You’re probably aware of the paper on the lack of viewpoint diversity at Google, which James Damore, a now ex-Google employee, wrote. James Damore highlighted the two class system at Google, according to which minorities are good, and everyone else is bad. In the tech sector, interestingly, Asians are not a minority. Of course, I’m talking about “real” Asians not the “Asian” label the BBC pulls out of a hat whenever a muzzy mows down a bunch of whiteys. Damore lamented that diversity of opinion doesn’t exist at Google, and showed that Google pushes a heavily unscientific agenda. He was promptly fired for stating scientific facts. It was a rather shocking witch hunt.
I have been quite skeptical of Google ever since I spoke to an employee years ago. Incidentally, he’s a friend of mine, but we haven’t been talking much for quite some time. I certainly noticed a distinct shift to the left with him after he returned from the on-boarding event in Mountain View. Anyway, I raised the concern that I witnessed preferential treatment of minority applicants. Concretely, I knew of cases where Google recruiters reached out to women in STEM fields who had almost completely barren LinkedIn profiles and who got fast-tracked through the hiring process. If you’re a woman, it’s apparently enough to mention on your LinkedIn profile that you’re studying STEM, university, degree subject, and date of graduation — and nothing else. They’ll eagerly reach out to you then. No, those women were not academic superstars, quite the contrary. That Googler claimed that it was impossible that there is a bias in hiring because every hiring decision goes through a committee. My suggestion that the committee may simply apply different standards to different applicants was one he dismissed outright, somewhat angrily, as an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory because that was “impossible”, and that was the end of that conversation for him. I didn’t quite buy that argument, though.
Well, that was a few years ago. Since then, I have been witnessing an ever-greater ideological shift happening. You’ve probably been reading stories of how Google manipulates search results to push a liberal agenda. More recently, there has been a much more overt push towards “diversity”. For instance, Google subsidiary YouTube has been pushing leftist propaganda hard. One overzealous employee the other day even banned Jordan Peterson from YouTube and Gmail and every other service he had been using, but that got restored quickly. Peterson is apparently too famous to be pushed around. Well, other people aren’t. I just read about a professor of statistics who got his Google account revoked for reasons unknown. There was nothing in his public persona that could cause any offense.
Google is a leftist corporation gone mad. If you are using their services, you may want to consider switching. Here is what you can do:
1) Get a backup of all your data on Google via Google Takeout.
2) Switch to a different search engine; I use DuckDuckGo.
3) If you use Google Chrome, drop it. Across my various machines I use Safari (OSX), Firefox, and Brave. Brave is particularly interesting as it blocks trackers and ads by default. It’s currently my main browser.
4) If you use GMail, get a different email address. I trust Russian companies more than I trust leftist US tech behemoths. If you think similarly, then get an account on Yandex. Another good alternative is ProtonMail, which is based in Switzerland. Unfortunately, there are some limitations on free accounts. In order to make switching easier, forward your GMail email address to your news one and successively change the email address of every account you have on the web.
5) I haven’t found a good solution for phones yet. I’m not a huge fan of Apple either, seeing what their CEO Tim Cuck is doing, like fundraising for the hate group Southern Poverty Law Center, so I’m not sure I can recommend using an iPhone. To be honest, I barely use my phone anyway, so for the time being, I’ll keep my Android.
In case some of you are wondering, yes my move from Google’s Blogger platform to a self-hosted WordPress site was partly motivated by my growing skepticism regarding Google.
The very first thing I did a couple of days ago was to change my secondary browsers to DuckDuckGo.
I already had bing as my default on my main computer/main browser since 2 years ago. This is because I got pissed off at Google for promoting feminist causes back then on the front page.
The scariest thing was that google seemed to double down. Censorship drives on google-related mediums have INCREASED since the damore incident.
The part that truly freaked me out is just as I was browsing around and noticing google is doubling down, I got a notification that Hunter Avallone has a new video… It got deleted.
He reuploaded it, so I went to see it… AND I WAS MET WITH A WARNING… Youtube is warning me about this video… And asks me to confirm if I really really really want to watch it.
Here is his video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NCnMVy_PgU
This is the last uploaded version, hasn’t been deleted yet. Previous uploads were deleted.
It’s about the barcelona attacks. Apparently talking about jihad and terrorist attacks is “Fake news” that needs to be censored.
All of this feels like a bad dream really.
Thanks a lot for this sound plan of action, Sleazy!
You’re very welcome!
Good move to get off blogger in case they shut your blog down!
How about hosting providers…I hear of sites maybe getting shut down…so much for “net neutrality”.
That’s why powerful adversaries of the US all encouraged, supported, monitored, controlled and protected their own domestic media companies. In Russia, think of Vkontakte instead of Facebook. In China, I am referring to Baidu instead of Google.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group? While they have been legitimately criticized for being quick to hit the “racist” or “Islamophobe” buttons, that does not really make them a bona fide hate group. This is sort of comparable with claiming that all left wing people support pedophilia.
I use “hate group” as liberally as they do.
Google is an advertising company, it makes its money off selling your info. Also look at pale moon for browser
I didn’t know about Pale Moon. Sadly, it is not available for macOS.
DuckduckGo has been my main browser for quite some time. 9 out of 10 times it finds what i need, but for some more obscure topics I sometimes have to revert to the big G.
I know of protonmail, I also heard german-based Tutanota is good. Apparently your inbox is encrypted in a way that even they cannot access. When ordered by a judge to turn over someones emails, all they could hand them is the encrypted data.
If you want to make it harder for companies (and hackers) to track you and spy on you, there are plenty of tools to aid you. Look up NoScript, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, HttpsEverywhere, etc…
I use a combination of these, and I am seriously considering a VPN
“Apparently your inbox is encrypted in a way that even they cannot access. ”
That’s usually not very trustworthy.
Just about as trusworthy as gatehub.net claiming they don’t own the secret keys to your cryptowallet.
Unfortunately with e-mail you can’t really go “cold wallet” style (yet?).
Yeah, I dont fully trust anyone on these matters. Still, if they can access it, they deliberately refused to comply with a court order and that counts for something.
On a related note, regarding VPNs, I had considered going on TOR, but I have a couple worries about it. One is that it slows down your navigation. Another that it may put you in the crosshairs of the NSA and other agencies.
Some of the nodes in TOR are run by servers well beyond the usual capabilities of activists and private individuals, which makes me suspicious as to who is running them and why…
Isn’t the NSA heavily involved in Tor? Read this, for instance:
https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/
Tor was initially made by the NSA to help americanized activists in bad countries spread their massage without fearing incrimination. However, it now has become the biggest problem to the government in the cyberspace especially out of everything they themselves have created. I do agree with Yarara that the exit nodes can be hosted by people with nefarious intentions however, they are only able to see what you do online not who you are. Among millions of Tor users, it is hard if not impossible to figure out who is doing what with current technology.
I use lineageOS on my Android device and I just noticed something interesting. I was reading the changelogs and noticed they’ve changed the default searchengine to be DuckDuckGo.
Don’t think it’s a coincidence.
BTW highly recommended OS for anyone using an Android device.
Thanks for sharing! I didn’t know about lineageOS. It is still Android-based, but it’s not bundled with Google apps, which you can’t uninstall.
For android, I also recommend installing custom ROMs.
There are plenty of it actually.
I am also on lineageOS right now.
Brave browser is available for Android.
This 4chan originated wiki gives great tips on privacy:
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Anonymizing_yourself
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/List_of_recommended_Android_software
I am very very surprised that you didn’t mention Tor (stands for The Onion Router). (Both the macOS and Win-“Shit”-dows versions) https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
(I don’t recommend downloading from that link and instead, type into DuckDuckGo and then download)
Proton Mail is great also but you mentioned it already.
As for a phone, its better to use a iPhone but a older one (6S perhaps) at that.
By the way, Brave can be very bad for your privacy as it has the ability to put on its own ads after blocking ads normally found of websites.
Brave blocks trackers and ads. For privacy, trackers are the bigger issue.
Oh no it isn’t. Lets just say even activists fighting against in dictatorships use Tor and not Brave. Brave is supposed to introduce a inbuilt Tor feature though.
Brilliant post, fabulous comments! Thanks.
As I am not very tech savvy I was wondering what measurements I could take in order to keep using my personal business email. Like info@business.com. I am currently using G-Suite.
Also, what do guys suggest for cloud storage? I am currently using a Swiss cloud storage provider to store personal data.
Is that domain registered with Google? If that’s the case, you need to transfer it to a different registrar.
I don’t have much data to store, so I’m fine with the 5 GB Apple provides for free. Note that I’m a lot less concerned with Apple, or even Microsoft, than Google and Facebook because the latter two much more rely on customer data to generate revenue. Microsoft survives based on sluggish corporations that don’t dare to move to Linux, an Apple largely makes money off hardware.
Have you heard of something called plausible deniability?
The way it applies in this context is you have to do a few things on the open so that you can pretend to the government that is all you do online.
By the way, cloud storage is inherently risky. There is nothing stopping that.
But Sleazy…women are qualified and of merit…I mean there’s this book talking about it here: http://amzn.to/2vEsRyG
/s
When you see that book, you also get other “recommended” books…and to me, I see hamstering…for example there are forthcoming books from Ellen Pao (ousted at Reddit…claimed sexual harassment but she’s so ugly, i can’t imagine that…)…and of course Hilary Clinton has a book coming out…
The title of that book made me chuckle. Thanks for sharing!
LOL one of the recommended books was ‘Sasha Savvy Loves to Code’ featuring a black woman on the cover. Yea, okay. As if there needs to be gender/racial specific how to guides in these fields anyway.