because I believe there are other ways, like with regulation, you should stand up for your values.

Whenever express those views on Hacker News I get downvoted, or called a shill. I get lectured about how the large tech companies are doing the right thing and how cool open source projects like signal, tor and bitcoin is going to save the world. I have to read through all the rants about how China is just protectionist, authoritarian and stealing intellectual property.

This isn't like Microsoft who built a presence in China over time or Apple who has at least somewhat of a pretense for being in China because of manufacturing. Here is probably the best moment ever given, and there is ever going to be, for those people to show that this wasn't all defensive bullshit. And that when developers, engineers and hackers are actually given a choice where they can quit their job or cancel contracts they will do so for what they believe in.

So I guess let's see what happens.

> Being wary of Google is a luxury

At this point in time, not really. There are better alternatives on the market for most of Google's services and products.

Email: I think that most people with an Internet connection good enough to access GMail can afford to pay $4 / month for email and their own domain and there are multiple good alternatives available, like FastMail or ProtonMail.

In some parts of this world with high levels of poverty, $4 might be a lot, but in western countries $4 is the price of one coffee and people do pay a lot of money on food and beverages.

DuckDuckGo has been better for me lately after I deleted all of my search history from Google. It's weird, but Google is really bad without personalization. I wonder if they do it on purpose. DDG isn't the only choice. For EU users there's also Qwant, see: https://about.qwant.com/

YouTube is hard to replace for users, but for creators Vimeo.com is much better. There's also PeerTube (joinpeertube.org) and increased awareness that YouTube is not good for projects that do NOT want ads, see the story of Blender being blocked: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...

Google Drive is a piece of shit. The web interface is pretty good, however I've seen their desktop client ignore updates or corrupt data and I simply cannot trust it for anything. And I'm speaking both of Drive File Stream and their Backup and Sync consumer client. The comparison with Dropbox's desktop client is night and day. Also Microsoft's OneDrive is cheaper. And https://syncthing.net is free.

Google Docs is OK for collaboration on documents, however their search is piss poor (we've been using Evernote because it has better search, Dropbox Paper too has better search), which means that collaboration in Google Docs doesn't scale, being where documents go to die. Also I'm catching offers for Office 365 Personal for about $25 per year and that's a superior choice for personal use.

Google Maps is good, but their coverage isn't that great in Easter Europe where I've traveled and in Romania where I live. OpenStreetMaps is actually better here. Currently trying out Maps.me. Not great, there used to be a great app made by a Romanian company named Skobler, but got bought by Scout and then it stopped receiving updates. Some people get by with Apple's Maps and HERE WeGo (former Nokia) is OK. But yes, Google Maps sent me in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road in the woods, while traveling through Bulgaria.

Google Hangouts and Allo have never been popular and have plenty of alternatives. Zoom.us, Skype, Signal.

The only difficult move is from Android. I have an iPhone now, but it is more expensive and I don't like its restrictions. But if you're set on escaping Google, you could always install CyanogenMod on your phone without Google Play / Services and instead go with Amazon's App Store and / or with https://f-droid.org.

Except there is clear evidence that FastMail employees are able and willing to read through your personal emails, and they've become actively user-hostile in their support: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458

Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better alternatives than things like FastMail (and I'd argue Firefox, but that's for another thread).

Not sure what FastMail has to do with anything, that wasn't the point, but ...

I don't care if FastMail employees can read my email for support reasons. I actually expect FastMail employees to be able to read my email, since we aren't talking about end to end encryption. Unless end to end encryption is involved, then the stories of Google's encryption at rest are nothing more than bed time stories, since obviously their systems are not available to me for review.

And that's not what my privacy concerns are about for Google. I don't care about random Google employees, because that's not the biggest threat. The biggest threat is me and my family being profiled and I've seen evidence of this time and time again. It's also a big and real threat due to Google's size and reach.

FastMail is a better alternative first of all because FastMail is not Google, period. You may want security, but I want privacy and yes there's a difference.

I don't need a better reason than that, but if I ever discover that FastMail is a problem (which I doubt, since they are awesome), I'll pick the next email provider in line that's not Google.

At Google, the one time I'm aware of where a Gmail SRE read the mail of a woman he was interested in, he was detected, fired, and publicly called out officially by Google, which almost never happens in this industry and probably had permanent career consequences for him. They also locked things down further after this incident.

I'd be surprised if FastMail has that level of ability and willingness to detect and react to a rogue employee.

If the privacy threat you are concerned about is Google as a company allowing your data to be used in a way you're not happy with, such as profiling you can't sufficiently control, I can't argue with your logic beyond noting that they do offer lots of controls for most of the profiling they do. I similarly can't argue if you want to avoid providers within US jurisdiction.

But if your privacy threat model includes things like "an intelligence agency wants to access your data without a legal right to demand it," "a rogue employee is hoping to access your data without an approved business need," or "foreign state-sponsored actors might want to target you," Google is one of the most private places to put your data to combat those threats.

They have the resources to address those privacy attacks, and they do so. Of course your own operational security is also relevant for each of those privacy attack vectors, regardless of which third-party email provider you use.

(Disclosure: I worked for Google 2011-2015. I never worked on Gmail, and neither work nor speak for them now.)

Employee A reading email X does not scale. Google reading everyone's email with ever-better AI systems does scale, and is a much bigger threat to freedom, political or economical.

But employee A can search for a very specific thing, something that machine learning won't be able to do. So it does not need to scale if they want to target a single person.

Employee A has no clue which person to target. Nor does he know which emails to pay attention to. His search tools are primitive. His brain's processing power is limited. OTOH, Google's core business is scalable search.

> Employee A has no clue which person to target. Nor does he know which emails to pay attention to.

Yes, he does: he looks up the people he knows about.

A person reading your mail is a much more immediate, direct danger than your mails being slurped into the big data silo that can slowly and widely ruin society.

> that can slowly and widely ruin society.

There is nothing to say these "big data silos" will run "slowly." And even if they ran slowly, the impact they could have on your life would likely be far larger than the more immediate impact of an employee reading your email.

You don't need deep machine learning to write a simple script to fetch data from your servers.

If Google can read all Gmail users' emails, Fastmail can read all their users' emails.

I think maybe the point is that reading all your emails seems to be Google’s business model, while FastMail is a service provider that charges users for the service? Also, regarding “your data” being more secure with google... is more like Google is good at securing their main asset, which is Google’s data about you.

Google no longer uses Gmail data for targeting. No person or ai is reading your email from your grandmother, florist, or then confirmation that you bought paper towels on Amazon.

It seems likely there is significant auditing at FastMail for access. For example, at one time when I asked them to check on why an email wasn't displaying correctly in their client, they asked me to create a folder with a specific name, and put it in that folder[1]. This suggests they have a process to request access to content that logs what is requested, and only displays the content requested.

If you were, as in the tweet, to offer up specific subject lines, they would probably run a search that would only show the employee those subject lines, which you disclosed to them when you offered that information up to them. Not that they were logging into your account and scrolling through your inbox.

I don't consider employees of my mail service accessing my mail on my direct request to help me is a hostile act. I do consider automated reading of my email to profile me[2] on a mass scale to be a hostile act. I probably would not have my email at FastMail if I believed anyone working at FastMail had a vendetta against me, I suppose, but I know for a fact that quite a few Googlers dislike me. :P

[1] I will say I feel like the appropriate way to handle this, which I offered, was to forward them the email in question, since my account was not relevant to the issue.

[2] Note that while Gmail "doesn't use your email for advertising", it does build a Purchases database populated with data from your email in the Account Activity panel, which has literally no justification for existing if they aren't basing ads off of that. So there's a layer of obfuscation there: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases