The Congressman Who Doesn t Use Google – POLITICO

When I see something that I consider an injustice, I just don t buy the product, says Buck, sitting behind his desk in the Rayburn House Office Building. He wore a dark, lightly checked suit, his gray hair cropped close; he dipped into his oatmeal breakfast from the House carryout, a Make America Great Again hat on the shelf behind him.

For the past nearly two years, Buck has been staging, or trying to stage, a one-person Capitol Hill boycott of a set of companies most of Washington would find it nearly impossible to give up: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those corporations, he argues, use their incredible power to unfairly crush small competitors, abuse users privacy for profit, indulge the Chinese government with impunity and censor conservatives. (The companies, of course, deny doing any of those things.)

Buck has called on his Republican colleagues to swear off taking campaign contributions from those companies. But Buck is personally taking things a bit further. He doesn t search the web with Google, he says. He directs his staff not to order from Amazon. He doesn t use Facebook, even to communicate with family. If they want to talk to me, they call, he says. It is, says Buck, a conscience thing.

Where that all changes from quirky member of Congress to meaningful is that Buck also happens to be one of the people in Washington most responsible for overseeing Silicon Valley.

via www.politico.com

For a while I was using Duckduckgo instead of Google. It was ok for routine searches — where is that new Mexican place? What time is the show, sort of thing. But for scholarly searches, say, I had to use Google because Duckduckgo’s results were too idiosyncratic and just off. So recently I switched to Brave, an encrypted browser that uses Google but at least doesn’t let them spy on my searches. I also sometimes use Surf Shark for another layer of protection. Probably this is overkill, but underkill as well, as Amazon knows pretty much everything about me and probably has some sort of sharing arrangement with Google. One does what one can.