Thread by @jensimmons

I’m glad we are finally having a conversation about how horrible Facebook’s spying operation is. Can we talk about Google’s yet? We’ve let Google collect all of our email for a decade. And for many of us, all of our work documents. Their bots read & store our corporate docs. Why?

And if you use Chrome, Google is watching everything you do online. If you use Android, they are collecting data history on literally everything you do — on and off line. Why do we opt into this? Because we like the UX of their their free software?

If you install Google Analytics on sites you build, you are helping Google assemble data profiles on people who visit your site. Because we like the charts?

We need to think twice. We need alternatives. Duck Duck Go. Fastmail. Gauges. Firefox. These help. We can try to escape.

For those of you asking about Gaug.es, it’s an alternative to Google Analytics. I switched all my sites to it. You pay for it. I’m hoping the data is not being mined or resold. It’s not as full featured, but it has everything I need. Allowed me to remove GA.

I also dropped GMail, and moved my personal domain email, calendar, etc to Fastmail.fm. I pay them, instead of them selling my data to their “real” customers. Has a lot of what GMail offered. Web interface. IMAP. Calendar invites, etc.

The hardest part is the peer pressure to use Google. Email. Meeting invites. GDocs. When other people use them, I end up having to use them. Especially for work. Especially Google Docs. I end up signed in when I don’t want to. And it’s tracking me again.

I’d love to see some kind of alternative to GDocs. Sadly, it’s not an open protocol like email, though, so there’s no way to not GDoc when other people are.

We are in this together. Have to opt out together.

Teams at Mozilla have been working on solving as many of these problems as we can with Firefox. It’s complicated. But you can opt in to tracking protection, private browsing, and more. Like this Facebook Container: blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebo…