Author Topic: Eradicating Google from my online life  (Read 3069 times)

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Online ataradov

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #25 on: November 12, 2023, 07:41:48 pm »
@ataradov -- last time you checked, did you run an oligarch empire anywhere?  :D
If I did, I'd like to know. May be I don't have to go to work on Monday.

The only things I can see them considering as "irregularities" would be use of VPN for registration and the name on the credit card is my full legal name Alexander vs preferred name Alex on the account. 

But I don't see why any of this would be a problem. VPNs are common and in many cases unavoidable. And if payment method is an issue, they could have told me and I would have used PayPal or something.

I don't mind providing any supporting info they need, I just don't want to be in a position where I try to register account over and over trying to guess what they want. Which itself could be flagged.

It is also too bad that you have to provide all the info at the registration time, so there is no way to solve one issue at a time. It would be fine if they allowed me to have an account and have a look at the control panel, but ask for a payment method before adding any service that costs money.
« Last Edit: November 12, 2023, 07:48:24 pm by ataradov »
Alex
 
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Online SiliconWizard

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #26 on: November 12, 2023, 09:25:21 pm »
Anyway, you can't completely eradicate Google from your life. Resistance is futile.
 

Offline Halcyon

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #27 on: November 12, 2023, 10:44:39 pm »
I often hear people wanting to distance themselves from Google because of tracking, advertising etc... etc... But one thing to keep in mind: The free Google services (e.g.: Gmail) are a completely different beast to Google Workspace even though they might look the same on the surface.

If you love the features you get with Google but want granular control of your information, then your own domain paired with Google Workspace is the way to go. Everything can be finely tuned, even down to location history being completely disabled if that's what you want. You can enable/disable individual Google services so the junk you don't use won't even run if you try.

Running your own mail server these days is a whole world of hurt and administration that even some of the more hardcore sysadmins tend to distance themselves from and I have to say, Google's spam/phishing filtering is probably among the best in the world.
« Last Edit: November 12, 2023, 10:46:11 pm by Halcyon »
 

Online ataradov

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #28 on: November 12, 2023, 10:48:09 pm »
A common complaint that I hear from Workspace users us that it is not at feature parity with the regular free service. I don't expect most people to care, but still something to keep in mind. All the new features (like AI, new UIs) lag in Workspace sometimes by months, sometimes don't appear at all.
Alex
 

Offline abeyer

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #29 on: November 12, 2023, 10:57:55 pm »
The only things I can see them considering as "irregularities" would be use of VPN for registration

That's almost certainly it. Many "high risk" payment processing scenarios have all but banned VPN traffic (though they won't tell you this)... if you're a consumer but your traffic doesn't originate from a consumer ISP's network you'll be flagged as fraud.
 

Offline Halcyon

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #30 on: November 12, 2023, 11:44:13 pm »
A common complaint that I hear from Workspace users us that it is not at feature parity with the regular free service. I don't expect most people to care, but still something to keep in mind. All the new features (like AI, new UIs) lag in Workspace sometimes by months, sometimes don't appear at all.

Yep, that's true. However it's not something I've come across personally. Just about all the consumer features are there. I don't think I'm missing out on anything. I'd say the added features you do get in Workspace, outweigh anything that's missing.
 

Offline zilp

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Re: Eradicating Google from my online life
« Reply #31 on: November 13, 2023, 03:31:13 am »
I often hear people wanting to distance themselves from Google because of tracking, advertising etc... etc... But one thing to keep in mind: The free Google services (e.g.: Gmail) are a completely different beast to Google Workspace even though they might look the same on the surface.

But ... the company is exactly the same!? So, if I mind *tracking* by them, why would I feed all my data into them just because they claim they don't track me?

If you love the features you get with Google but want granular control of your information,

How would I know that I have control of my information?

Running your own mail server these days is a whole world of hurt and administration that even some of the more hardcore sysadmins tend to distance themselves from and I have to say,

That isn't my experience.

Google's spam/phishing filtering is probably among the best in the world.

Is it really? Given that part of the reason why running your own mail server supposedly is so difficult is claimed to be deliverability to gmail, I would think that that indicates a terrible spam filter? I mean, a spam filter that has a high rate of false positives doesn't sound like a good spam filter to me ... and if the way to circumvent it is to become a customer of the company that operates that filter, that smells like anti-competitive behaviour, which would be even more reason to not use them.
 


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