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Comment by jstayton | Hacker News Reader

https://www.privacytools.io/ and https://prism-break.org/en/ are good places to start. They list most (all?) of the major alternatives for the different categories of apps.

On a personal note, it's definitely possible. I've done it without much loss of convenience, which I think is the main drawback.

> The main issue I have is making my data highly available and resilient at low/no cost.

I think you'll find that most alternative, privacy-conscious services will cost something, primarily because they're not able to profit off of your personal data like Google and Facebook are. For me, I'm definitely willing to pay for that value.

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+1 If you are not paying, you are the product.

The insistence that everything has to be free is materially harmful to everyone who works in IT, software development, etc. You have Google on one hand and Richard Stallman oon the other.

For $40 you can get full fat service from Fastmail with your own domain name, which costs another $10 a month or so. That's pretty cheap.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the replacement(s) SHOULD be free. Only phrasing this in a way to emphasize keeping costs low.

I pay $30 a year for my FastMail account with no additional charge for my custom domain name. Maybe they have changed their pricing though, I have been a customer for going on 4 years.

I'd make the statement a little more complex than the aphorism: "If you are not paying, and the system requires resources to operate, then you are the product."

Which I think strikes to the heart of why open source only ate specific parts of the world. Things that require resources to operate that users are normally happy about having in the modern world: network and server infrastructure, compatibility testing, support, security testing, UI updates.

If you're paying $10/month for a domain name, you're paying too much!

Richard Stallman does not insist that everything has to be free of charge, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html. It's a common enough misconception, and in reality nearly all free software is also free of charge (sometimes with a paid support plan).

A domain name is also much cheaper than $10/month, it's closer to $10/year. Oh and for FastMail, you get a discount if you pay multiple years in advance - the price for n years is $10 + n•$30

I agree with the sentiment that you get that you pay for, and in this case, it's worth it.

Can you share what alternatives you used to move off of Google?

Gmail => FastMail

Calendar/Contacts => Apple iCloud

Drive => SpiderOakONE

Chrome => Firefox

Search => DuckDuckGo

Maps => Apple Maps

Photos => Store locally (iPhoto & Lightroom)

Docs => Apple iCloud

Apple may seem like the odd one out, but I trust them quite a bit seeing how they've fought for privacy over the last few years. I also use all Apple devices, so the convenience is also unparalleled.

Nice, thanks. A handy list.

Fastmail seems to be a popular alternative to gmail as per the comments here and as per you. It is NOT listed on privacytools.io

Should this be a concern? Is it any better than Gmail with respect to privacy?

Edit: moved comment to more relevant parent.

The answer is probably: it depends.

Fastmail, unlike Gmail, doesn't use your email contents for ad targeting. OTOH, unlike commonly claimed, Google doesn't actually sell your info, they just reuse it internally.

Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.

Google is subject to NSA/FISA/etc. Fastmail claims it isn't since they're an Australian company, but their servers are all in the US.

> Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.

That's a bit misleading, FastMail encrypts their hard drives (and I'm sure Google does, too). It's just that they don't have a special key for your data. That means you can't just break into their (colocated) data centre and steal their disks, but if you hack a machine with the drive mounted then you get all the data on the machine.

Yeah, good question.

There are certainly more privacy-conscious services, but FastMail is good enough for what I'm looking for. The big thing being that they don't analyze my email for advertising purposes.

This list is about a year old, but it provides some more privacy-conscious alternatives: https://www.prxbx.com/email/.

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