Tell her; “no mom, if some 30 year old man was tracking me, reading my mail, texts and tracked my location you’d be getting ready to murder him. Why should I let gmail get away with the same shit?”

• Never defend. Always make a good attack.
• Never say privacy. Never get dragged into tech yapping. Always say control, power, scam and abuse.
• Never lead with gains. Human care most about loss. Always focus on loss.

Something like:

Watching big tech gape my inbox was never normal but, if you’re into that, I’m not judging you.

When Google bans their account ask them, is having no email normal?

my mental health was questioned so there’s that.

my explaination about surveillance capitalism and what possibilities corporations have to spy on us fell on deaf ears and raised concern. i got called “paranoid” and also “stupid”

Same here, while this was a few years back it’s still relevant. My girlfriends parents are helicopter parents and would have a back door into everything if they could. So the one day I noticed that her mother had said to me that she doesn’t mind us going to movies two weeks from then. This was only said between the two of us in a text. This was a good opportunity to switch her over to signal. She asked me if there is a way to check if she was in anything else so I had her change password and move over to a password manager instead of the paper notebook in her room that her mother probably looked through.

Only a week later her mother did look through that notebook at one point for passwords because because she openly asked for it one day “so she could check her school email for scholarship information”, didn’t ask for just the password, but the whole notebook. From what I remember my girlfriend had a conversation with her mother about privacy that would turn into an argument.

Moral of the story, even people you are told you are supposed to trust aren’t trustworthy.

• it you would have WhatsApp, we could keep in contact
• oh, come one, we have a Facebook Family group
• can’t you just share a Google calendar with me
• …

Parry and hit back. Ask her why it matters what you use if you can function with them as if you use google. Then return fire with your favorite reason not to use google. For me, I like to open the dev tools in Firefox, and show the head of any website. Let them choose. Find the line with google analytics, google tag service, or google ad sense. “Wow this website has nothing to do with google. Why is this here? To track you. Did you know that google can track your mouse? Even if you don’t click on anything? Or they can track you by installing fonts?” Etc. Etc. Scare the shit out of them and they’ll leave you alone. Hopefully you can slowly begin to convert them.

Huh? What difference does it make to them…?

Wait, thinking about it, is it because name at gmail is easier to remember for them? Because gmail is the “standard” in their minds?

I have found that even when people are conscious of the “technocratic & surveillance” state of the world, they still dont change their habits. Just like “this sucks” but they dont bother on looking for alternatives.

Even when I tell them about E2EE services, or the fediverse, they’re like “that sounds awesome”, but they never try it. Once I had a friend try Pixelfed and they loved it! I was so happy hehe but it goes stale after a few days, since other friends didnt switch. But were both telling others to switch sometimes.

My family uses Life360 for safety or emergencies, and I managed to switch them over to Paralino. It was all working seamlessly until they suddenly decided they wanted to go back, for whatever reason. I don’t know what it was, they wouldnt say, but it frustrates me that they would prefer giving out all out location info in rreal time to a company that has had many breaches and has sold such data, compared to a small one that can’t even access such data, and its just a few bucks. Idunno.

The title sounds weird because it’s word gore, not because of the implied meaning. Try reading what you’ve written.