Alternatives to Google Products | Hacker News Reader

Alternatives to Google Products

restoreprivacy.com

1,169 pointswuschel504 comments

Hi all,

I'm an engineer working on Firefox Platform (Gecko). In the linked blog post, the author recommends Firefox (thanks!) and links to a "privacy recommendations" for it, which include items such as "resistFingerprinting" settings.

I'd like to remind everyone that turning on this setting has far fetched consequences to how you experience the Web. Your dates, timezones, preferred languages will all be masked which will result in weird experiences.

The option is behind a flag and without UI precisely because it is a pretty complex feature, that we didn't iron out yet, and which should be well understood before being used.

It concerns me to see it being references and recommended without any explanation whatsoever.

Of course I'm likely biased because I'm on the receiving end of bug reports from people who experience the Web in weird languages and with wrong timezones because they followed some tutorial that recommended it. :(

Is there a moderate resistFingerprinting setting? I don't mind my date/tz/language being known. There are 150m+ people living in my timezone who use en-US.

I don't want my fonts, plugins, user agent, or detailed HW/graphics features (e.g. canvas/WebGL hash) being known. Those can uniquely identify me according to https://panopticlick.eff.org.

Those can uniquely identify me

So does your resolution. And that's hard to mask because JS usually needs to know it.

If you're not using the browser fullscreen, chances are that you're using a unique innerWidth+innerHeight.

As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.

Your resolution alone will not likely uniquely identify you. The idea is to eliminate many of the data points that make it easy to track you across IPs. Resolution is very common if you're browsing with a maximized window so it's not in the same league as these others that quickly diverge amongst users.

The Tor Plugin sets the window sizes to predefined values that match various fullscreen resolutions. So there are options, but they all involve tradeoffs.

Don't huge swaths of people have the same resolution, though? Yes, I understand other things come into play here (OS, Browser, available plugins, etc) but I am skeptical that people are really building UUIDs based on someone's screen resolution. Or, if they are, that such IDs are meaningfully accurate.

But I resize my browser all the time? Even with timezone + language surely it's a very short lived fingerprint? When it's not manually sized it's snapped to either side of a standard screen.

idk - it seems like that can't be enough?

If fingerprinting uses a hash based on a number of input criteria, then you only need to perturb one of those inputs to make the entire hash unusable. Perhaps Firefox is perturbing the other inputs (?) such that screen resolution doesn't matter much. (Just guessing and looking for a positive angle here).

> As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.

No offense, but advice like this is useless. It reduces to, "someone I don't know thinks the average person with no special risk factors should think this way about their personal privacy based on who knows what priors."

Different people have different reactions to risk, have different actual exposures to risks, different competencies, and different tolerances for the hassles of opsec. And potential future risks of data slopping about are unknown.

There is no such thing as a "best solution" when talking about this.

Assuming there's 4k possibilities for width and 2k for height, that's 8 millions possibilities right here. Compared to ~2 billions of people accessing the internet, the odds of having a unique one seems really really low.

> JS usually needs to know it

What do you mean by this?

That https://panopticlick.eff.org link was interesting, but I don't see what about my user agent string makes it so unique (1: 76540.09) ?

  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.62 Safari/537.36

Looks fairly generic, I think I'm running a mainstream chrome browser on a mainstream OS.

One problem is that your user agent is matched against all tested user agents from all times. This includes very old ones. If the user agent was used to track you online, they would account for that it frequently updates and for a lot of users (considering that most browsers update automatically these days).

So the site should really only take into account your OS, maybe its major version, and browser version (which changes frequently so trackers can’t rely on that). Or at least not count any that are not used anymore.

Using Javascript the page can query more details about the environment including installed plugins, addons, configuration settings (language etc), certificates and fonts. That combination is often unique.

This is amazing, I use Ghostery, Privacy Badger and Scriptsafe in Firefox, and I was MORE private in non-private window! wth?

I suspect it's partly because these plugins don't function fully in a private window?

After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches, all I want a browser to do is lie and obfuscate. So I'll gladly take the sledgehammer boolean of resistFingerprinting for now.

I've yet to come across an extension that does something like this so I'm presuming it's not possible via extensions?

Are Mozilla working to make this more granular and let me whitelist individual features on a per site basis?

I'd far rather lose tracking than get the very minor benefit of a (slow loading) web font or en-GB over en-US. Especially if I can opt in the few I trust or need those features.

> After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches...

I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. I remember thinking that it seemed totally insane. But in light of the reality of 2018, I am coming around. The way I see it, I can keep tweaking privacy settings in a browser, or opting out of collection, or doing any number of other things to attempt to protect my privacy, _or_ I could just stop using services that do not respect my privacy in the first place. Perhaps certain aspects of modern life have taken too much, and they need to be abandoned until they are reformed?

> I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back.

One of these you mean?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515

[2] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I agree. I'm coming around to some of his view, and no longer see him as quite so extreme. Still think he weakens his message with the alternative language, like "used" instead of user etc. Always have.

The difficulty of course is right now it's nearly everyone at it. Too early to say if GDPR will make an appreciable difference, though it seems like it should. So that leaves few choices outside of gnu everything or layers of hacks and browser extensions. I have hope that many services will start being much more careful in what tracking and data they actually need after recent events.

The irony is that everyone knows a bit too much about RMS and exactly how he behaves online or in interviews. His efforts at privacy have backfired.

For FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-...

I think this one is no longer working with the newest FF versions, but check back in on it every once in a while.

For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-user-agent/...

Not as configurable as I'd like, but it gets 25% of the job done.

I actually used to use the Firefox one. IIRC when they changed the extensions system the dev announced he couldn't support it in the new system.

Time to give the chrome one a look, thanks.

NoScript, uBlock or uMatrix offer this (largely). Fingerprinting relies heavily on Javascript. Many sites work just fine without it or with first-party JS only (fingerprinting is mostly done by third-party trackers).

If Firefox really cared more about privacy than about its money flow they would have disabled 3rd party cookies by default instead of explicitly hiding¹ that setting.

Apple can do it. There's no reason why Firefox can't. And if there is a reason, it should have been dealt with years ago.

¹ i just noticed that in Firefox 60, the setting is no longer as hidden as it used to be. Good!

Most casual users would be quite upset if cookies stopped working. "Why does this site not stay logged in"? Etc.

You think Apple is upsetting casual users?

Not all cookies, just 3rd party ones.

I don't know, I think if a user is following all of the steps in this article, they likely know what fingerprinting is. Running an Android device without the Play Store, for example, is by far a much more difficult & complicated thing to do than just toggling a flag in a Firefox browser.

That, and the user is likely used to having less-than-ideal browsing experiences if they run any adblockers. I do agree that the article should outline what the consequences would be for disabling browser fingerprinting; they simply have one sentence recommending it, and nothing else.

By the way, what does GDPR say about fingerprinting? Is it legal? (Asking because the EU explicitly made cookies an opt-in technique, but not sure if they considered fingerprinting).

The EU did not make cookies an opt-in technique. The EU made irrelevant cookies opt-in. Cookies that are essential for the functioning of the service do not need a notice. If you require user accounts, you don't need to show a cookie notice. If you implement a shopping cart without user accounts, you also don't need to show a cookie notice.

Unfortunately most websites don't understand this simple idea and show the cookie notice indiscriminately (or, perhaps, they just all use cookies for tracking in which case the notice should be there).

That’s one of the most frustrating aspects of GDPR in relation to cookies - many businesses that could happily run a site with no cookie opt-in end up implementing one anyway because that irritating pop-up gives the end user a perception of ‘handling privacy well’.

I’d be so keen for the solution to lie in the browser UX- in the same way as we currently request location information - rather than the current mish-mash of badly implemented, often disingenuous site overlays that have become the modern equivalent of the ‘enter site’ splash screen...

Probably most websites use Google Analytics or an alternative.

Yea, maybe you should prioritize 'ironing' it out.

This feature is not even part of the UI yet. It's in progress. I really don't understand why technical people would start recommending its use to others on blogs in its current state. All you create is lots of bug reports coming in to Mozilla, forcing them to put resources into responding to users who blindly followed the blog and now their Firefox is "not working" anymore.

>I really don't understand why technical people would start recommending its use to others on blogs in its current state.

Because when ordinary users ask "what can I do to protect my privacy?" you have two possible answers:

a) "Nothing, you're not smart enough to do this, you're screwed"

b) "These things"

B has a high learning curve, but telling people about it scares them off. If you care about your friends privacy and want to get them past that learning curve, it's better to let them stumble into issues and be there to answer questions.

Do you know why there are so many separate things bundled under a single flag? Would it take much effort to add sub-flags for entirely separate anti-fingerprinting features?

I’m certain they’ll accept help. So maybe go test, report bugs and issues and get involved if that’s a priority for you. Triage some of those weird bug reports. Write a guide on how to properly enable the feature, what it does and what to expect if it’s enabled. Explain what’s a bug and what’s just part of the expected - and sometimes annoying - behavior.

Or just donate if you can’t do any of those things.

Prioritize it over the probably 1,000s of other things they have to do, which we might not have any idea about? Just because one person was kind enough to try to help people with a short cautionary message, therefore bringing this specific issue to our attention?

I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple.

For example, the "best" calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I'm not a fan of hooktube either - it just further cements YouTube's monopoly.

I think what what bothers me is that "privacy focused" tends to be conflated with FOSS. I'm really thankful for organizations like Mozilla and Signal that are trying to deliver privacy focused applications to real people. However I also think we should recognize Apple-like companies who are also privacy focused without necessarily being FOSS. I think that will help move more non-technical people out of central databases.

It's not that "privacy-focused" tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.

This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

> Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.

I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position. A relatively small proportion of the general population has the skills to meaningfully look at the code, never mind the time. Moreover, even for someone who is capable, such an exercise quickly becomes non-trivial on an unfamiliar codebase for an app of any complexity.

In many cases there's also no guarantee that the code you're reading is the code that's running.

> I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position

It's more damaging than that. The bundling of privacy and FOSS advocacy weakens the former. Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS. The potential audience for a privacy pitch is broader. By bundling the two, however, the technical advocacy community limits the appeal of the former to those supporting the latter. This is an issue because the opponents of privacy rights are not similarly limited. Hence, we find ourselves reliant on Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon being benevolent dictators, in their services and Washington.

While I generally agree with you about the soundness of the FOSS==privacy argument, I think you're misstating it subtly. The claim isn't necessarily that the privacy sensitive user specifically will be able to audit the source but rather that someone somewhere will have done, and will have written about problems they uncovered. See also many eyes making all bugs shallow.

Apple makes its money from expensive hardware. And respecting your privacy and security helps selling it a lot. And they earned trust by being serious about it for a long time.

This is true iff you look through the code yourself, or are willing to trust that others have done so in as thorough a manner as your use case (attack vectors) necessitate.

Apple isn't worth consideration if you are willing to put in the effort, or delegate trust, to other systems. If you'd prefer to delegate trust to them, how is that effectively different that FOSS that you haven't examined?

With tools like Guix (and then hopefully, eventually distributed networks like IPFS / Dat doing the distribution) we will be able to have people audit free software and every user being guaranteed to have the exact version that was audited.

The future looks good if we just continue to implement it the way it should be.

>Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.

>This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

Quite a few of the things listed in the article are not open source (some of the map stuff, as an example). Last I checked (several years ago), we only have DuckDuckGo's word for it.

I think the idea is not that these are all trustworthy services, but that no single company has all the data on you.

That's provably false when you get to the bottom of what makes proprietary software trustworthy: it has to be verified by qualified people who you trust after being designed and built with enough rigor to not have accidental flaws. That's regardless of whether it's proprietary or FLOSS. I went into detail here:

https://pastebin.com/EZQWbwCB

In fact, the first systems that resisted strong pentesting by NSA were proprietary, shared- or closed-source systems. They shredded everything else. Two are below with another designed like that. The first, safe, kind-of-secure machine that I know of was Burroughs B5000 whose CPU did things like stop overflows, protect pointers, and check function arguments. It was immune to common, root causes of many failures or attacks. OS in a type-safe, high-level language (ALGOL variant). It was a proprietary system whose source was shared with customers. Linux systems still don't have as much code-level security in average case as that proprietary software from 1961. The virtualization solutions in FLOSS still aren't produced as securely as VAX VMM or the separation kernels that followed in 2000's with VMM's layered on top.

http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse443-s12/docs/ch6.pdf

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Karger-et-al-A... (See Layering and Assurance sections especially. Compare to QA practices of favorite FLOSS VM.)

http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec04/tech/wips/wips/04... (Nizza uses FLOSS components. This document is just great at describing the architecture they and the proprietary vendors were using with separation kernels. The proprietary offerings contained a lot of problems FLOSS didn't with their 4-12kloc kernels having less code to screw up. User-mode drivers can boost reliability a bit, too.)

This isn't true. You can use disassembly tools to trace through code, and you can see what imports/exports there are, as well as what API calls are being made using static analysis tools.

You can also use all sorts of runtime tools to see what a binary is doing at runtime, so I imagine it would be pretty easy to see if an application is phoning home, and where home is located, although the data is probably encrypted.

In fact, it might actually be easier for an end user to audit a binary using such automated tools instead of looking at the source code itself. At least with the automated tools, the tools can flag suspicious constructs in the binary that may indicate that it's up to no good, and do so in a way that is more understandable to the end user.

"Look at the code" is an anachronistic strategy.

Nowadays, very little of our data solely relies on our own devices, and most of the value of consumer software occurs when data is being transmitted between systems. When your data lives in the cloud, there is almost always a side-channel way to get at your private data that won't be visible in any Git repository: Just go look at it directly.

Meaning that, nowadays, if we're to live any sort of non-Luddite, Internet connected lifestyle, all we have to go on with anybody is their word. If I limited myself to services where inspecting the source code would give me what I need to know about how well my privacy will be protected, without trusting the word of any third parties, then I'd have to let go of email, telephone, and credit and debit cards (and banking in general). Plenty of other things, too, but I think those three paint the picture well enough.

I thought it was strange bing was not mentioned, even though it has Mozilla's endorsement of having a better privacy policy than Google[0] and is probably the most popular alternative to search in the United States. This far from a complete list of Google alternatives.

[0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing...

I like/sometimes use Bing, and it's decent, but it's not significantly different than Google in terms of data collection. The biggest difference, arguably, is that they pay you for it via Bing Rewards.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing data and respects your privacy more, and probably the best choice for the privacy-conscious.

My primary goal of using Google alternatives is to deprive Alphabet of revenue. Privacy benefits are secondary.

That was in 2009 - Windows 10 probably wasn't even a project at that point, for instance.

I doubt Mozilla would recommend Bing over Google again because it's more "pro-privacy."

I think the point is not so much pro vs anti privacy. On the web you have to assume every site is anti privacy, and you may have some rare pleasant surprises. To me the point is rather to spread that trail of data among multiple providers that are not known to sync their data.

As much as I like Microsoft, Bing is awful. Ive used it, and I tried to like it. It can't find anything.

I use Bing a fair amount and I like it.

I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what sorts of things you are trying to find and having trouble with. Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions for how to get more out of your Bing experience.

Bing's video search (particularly for porn) is the best in the business.

I find bing to be better than any other Google alternatives.

It was also disappointing to hear recently one of their developers say that they mostly just copy what Google is doing to keep up.

Apple iCloud privacy policy mirrors Google's. You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. Apple also regularly gives iCloud data dumps to US government (they approved and delivered data in about 80% of US Government requests in 2017: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-trans... )

(The exceptions here are iMessage and phone backups which are E2E encrypted.)

> You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud.

This seems so deliberately wrong that I shouldn’t respond, but I will. Quick and easy synchronization of contacts, calendars, and photos are all features that I appreciate. What’s more, my fearful-of-technology brother tells me how useful they are to him. He mentioned photo sync as a benefit only a few days ago.

The OP was referring to iCloud vs. Google. Not the features of sync in general.

By "gain" they meant privacy. You gain no privacy... you lose privacy when using iCloud and Apple Calendar

"Gain nothing" ... over Google's superior features.

You mentioned the exceptions - both of which didn't happen 5 years ago. Is it crazy to believe that we may have Tarnsap-like storage from Apple in a few years.

Side note: I don't think Apple will ever encrypt iCloud iPhone backups because that would make it difficult to use them (how would you restore an iPhone backup to a new device if your old one was incinerated? Your private key would be gone)

Best I can tell, they already encrypt a whole load more and are ready to encrypt everything. When setting up a new iPhone, I’m asked to enter my Apple ID, password, approve via an existing device, provide 2FA and then provide the PIN or password of that existing device. After all that, access is granted. To me, this suggests they’re already encrypting in such a way that while it may be brute force-able, it’s unlikely to be data they can read by default.

>alternatives like Apple

I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs.

When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it.

Given all these experienced with Apple, to my eyes, Apple is no different than Google and I wouldn't trust any word of theirs as they've consistently been exposed time and again lying to consumers. So, I don't know where you got the idea of Apple being "entitled" to be in that list, but I'd say it's the right thing that they aren't.

>pro-privacy alternatives like Apple

I don't believe this. There is no evidence to support this as Apple runs on proprietary code. And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers. Ever wondered how Apple gets its data for its Apple maps? For all you know, they could be collecting your location information to build their database. Isn't that a privacy violation? I work in the Analytics industry, inside an iPhone, using Charles proxy, you'll be able to see random requests hit Apple's servers from time to time. For all you know, this could be info about you. You can't prove it nor disprove it.

I would never dare put all my trust into a single for-profit corporation whose sole goal is to maximize revenues and has been consistently exposed for unethical practices to its customers.

So, hope that answers why Apple isn't exactly a consideration.

[1] http://bgr.com/2017/12/28/iphone-battery-apple-apology-lette...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a...

[3] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/07/class-action-lawsuit-apple-wa...

>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers

Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as well be mud.

This article is about alternatives to Google on the basis of privacy. Isn't a company that doesn't base its core business model on mining your data an improvement for a vast majority of users?

What was the latest price of source code you inspected?

I know it's not exactly your point, but Etar is pretty nice, and apparently is cross-platform (Android & iOS - which I didn't know), and exists on F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/), Google Play (it seems somehow wrong to link to the Google Play Store given the context, but it's easy to find there anyway), and Apple's App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8). I think OsmAnd(~) [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/] is probably a better choice than Maps.Me.

Given that alternatives to Google products are largely services rather than software run locally on one's own machine, you're probably right about the partial orthogonality of FOSS here since it can be hard to verify that the remote server is in fact running the software it claims it is, and from a privacy-standpoint it may be somewhat irrelevant (I recall even the FSF said something of the sort).

There is a fork of maps.me on f-droid that strips out analytics/ads/proprietary bits. It's called omim (https://gitlab.com/axet/omim).

On F-Droid it's just called Maps though: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

I don't see that in the article. Search, email, drive, youtube, maps all have many non-FOSS entries.

I am fairly sure that no apple product is mentioned because replacing all the hardware one has just for more privacy is likely too extreme for many. Not to mention that one of the biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning, and apple does not make it easier at all.

> biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning

Very true. But there is no problem with apple, in fact Safari is first browser that is clearing cookies - ITP(2). I use uBlock Origin on Safari and Private browsing - no cookies at all.

Firefox has been able to clear cookies like that for years without any extensions.

I've been using startpage.com to search Google anonymously for the past year. Startpage proxies your query to google and back while leaving off the identifying metadata, making the query anonymous. At first you notice the slight increase in roundtrip time, but quickly get used to it. I find Google Search to have a better search engine than any alternative I've tried, so Startpage is right up my alley.

Apple is closed source, so we really don't know if they respect our privacy now, and in the future.

Also, they may work with the US government, even if they say otherwise, and people from both the US and other countries may not like that idea.

I don't disagree that Apple looks really good nowadays from a privacy perspective. They treat their customers with respect and don't sell their data.... until they do.

How can you trust a single point of failure to "do no evil"?

Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. All of the ML that apple does for example is done on-device or is privatized [0]. This goes for all of their services that Google has built their business off of: Messages, Siri, Maps, etc. People don't respect Apple's security because they trust Apple, they respect it because Apple has intentionally shot themselves in the foot if they wished to sell their data in the future.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...

> Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has.

Huh? Apple potentially has everything on the device, just as Microsoft does. Maybe they don't touch it, at least intentionally, out of respect (or just prudence). But if I recall correctly, they accidentally logged all Safari URLs for a while.

Dude, google has been doing diff. privacy earlier than apple. Even now, their researchers( one of them the great Ian Goodfellow-inventor of GANs) is working on federated learning. Heck google had even open sourced their diff. privacy system. Apple just made a big deal put of it when they started diff privacy.

Well as Mark Zuckerberg put it during the congressional hearing—and this is a paraphrase—"we do not and have never sold data."

Which is true. They don't sell the data because they directly monetize it. Same with Google. Google didn't just start doing that one day, that's been their business model since they started doing ads. Apple's business model is selling users devices, which they would jeopardize if they tried to also sell their users' data.

There is a difference between privacy by charity and privacy by design

>Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps?

The "Maps (F Droid)" alternative suggested before the Maps.me app is a fork of Maps.Me that doesn't include any tracker/ad. It works pretty well although I've had a few issues logging into my OSM account and it takes a little too long to navigate "up" from a place search. It also features a GPS track recording function that Maps.Me lacks (AFAIK). It's really great and deserves more contributions!

But Apple services are still not privacy focused services and for most of them, you have to use an Apple device, which is still less than 10% of PC market and less than 30% of mobile one.

> Maps.Me

Has several useful functions like being able to pre-download specific countries or parts of specific countries.

Many mapping apps work offline but the way Maps.me lets you specifically pick & choose areas = more user friendly.

It uses Openstreetmaps which I've found to work amazingly well in areas where you wouldn't expect (it has off-road trails in remote areas of Vietnam for example)

via iTunes I can also import gpx tracks (or gpx converted to kml, I forget) for things like mountainbike routes, which works super well.

It's better to host your own content if you want to have a better chance at privacy.

You are seeing a problem where there is none. Etar is just a fork of Google Calendar, and you can find it in Play Store / F-Droid (which is linked from the mentioned GitHub page).

But then you have no protection against Apple, privacy wise.

I trust nothing I can not verify...

14M Users affected by Facebook Privacy Bug that makes Posts Public

Apple is a US based company. The point of this post is to try and hurt American hegemony in tech and promote European alternatives. Europe desperately needs it given a dangerously old population and increasing irrelevance of its tech industry, with GDPR being yet another populist nail in the coffin. Method of choice is thru soft power - swaying opinions on HN, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media.

I am on linux ... just tried Apple Maps - horrid ... it fails to permit location search by zip code ... just show the globe and let me zoom around - fail ... forced me to login - fail ... unable to enter arbitrary address - talk about slurping personal data ... unbelievably evil

What are you going on about? Apple Maps does all of those things, without asking for login information.

> All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market.

Google has what I think are the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing history, but enable personalized ads).

- For most of the products mentioned in the blogpost (YouTube, Search, ...), people can just go to MyActivity [0] and delete any data they want to. They can also disable data collection here. [1]

- Emails received in Gmail are no longer used for advertisement in other Google products, only used for Gmail ads, and features like searching your emails, spam prevention, parsing orders/flights/etc. to display them in the app. Also note that emails received in GSuite ("enterprise Gmail") were never parsed for these purposes. [2]

[0] https://myactivity.google.com/

[1] https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Important disclaimer: I work at Google [but only voicing my own opinions, as it goes], and only working there because I realize they are doing all they can to respect user privacy.

1. Please ask BEFORE you collect.

2. You can't expect every user to know they are logged, or how it's affecting the user, or know how to disable/delete it, can you?

3. How can I verify that you did delete the data about me instead of just hiding from me for viewing it? Alphabet is not belong to public sector. So the simple answer is I can't. If you want me to trust you, don't use opt-out as default.

4. I'm sure you can tell the differences between those alternatives and Google products.

5. It's not that hard to respect some one's data. First, do not collect it! Second, if you have to collect it, tell the owner why! Third, delete it completely while requested.

6. Aggregated data collection and use without permissions adds potential risks to the society. (Cambridge Analytica)

Edit: And you guys are doing deep learning, that's gonna consume lot's of data. Duplex for example, you use anonymous phone call data to train it. The question is, where does that data even come from? I'd blacklist whoever collected the data, even it's collected anonymously.

> 6. Aggregated data collection and use without permissions adds potential risks to the society. (Cambridge Analytica)

Everything adds "potential risks". When you talk about risk, you have to give estimates of both the frequency and the criticity, and then compare to the potential benefits. Only then you have all the pieces to take an informed decision, according to your preferences.

How do you define benefits? Sacrifice one's privacy without his permission to make ten of others' life easier, would you call it beneficial? If so, let's rob the wealthy to aid the poor.

They can reduce the risks to a certain level if users were told how they are going to use the data and why before using it. Are they going to do that? No, because that increases the cost, which means less profit, which means shareholders won't agree.

So there comes law.

Google has what I think is the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing history, but enable personalized ads).

I don't think this stops Google from collecting your viewing history. If it did, Youtube recommendations wouldn't work at all, because they would know nothing about what I like or don't like. But I'm pretty sure recommendations work regardless of your settings -- meaning you're being tracked.

I happen to like the recommendations, so I don't mind this. But it's a hard problem.

The second link I posted allows you to explicitly disable search and viewing history on YouTube, which also disables recommendations (at least those based on your profile; you will still get recommendations after watching a specific video).

Fair enough, though that would require me to sign in.

Does that actually prevent the data from being stored on Google's servers? I'd like to believe that the data isn't being vacuumed up regardless of what the user says, so if you're willing to vouch for it then that would mean a lot.

When logged in I have history disabled, and YouTube being kind of usable, with a lot of stupid content promoted, but at least not too much weird fixation on things I watched 5 years ago. When logged out I get the full fixation experience where I half the suggestions are aggravatingly repetitive personalized suggestions.

That's an understandable point of view because if you perceived Google the way many of us do, it would be impossible or at least very difficult for you to work for them without strong emotional struggle.

You see, the point is that we, the users, helped to create a mammoth that has an enormous pile of sometimes very intimate data on almost anyone. This in itself is dangerous, regardless of what they do with this data - whether they share it with advertisers and other third parties, the government, NSA etc. or not. Also, the world changes fast. Owners change, governments change. Who is to blame when things end up badly? We are, because we got lured by free unlimited spam-free mailbox, free browser, cheap phone, free analytics, accurate search engine. We like these so much that we gave up critical thinking for a while. But the society as a whole is slowly waking up, hence articles like these (which is quite lacking on several points BTW.)

I don't work at Google, I live in Europe and I agree with you. So far, we didn't heard of any breach in any Google product, and the history of the different products can effectively be turned off. I remember years ago, when I started to care about data collected about me, Google was one of the first company allowing you to download a part of your data. We can see the emphasize about security on the evolution of Android APIs too (encrypted enclaves, key storages, for example). Google also contributes to open AI and ML researches. My only consumer concern is about monopoly, not about data collected on me.

> So far, we didn't heard of any breach in any Google product

A breach would be a security issue, not a privacy issue.

A security issue is where a third party accesses your data stored at Google without Google's permission.

A privacy issue is where a third party accesses your data stored at Google with Google's permission but without your permission.

How do I view the data Google has collected on me if I do not have a Google account?

The unavoidable suggested answers in gmail make my skin crawl. I dont want it and i dont want to be reminded that you can read my emails despite my consent for it

I guess it's a good reminder that i need to change services

How can an email service work without "reading" your email? Emails need to be indexed to be searcheable etc.

It does not need to read the body of email in order to work. It can index just the header(to, date, subject) or you can use a program on your computer locally to keep your emails and index&search them.

This is all fine and well, but to be honest, I like how Google integrates all the different products. I get a better experience when search is customized to what is in my email, especially when I search for flight info and it tells me about flights I already have booked, or better yet, flights my in-laws are on that they forwarded to me and I'm now tracking to go pick them up.

Sometimes the ads it gives me are so relevant I actually click on them and I'm glad I did!

I just have a better experience where I'm constantly delighted by Google anticipating what I want because it knows so much about me.

I should be paranoid, I know, but I just like the convenience so much.

Well, most people are boring and don't rock the boat.

Things can get tricky if they pop up (thorough bad luck or as a consequence of their actions) on the radar of someone that wants to make their life miserable or if they bother someone with power.

Otherwise I assume you're well off financially by now, so getting screwed on insurance should be a non-issue. Discrimination is likewise a non-issue.

In general money helps and being a US citizen, straight, not muslim, healthy, male etc also helps.

Then this list is probably not for you.

Stockholm syndrome... :)

The worst thing, the absolute worst thing is, you know all that but you have gotten so used to the way Google services work, that you simply have a hard time to switch.

E.g. thank to Gmail I rarely use an email application on my computer and use webmail. When I tried out Posteo it was extremely annoying that it logged me out every few minutes and I couldn't get my email. They said this couldn't be changed.

Google really did an excellent job of supply me with services which I want to use. Not just tools which are working well.

BTW, Google doesn't use all its services to sell or personalise ads. Which doesn't mean they don't use them to learn more about you which in turn is used to improve the services so that you them even more.

So as much as I wish I could restore my privacy by leaving Google, I think Google knows me too well that I won't for now.

I haven’t found a replacement for Gmail yet. I’ve tried fastmail and ProtonMail but both have limitations.

From a search engine perspective I’ve switched to DuckDuckGo and I’m impressed with how good it has gotten.

With maps I’ve tried various solutions including mapquest, Microsoft, and Apple but nothing comes close to Google Maps.

> From a search engine perspective I’ve switched to DuckDuckGo and I’m impressed with how good it has gotten.

I switched to DDG over a year ago and it works great for things that are simple lookups to Wikipedia, IMDB etc. When I have an arcane Windows bug, I end up using "G!". Also DDG isn't that great for latest News but the Image search is pretty good.

I set DDG as the default search on my non-techie wife's new PC earlier this year and she has not once complained about the search qualify.

I second those asking what limitations you ran into (specifically with FastMail, since I have more chance of being able to fix those than the limitations with Protonmail - though I'd love to know both!)

If it's "costs money", we're not planning to change that! We (FastMail) are proudly a paid-only service.

Can you elaborate on the limitations you experienced with fastmail and protonmail?

I too feel like I am ingested, rather than served. You may want to take things more in your own hands, requires more upkeep: https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox

I'm definitely on the hunt for a Gmail replacement, considering I have been hearing things such as a snapchat-esque disappearing emails, unprintable emails, and other similar stupid ideas. I decide what to do with emails and other data sent to me thank you.

>When I tried out Posteo it was extremely annoying that it logged me out every few minutes

I haven't encountered this with my personal email server nor heard of it from anyone else. I think this might just be an issue with Posteo.

It's easier if you don't try to move all at once. Spend some time looking at different email options and move that. Do calendar later. Get rid of Google Apps on your Android later still. Gradual change is much easier.

Posteo is very aggressive on privacy, reducing exposure, and keeping information safer. So a shorter webmail session timeout may be related to this. Depending on the use case, if this were the only issue with Posteo, the GP could’ve used Firefox with one of the many tab reload or tab refresh extensions to keep the logged in session alive.

> use webmail ... Posteo logged me out every few minutes

Lets me assume, that you're always logged in. Google thanks you for that, much easier to link this browser's history and searches to your account.

So I'm one of those who doesn't care if Google tracks me or sells me as a product. [ * ]

Is there actually some real, tangible harm that can come to me from using Google products? Not theoretical stuff, not stuff that is less likely than dying in a plane crash. Something that is actually likely to happen, that will affect me in measurable, negative ways?

I'm really trying to come up with something, and I'm really trying to care.

* actually I don't agree with that last one: ads are a product of Google, and various things like Gmail are products of Google. The latter is paid for with ad viewings rather than currency.

Really, there is no need to redefine "product" to include humans being advertised to and tracked. There was (and I guess is) a thing called "slavery," where humans were bought and sold....my voluntary use of Gmail is not comparable.

Has it become some sort of fashion statement to be ignorant about privacy?

Whenever I discuss this topic people seem to almost take pride in giving their information to Google, Facebook and the thousands of other companies they have no clue about.

I think it's cognitive dissonance rearing its ugly head again: those people have tied their identity at some level with the use of the products and an attack on e.g. Google becomes an attack on them.

The concept of fairness also plays a role. Most people feel that Google should get something for providing their services and they also feel that it's ok if they are shown some ads. Fair deal. What they have no idea about is how much data is extracted from them, who it's shared with and for what purposes it's used. But we can be almost certain the answers to those questions is more and more data, more and more parties and more and more purposes, because data is forever.

And yes, real harm can come to you if you are promiscuous with your information. Additional information should be accessible through your favourite search engine. Hint: home invasion.

I find I'm having trouble arguing in a meaningful way with people who don't share the same concerns regarding the privacy of their data. I'm running out of arguments - no matter what I say, they'll respond with a shrug.

"So what? I don't have anything to hide."

"So what? They are a big company, surely they won't abuse my data."

"So what? How has Cambridge Analytica affected me?"

And for the ultimate capitulation: "So what? They already have so much data on everyone, you can't avoid it anyway."

Brave new world.

This is not only coming from folks with little understanding of tech, but also from "technologically literate" people who should know better. Sticking your head in the sand is just so damn convenient.

Even a comparatively widely reported privacy scandal like FB's can't seem to sway these folks... apparently because they feel like it hasn't affected them personally.

How do you deal with this kind of attitude?

I'm ignorant, I suppose, because you are unwilling or unable to list a single tangible potential harm. Home invasion? Please explain how Google tracking me is going to help a home invader.

Or are you talking about me posting stuff on Facebook? Because that's a very, very different thing.

Everything you have said there is completely intangible. Show me one real world example of where my use of Google products has actually hurt me.

Okay, let’s think about some side effects of having lots of potentially sensitive data nicely stored at one location:

* Propaganda: Because you understand what people need to hear, it’s a perfect tool to influence opinion. Of course, this doesn’t happen in your country (it never does). A recent popular example is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Thankfully this evil cooperation does not exist any more (by changing its name).

* Reinforcement of monopolies: You need to hit a critical mass to use data effectively. Therefore, big players will have an advantage over competitors and can provide better products. Therefore big players …

* Reinforcement of dictatorships: If things turn bad they turn really bad. User data is gold in the hand of dictators. One reason is that is helps with propaganda, but it also helps to identify resistance. If for some reason your country ends up in a regime, it is going to be hard to get out of it.

* Self-censorship / freedom of speech: There is plenty of evidence, that we constrain ourselves because we know nothing online is anonymous. This also depends on which country you live in.

There must be a plethora of side effects I didn’t think of right now.

You have to decide how “theoretical” these issues are for you. Maybe it is more a thing of “believing” – such as vegetarianism (although we all know eating meat is bad for the environment).

I don't see how any of this applies to Google. Are you saying that dictators can steal my data from Google?

I'd think they'd have an easier time breaking into my house and stealing my computer. By a factor of maybe a thousand.

I think the average worst thing that could happen is that you end up going to court against someone (since we are thinking about averages, I'm thinking divorce), they obtain your data, and use that to build a case against you. If you were cheating, for instance, your location info could be used to show all your meetings in quite some detail. And even if you weren't, you can always bend your stats a little bit to make it look as if you did. Enjoy discussing p-hacking and statistical significance with a judge.

If you live in the US this may not be a problem now, but you also have to think ahead: courts may not be allowed to obtain your information right now (although that's probably not true if you are in a murder trial), but they might in the future.

And even then, someone close to you could provide that information to the other part: a (soon to be ex) friend of yours downloads all your information* thanks to the new GDPR tools and provides them to the other part.

*: I think this evidence would be admissible in court, since it's not the police the one who obtained evidence with illegal means. But even if it were not directly admissible, parallel construction is also a thing.

So how would this happen? Google gives them my data? I'm sorry but I don't get it. Google can't do that. Even if they work at Google they can't get it.

I just represented myself in a week long custody trial (I won primary custody, and yes I went up against an attorney), and there were lots of risks involved, but this sort of thing seems to be about the smallest one I could imagine.

I'd like to hear if this has actually happened to anyone anywhere.

Then you must assume one of:

* No one can get access to Google's data * Those who can get access cannot harm you

In addition to trusting google not to be evil. What are your assumptions that lead you to that conclusion?

Or are you assuming that no matter who has access to your data, there is no one could ever do any harm to you with that data? (That's the 'I have nothing to hide' argument)

> * No one can get access to Google's data * Those who can get access cannot harm you

Maybe it's more about will than can if you're a bit more pragmatic? Anyone on the street can harm you, but not many will....

I think Google has a very strong incentive to protect my data from that sort of thing, and a lot of layers to ensure this. One rogue employee can't get access to my email. Why? Because if it happened and the press got wind of it, Google would see their market cap drop tens of millions of dollars overnight.

Meanwhile, why should I trust that that guy living on the sidewalk won't jump up and bash my head with a hammer? Or that the person driving the car in the opposite lane won't swerve into my lane and kill me? I just try to keep risks in perspective.

If you don't know why you should care about privacy, there's no one who can explain it as eloquently as Edward Snowden. Read https://www.businessinsider.de/edward-snowden-privacy-argume... or - preferably - whatch the video at http://hooktube.com/watch?v=WRzm7wrk_FA

I like this comment. It's not beeing ignorant about privacy but I also value my free time a lot more than searching and dealing with all sorts of Google alternatives. I think that security and uptime at Google are outstanding and better than all sorts of alternatives which can shut down any time. And in comparison to Facebook Google is not selling your single soul or your direct private information to outside advertisement companies. It's not like Google never thought about privacy... they have deep thoughts about it and how they still can make money with you.

In the 1930's (and before) people in Germany were asked (as they are today) to specify their religion in certian dealings with their government. Nobody thought anything of it. And then the Nazis came to power, and there was no ability to undelete anything.

So basically if shit hits the fan then we're even more fucked than we would have been had we not used Googles and Facebooks?

While the advice here is quite solid, when I went to figure out what their favicon was doing(it had partial transparency, apparently due to downscaling blending opaque and transparent parts), the first thing I saw was a big block of code that appeared to enable tracking by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin. (It was a sharrre function with enableTracking set to true on each).

Not entirely relevant, yet considering the topic of the site it's a tad ironic, and a reminder of the prevalence of sites complicit in the tracking they advocate against.

Yep, they're using a jquery plugin called Sharrre to add social media buttons and have overridden its default off setting for "enableTracking - allows tracking social interaction with Google Analytics".

I've enjoyed fastmail for many years as an alternative to gmail. I've never once had any issues with them and their UI has been very responsive. They also give you a MASSIVE list of domain names to choose from! ^_^

I started using fastmail for my business domain, it's going pretty good so far.

I'm in the process of switching over to fastmail. I'm pretty happy with it so far.

How is their spam filtering. For me gmail really does an outstanding job in that regard and it's hard to beat them.

Unfortunately, Fastmail is very expensive.

Unfortunately it costs money to hire people and run servers, and we have to pay for it somehow! Over 1/3 of our staff are first line customer support, and you get through to the engineers actually building and running the product quite quickly if you find an issue that the support team can't help you with directly.

The alternative is trying to monitise the userbase some other way, and we're not interested in that game. We have no advertising, no data sales, and no ethical conundrums or regrets about that choice!

Cheers.

$50 per year for what is arguably one of the most important services/tools you use? That's not very expensive to me.

Expensive? It's cheaper than G-Suite...

$3/month is quite reasonable

$30/year is expensive?

I am personally using an often not mentioned solution.

I use Gandi.net as registrar for my domain name and they provide email hosting[1], CalDav and CardDav with it. They even have a web interface (using SoGo[2]).

So all my emails, contacts and calendars are properly managed[3] by a French company.

[1] https://www.gandi.net/en/domain/email

[2] https://sogo.nu/

[3] https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit

Recently I started shelling out $25 a month for a G-Suite account. I wish I could have kept my @gmail email address, as I think your own vanity URL looks a little tacky, but oh well.

Anyway, for privacy but also security it’s been amazing.

DKIM, DMARC, SPF, and S/MIME for mail. All attachments are executed in a special sandbox before moving to your inbox (delays mail a little bit). None of my personal data / content is scanned or looked at (I think?). Plenty of security rules, alerts, and audits I can set up. Also an actual support phone number I can call for help whenever.

Why can’t Google move to a paid model? It’s worked for both Oracle and Microsoft for the last 40 years.

> as I think your own vanity URL looks a little tacky, but oh well.

I think it depends on how professional the personal URL is. If it is my_name@wazoo-how-is-it-going-lol.com, then I agree that it looks rather tacky. It it is first_name@last_name.com, then it looks more professional than a @gmail address.

> None of my personal data / content is scanned or looked at (I think?)

How can you say "for privacy [...] it's been amazing" if you haven't even checked?

They do say "Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in G Suite services for advertising purposes" and "Google does not sell [your] data to third parties" which mostly covers it, though (although ideally they'd strengthen the wording in the first part to say they don't use your data for any purposes other than to provide it to you... but now I'm just being picky.)

If it's worth anything, G Suite products are HIPAA and FedRAMP compliant.

https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

> as I think your own vanity URL looks a little tacky

Free domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, live.com, yahoo.com, etc emails are tacky, lazy, and unprofessional. A domain is less than $10/year. You don't even have to be technical to buy one and use it with G-Suite. There's no excuse to use a free email domain.

To me the value is in not having to spell it. When I say @gmail.com no one ever typos that half.

If your use of G Suite is only for email (and calendar), and if you don’t need phone support, there are better paid options out there that are a lot cheaper. Mailbox.org, Fastmail, Protonmail, Posteo (this one doesn’t allow custom domains) and more.

None of those are better than Gmail.

I’m not sure what you mean, isn’t your experience using G Suite as a paid service?

I think he wants something in between gsuite and free Gmail. A Gmail+ that lets you keep the @gmail address and take out all the spyware.

I think the parent means, why don't they move away from ads in general to get their revenue from paid services, like gsuite.

The last price I recall was $60/user/year (at the default level of storage space). Has the price increased that much, or does this reflect extra storage or other add-ons?

https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

Yeah, they must have the enterprise edition - basic is $5 a month

It’s $25 per month with no contract and that’s for the Enterprise Edition, the one with the most features. I believe it starts at $10/month for lesser editions.

There are three tiers, ranging from $5 to $25 per month per user.

Why are you paying $25? Isn't it like $5 or $9 per user?

Is it still tacky if you actually run your own MTA?

Could you forward your gmail address to your gsuite address and set the gmail address as your reply to?

What does Google Chrome track beyond what you can disable under the Privacy and Security settings, when you're not signed in with a Google account?

1) That's a lot of precursors. Many people want Sync functionality, which Google uses to track your browsing history. And most people don't go through the privacy settings.

2) We don't really know, Chrome is not open-source and it's hard to tell from network traffic, since nowadays pretty much every webpage loads something from a Google server in encrypted form anyways (and with those request, Google could send all kinds of data).

3) For Chromium (which's source code is basis for Google Chrome), this project tries to collect and fix all the privacy-infringing stuff: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

4) There's many ways in which Chrome doesn't actively track you, but infringes on your privacy by just being terrible at protecting it from webpages' tracking. As in millions of lines of code, tens of thousands of design decisions, all made by the biggest tracking company on the planet. No journalist can report about all of these, but it'd be foolish to assume innocence until proven guilty.

A French non-profit named Framasoft [1] started a few years ago an effort named "degooglify internet" [2] and provides several open source solutions that you can self-host or use on their (arguably slowish) servers.

[1] https://framasoft.org/

[2] https://degooglisons-internet.org/?l=en

I’ve used the freely hosted online spreadsheet from Framasoft. It’s somewhat primitive for today, but gets the job done! It will remain one of my goto solutions to use where I need more privacy.

Framasoft is pretty good. I'm sometimes turned off due to the french (I don't speak french at all, my own language and english are already too much).

I can recommend it however.

We've been working on something that has yet to be added to this list, but I feel it's worth mentioning.

It's a self-hosted OS alternative to Google Analytics, much like Matomo (formerly Piwik) but less focused on developers and way more opinionated in terms of what data is visualized.

It's called Fathom Analytics[1]. Eventually we want to provide a paid hosted option much like what Ghost is offering to make sure we can keep on supporting it. For now, our development efforts are paid out of our own pockets.

[1] https://usefathom.com/

[2] https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Hey wanted to know that I'm super excited to see/use fathom -- I've been using Piwik (now Matomo) for a while, but found that it kinda did too much, envisioned myself writing something like Fathom to scratch the itch, glad I don't have to! :)

It looks like fathom has just the stuff I want to see in a nice stripped down view

Hey, that's awesome, we plan not to disappoint.

We'll be setting up a public roadmap over the next few weeks so your feedback while we built this would be very much appreciated!

Also: Awesome AWS alternatives https://github.com/ro31337/awesome-aws-alternatives

One thing that I think would be helpful would be some editorial contextualizing how good these products are. A lot of people would like to incorporate privacy into their decision-making calculus, but not to the exclusion of the quality of the experience. In some of these categories, there are great alternatives. In some of these categories, the alternatives are not serious.

This comment intersects with nemothekid's great comment below which highlights how there are some major player alternatives which, while they aren't OSS and may have some privacy considerations, probably are still worth mentioning as an alternative to Google.

We are facing two issues:

1. Privacy against advertisers 2. Privacy against security agencies.

From my perspective, first issue, is more important than second one. I think Apple does pretty decent job regarding first issue. MS holds second position. Google/FB hold the worst position.

So even though Apple/MS are closed source, I think our privacy will improve considerably just by installing an ad-blocker and sticking to Apple/MS products.

Second issue is more involved and you'd probably need to give up on all sort of mobile devices. On desktop you have to move to Linux/BSDs. No online storage (or at least move to self hosted solution). No hosted email(Or maybe just protonmail, ...). Life becomes tougher, if you decide to improve privacy against security agencies.

People tend to treat privacy as a binary issue. (either no privacy or full privacy). However, as said, majority of people experience much higher privacy just by dumping Google/FB and using an ad-blocker.

Something I'm pondering..

If advertisers can't reach me then why should I be concerned what they collect about me?

I do not see any ads, I use gmail and gcal. Genuine question - I understand I'm still 'the product' as far as they're concerned but it's a broken loop if they don't get my eyeballs. Help me understand anything I'm missing.

I'm currently not motivated enough to move out of google products.

It might sound a bit radical, but I think, even using rival's products to decrease Google's monopoly is an achievement on its own. To be honest, Firefox is somewhat an inferior product compared to Chrome, but I use it just to increase diversity in browser marketplace.

Where exactly does Amazon fit in your picture?

Regarding their cloud business, I think it's fine to use AWS. However, I'm kind of against their online shop, since there are many reports that they abuse their employees in warehouses.

A rule of thumb is that the more you pay for online services, the more pleasant, more privacy-respecting, and better support you have in the services you use. I use email hosts, file hosts, git hosts, and video hosts that are quite expensive, but the cost is totally worth it when you get used to the quality of service and product you get. There is very little reason for a company to sell your data when they make $200/yr from you. Even a slight rumor based on a misinterpretation of their privacy policy could lose them thousands of customers and thus 6 figures, and unlike the free services that couldn't care less if they lost thousands, they try very hard to keep their privacy policies honest and clear. It's just an application of the saying "you get what you pay for."

It would be interesting to check those out - who are the providers?

I don't want to feel like an advertisement, but here are some "expensive" services that make me feel that I'm using their product instead of being their product. The following are some services I'm proud to pay their amount for.

https://www.fastmail.com/ for email

https://vimeo.com/ for 4K HD video uploads

https://www.backblaze.com/ for backup

https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files for sharing files and photos to people

https://www.shopify.com/ for processing payments for my company

https://www.linode.com/ for frontend hosting

https://www.heroku.com/ for app hosting

I don't use online services for calendars, project management, to-do lists, etc. so I can't help there.

After convincing myself to do this kind of a switch, I noticed the experience using open protocols (IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV) on Android isn't perfect.

First of all, I had to buy a 3rd party app that does CardDAV and CalDAV syncing, because unlike iOS, Android doesn't support it natively.

Secondly, IMAP doesn't come close to what I was used to with Gmail. And I'm not talking about the lack of good global search, I mean the general responsiveness when reading emails. No matter which client I use (I currently settled on Outlook), things seem to load for a long time, sometimes freeze, etc.

Thirdly, all the Google supplied apps technically have support for other providers, but the Google account is clearly a first class citizen. E.g. adding/removing a generic IMAP account simply makes it appear/disappear from the sidebar in the Gmail app. You can never truly hide the Google account. You CAN disable syncing, but it will remain in the app and you can easily re-enable it accidentally if you just tap it in the sidebar.

Anyone have similar experience? What do you recommend? Are there any commercial clients with a better user experience? Should I give up and move to iOS?

> First of all, I had to buy a 3rd party app that does CardDAV and CalDAV syncing, because unlike iOS, Android doesn't support it natively.

Android is made by Google and they now have an interest in not promoting open protocols. They are no longer the underdog, so it's in their best interest to push their proprietary protocols. It doesn't always work, the former Google Talk was great because it was light and compatible with XMPP, it all went to shit after Hangouts happened and I'm glad that Hangouts is almost dead.

Either way, you need to recognize that if Android doesn't work well with CardDAV / CalDAV, that's a problem that Google is creating.

> IMAP doesn't come close to what I was used to with Gmail. And I'm not talking about the lack of good global search, I mean the general responsiveness when reading emails. No matter which client I use.

If you're using Gmail, again, that's not fair because their IMAP implementation isn't that great. I haven't had any problems with iOS's Mail or with MailMate (https://freron.com/), in combination with FastMail.

Speaking of which, I use MailMate with my Gmail accounts too, because I love it and all third-party email apps work better with FastMail, because Gmail's IMAP is not standard; e.g. labels are IMAP folders instead of IMAP keywords, so you get duplicate emails and the client needs to do tricks to reconcile the two.

I also use Gmail accounts on iOS and Gmail doesn't do push email on iOS (FastMail does), but I don't mind it so much to be honest. I don't like being bombarded with notifications, so if email notifications from Gmail are a minute late, it doesn't matter.

And it should go without saying that if you want push notifications on Android's Gmail app, then you can't use IMAP. I don't know of any good solutions for Android, I was a user of K9 because it's open source and does push notifications for IMAP, but it's not great.

And now I'm an iOS user because it has better support for open protocols, even if I was a die hard Android fan. I might reconsider for my next phone, I might get back to Android, but when I do, I'll factor in the cost of using open protocols, because it's Android's fault for IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV not working well.

K9 mail with IMAP and DAVdroid for CalDAV (both from Fdroid) work OK for me on Google-free LineageOS.

It's always funny to me to see alternatives to YouTube. The creators I like are on YouTube and rarely anywhere else. So while if I wanted to start vlogging, I might choose Vimeo, I'm tied into going to YT to see the content I want.

It's like saying "for an alternative to NBC, try CBS". OK fine but Cheers airs on NBC, now what.

You can use Youtube as a producer, or a consumer (or both). You are right that as a consumer, you are part of a captive audience.

But as a producer, the others might be a good alternative - especially if you are not trying to monetize and/or rely on YouTube recommendation to get discovered. If you're posting family videos for aunt Mildred, and an instructional video linked to your blog post - then there are perfectly fine alternatives to YouTube - of which most people are completely unaware.

Last week I tried to improve my online privacy and removed all Google products from my life. In short, here's what I did:

1. Replaced my Google G-Suite with Proton Mail and a self hosted Nextcloud The process was fairly easy: Just export all your mails and import them into Proton Mail. After that I've exported Google Drive data, contacts and calendar and imported everything into Nextcloud. This all took around two hours (including the Nextcloud setup).

The only "issue" was dealing with services where I use my G-Suite account as a login, but most of them allowed you to set a password so you can log in with email.

Nextcloud has amazing one click install apps that offer the same features that Google has (video calls, docs, notes etc.).

2. Removing Google from my Android phone For that I flashed LineageOS for microG. The great thing with this is, that you can install and use all apps you normally have but without having Google Services installed. As a PlayStore alternative you can use F-Droid and Yalp Store. Anyone who installed a custom ROM before will have it running in under an hour.

3. Securing my network with a PI-Hole and Proton VPN For devices like my phone, laptop and desktop I installed Proton VPN. As a browser for mobile and desktop I use Firefox with uBlock origin. For everything else (like "smart" devices etc.) I installed a Pi-Hole (basically Easy-List on network level) to remove ads and tracking scripts.

These were only the major steps that I've taken. So far I don't have any regrets about it and I haven't faced any limitations with the alternatives I use now.

If anyone has questions or ideas for further improvement, let me know.

Links: https://protonmail.com/ https://nextcloud.com/ https://lineage.microg.org/ https://protonvpn.com/

People, turn off automatic content download in your email clients. It immediately leaks when and from where you opened my email.

And Search suggestions in browser, when you type into address field.

Are there any clients these days which don't have external content downloading disabled by default?

I know that apple Mail and ProtonMail's are enabled by default. Don't know about others - I don't use them, but I expect it to be same, as defaults are always set for user convenience, not privacy.

You probably should install something like LineageOS to replace stock Android and avoid installing any Google apps/services if you want to be Google-free... (use f-droid or Yalp to find apps). Because if you replace all Google products with alternatives but have a Google service running on your phone 24/7, what's the point?

Absolutely. Last year Google was tracking the location of Android devices that used its push messaging service (so basically all of them) even when privacy features were turned on. Installing a Google-free custom rom is the only solution to prevent this. I have been using LineageOS without Gapps for the past month, and it's worked superbly.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...

One problem that I found with Lineage without GApps (using microG) was that GPS was done for. I couldn't use any map application for navigation, nor book a cab using Uber (their web interface kept denying my payment methods), etc. There were times when I was at a tough spot with friends and family -- trying to book a cab but couldn't. Again, using Uber is sending a tracking signal but it's either that or paying 2x the amount to a local cab.

So google play services is the necessary evil that I have to keep using even after switching to Lineage. I'm back to using them again, but PlayStore and PlayServices are the only two google apps that I have currently. I try getting most of my apps from FDroid -- my filter for "good" apps is mostly how active the repo is, not great but it works.

I've moved my mail over to Fastmail, and looking alternatives to Google Drive (Backblaze B2 is one that I'm thinking of). The problem with all of these non-google alternatives is although they're only slightly inconvenient for me, they're almost impossible for my family to use (B2 for example doesn't have an app).

Funny how a website that announces alternatives to Google Products has a flash of unstyled content because it uses... Roboto as the main body font.

Roboto is a typeface developed by Google...

Using a font developed by Google doesn't help Google track you. Protecting your privacy != doesn't mean rejecting absolutely everything by Google.

> Using a font developed by Google doesn't help Google track you Oh you bet it does, if you load it from googlefonts.com

I think we should all be looking a little harder at Sandstorm.io, and trying to get more Alternatives to Google Products running well on it.

It's hard to explain well, but roughly it lets lay people run cloud software on their own hardware (or in the cloud) with minimal fuss.

I wonder, am I the only one who's actually happy to be a paid up Google customer? I own a Chromebook and an Android phone and have migrated absolutely everything onto google drive, play and photos. It's a wonderfully relaxing compute experience. Everything just works and works well.

Yes I know they're mining data about me and are likely making money off that. But has that actually had a tangible negative effect on my life in any way at all? I'm not aware of anything bad, and their products are a boon to my life.

I've invested in a couple of other web sites to satisfy my requirements (like picmonkey) and have a DigitalOcean account for my VM needs, but that's it.

I installed etar, but I fail to see how this is a replacement for Google calendar. It is a nice app with seemingly identical functionality that still reads and works with my Google calendar feed and seemingly nothing else. If Google still hosts my calendar, then this app isn't providing anything of value privacy wise. Am I missing something here? I've been looking for a Google calendar replacement that respects privacy for years. I hear rumors proton mail might get one at some point... but I'm not holding my breath.

This site is so obviously trying to sell everyone VPN software for affiliate revenue. The aggressive SEO structure is a pretty clear tell. So color me skeptical in terms of their advice.

Google Photos would be the most difficult thing for me to leave behind. Nothing to my knowledge even comes close in terms of functionality. A year or two ago I tried Microsoft's equivalent in OneDrive and it was absolutely abysmal, the web interface barely functioned with a few thousand photos.

Not to mention the search works so well, I don't know how I'd replace it for finding things. I would take an eternity to go back and tag all of my photos.

Alternative to Google Keep: Standard Notes.

https://standardnotes.org.

Encrypted, open source, and cross platform :)

Anyone know why G Suite (the paid version of Gmail) is not considered private? From the site it says they are encrypted, regularly audited by 3rd parties and not used for ads.

I've used alternatives (namely ProtonMail), but the experience is not as good as Gmail.

https://gsuite.google.com/faq/security/

I would like to see more projects that make robust self-hosting easier and friendlier. That would make decentralization of the Internet services actually more fun.

Today, only people who basically live inside terminal emulators have a fair chance of correctly configuring and running a server with mail/webdav/www/webindex/dns/git, and all of that with letsencrypt.

I switched to DuckDuckGo for a while, and noticed I was having trouble finding things. When I then compared specific searches with Google, it was clear to me that I was getting a superior quality of searches with Google. This disappoints me. I would gladly prefer the alternative, but I can’t add many minutes to my day of work trying to find stuff that should be easy.

Advice here is to toss the !g bang on when you think you aren’t getting what you need. AFAIK this is still better than using google itself because the search is from DDG’s servers and not your personal IP (I could be wrong here though)

I was tossing !g in to so many searches that I eventually just switched back to google from duckduckgo and startpage.

The !g bang just redirects to you Google with the search query.

I tried. However

- On Mailbox.org I receive spam. Lots of it. Why? Because they don’t look at message contents in their spam filter. Privacy, remember?

- On other search engines, I don’t find what I’m looking for. Not even remotely.

- Firefox Dev Tools suck. You have to test across all browsers anyway.

In the end, I will keep using G Suite. There is simply no equal alternative, with my own domains for mail and whatnot.

Aside from the philosophical argument that is being had in the comment section, there are obvious services missing. Android, for one, because what good are all these alternatives if you run it on a Google OS and then there are the actual moneymakers, namely Adsense/Adwords. What's the alternative for those? Are there any?

For Android, there's Lineage OS and microG

Again, like I or others mentioned before. If you don't want to be the product, you just have to pay the equivalent of a beer in month [0]. You need a own domain, but who doesn't these days?

[0] https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

This is ridiculous. It is the same company, Ads driven company, you're expecting to be nice just because you paid few dollars.

Some people trust a company to outlive their domain registrations, and hence prefer not to use a custom domain.

A custom domain, commonly of the <firstnamelastname> format, also leaks personal information every time it’s used, whereas a consumer mail provider domain name doesn’t (as long as one chooses a somewhat random address).

Worth mentioning that even in Gmail, emails are no longer used for advertisement. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

So are you saying that a Gsuite customer is not tracked and targeted for ads?

Which of the tiers are you talking about?

Regarding Youtube, the article does not mention PeerTube, which is in beta today and is crowdfunding through a highly trusted French non-profit (Framasoft): https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/peertube-a-free...

You can try it out at https://peertube.cpy.re

Former discussions on HN:

- About the crowdfunding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17153023

- About Peertube: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16714453

My biggest problem with this article is that it doesn’t do anything to address built in tracking google has on many pages. Companies embed little snippets of google JavaScript so they can take advantage of analytics. As a result, google can track you whether you use their products directly or not.

And that's exactly why stuff like uBlock Origin / uMatrix / Disconnect / Privacy Badger is not just ethical, it's almost a moral imperative - they stop that kind of tracking, but not fetching those snippets from Google.

Decentraleyes aids further by moving the CDNs into your own machine, killing even the little tracking enabled by those CDNs.

Right. I recently had to debug an official app to a quite expensive enterprise application and was shocked that everything you do in that app is logged with Google. When I brought this up with the company they were furious. I think they forced them to add an opt out flag. Or at least they tried.

https://prism-break.org/en/all/ and https://www.privacytools.io/ has comprehensive list

Did a little version of this a few years back. Think it still holds up - https://impossiblehq.com/complete-guide-leaving-google/

Nice article as well, you could add Qwant & Searx for search; and Tutanota & Posteo for email (though Posteo is not free); and Mastodon for social, just my two cents.

I used to be a privacy advocate until I realized the futility of trying to thwart the data collectors. Our Information is everywhere whether we like it or not and the only way to avoid its aggregation is by not associating with the world and abandoning the convenience of modern technology. I feel like at some point we just have to accept the loss of privacy to gain better harmony within our communities.

I would recommend The Transparent Society by David Brin to anyone interested in this matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

I could empathize with your viewpoint more if not for the fact the lack of privacy wouldn’t be symmetrical. The middle and lower class will lose all semblance of privacy while the elite will be able to buy it. Case in point Mark Zuckerberg buying up that Hawaiian island.

Not only is it unfair but when the rich are just getting richer them having privacy while no one else does just allows for so many more ways for the poor to get screwed.

I'm glad you mentioned this- something that perplexed me a lot this year about the uproar on privacy is how people expect to have the ability to upload unlimited amount of personal images and videos for free, make internet call for free and somehow don't expect these companies to make money. And privacy is currency unfortunately- if we were in a perfect society everything will be open sourced and like signal all tech companies will be publicly funded- but it's not. We fail to see value in these companies and what they do and instead demonize them. Hopefully someone can let me see what I'm missing.

After DDG recently switched to imprecise search, ignoring what I really search for, the same way as Google does for a while, I don't see any use for it anymore.

Is there another good alternative for precise search? Thanks

Google, enabling the Verbatim option? You can add "&tbs=li:1" to the search query in your browser or use http://mycroftproject.com/google-search-plugins.html in Firefox.

What about Android? Android allegedly collects your data too. If you are running all your apps on an Android phone, all these replacements don't really mean anything.

I want universities back in their role of defining and creating the basic services we need on the internet. Corporations have shown they can't handle it. A few large open source organizations like Mozilla are now doing the work of universities, but they don't have the financial backing of governments, so it's a miracle they even exist.

Corporations can go back to their role of creating hardware. They have no business looking at our data.

Decentralized Google Docs alternative: https://www.graphitedocs.com/

Thanks for posting. Graphite has an alternative to Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Drive, and Google Hangouts. I hope you'll check it out!

I use Nextcloud since a few years now and I have to say I am quite happy.

Sometimes the devs have some awkward attitude towards not supporting the latest stable PHP version with their current version, but overall they do a decent job and every major release brings cool new features. With KDE the desktop integration is quite nice (don't know about other desktops).

So, mail services that actually care about your privacy. Nice. I don't even mind paying BUT...

... are any of them as usable as Google?

Or at least close. GMail's web interface is the only place where I have old email and i can actually find it by searching.

Any of these services offers both imap and a usable web interface?

Thanks for list but I am always worried about what if the new ,safe,better privacy provider is bought by Google or <any company which we are trying to avoid> ? Referring the recent history we have seen many good products just bought up and they changed their business model e.g WhatsUp

I considered many of these alternatives (I am a Google fanboy but wanted to host a few things myself, notably Seafile) but never found any alternative to Docs and their multiuser concurrent edition capabilities. I think this is a know-how particularly difficult to reproduce.

Perhaps I'm off base, but there's an awful lot of other tracking possible by Google - how many sites are pulling fonts, compressed JS libraries, etc from Google but don't have a referer policy defined? Decentraleyes and the like may help, but are they foolproof?

The URL restoreprivacy.com is an interesting choice, considering that the Internet and browsers were never private and weren't designed for privacy. The Internet was designed to be redundant and persistent, both of which are effectively non-private qualities.

I use Nextcloud (files, contacts, calendar, notes), Firefox on all the things and pay for email. My last "things" are the play store and Google maps, I can't seem to shake them (I love paying for good apps and gmaps is the best nav app imho).

Nextcloud looks great! Do they do individual subscriptions? Doesn't seem obvious to me.

EDIT: Seems you have to go through a "provider" https://nextcloud.com/providers/

I will investigate further.

EDIT2: OK, so you can can get a Nextcloud instance through one of these providers. Do you have a recommendation?

As much as i like OpenStreetMaps, i wouldn't really consider it a great alternative for google maps.

Consider making a small application to find the nearest cofee shop. OSM might have 10% of the POI coverage that Google has. And that 10% likely has some stale data.

Throwing Graphite into the mix too. Decentralized Docs, Sheets, Messaging, and File Storage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16490595

Anyone know of an alternative email client that sorts your mail intelligently into promotions, updates, forums, primary like Gmail does? That's had such a positive impact on my productivity I can't leave it behind (I've tried).

It's pretty easy (less than 2 hours work per quarter) to build your own filtering system that works similarly effectively.

Google built a bunch of ML systems that work by default for everyone. Personally, I just have a bunch of filters setup that do the same thing. Has taken minimal effort but some discipline to file incoming emails based on my own patterns.

I use Gmail, but I deactivated that feature. It resulted in too many emails getting missed because they got categorized as promotions or updates.

Here is what I now do instead:

1. I archive all incoming email unless I still need to act on it. Ideally my inbox should always be empty.

2. I unsubscribe from all unwanted email like newsletters and most social network updates.

3. I learned gmail keyboard shortcuts to clear my inbox quickly.

4. I use filters for some mailing lists.

Since I started doing this I am much more on top of my emails. At least for me, most emails in those tabs was stuff I wasn't going to read anyway.

Spark for macOS and iOS can do something similar for any mail accessible via IMAP/POP/Exchange.

Outlook's focused and other segregation works well enough for me. I like the fact that in case of a miscategorization, it gives you very clear and explicit knobs to turn. Gmail classification always remains somewhat mysterious to me.

"intelligently"

I only had trouble with Google's "intelligent" sorting; you're better off with a proper filter system, like sieve, and setting it up for yourself. Eg. I remember reservation confirmations going into "promotions".

if you go under 'privacy checkup' you could easily turn off any data tracking that you don't want to share with google. This website I think is kind of misleading we are not 'surrendering' our data as the website suggest, we are still in control of our own data, and we could control of how much data we want to share or don't want to share with google. And all those sharing also has benefits to increase the user experience. On top of that there is always a paid version like youtube where you don't get to see any ads.

Besides the Gmails alternatives:

1. Mailfence – Based in Belgium – 500 MB free; 20 GB Pro

2. Tutanota – Based in Germany – 1 GB free; 10 GB Pro

3. Mailbox.org – Based in Germany – 2 GB storage

4. Protonmail – Based in Switzerland – 500 MB free; 5 GB Pro

5. * * Runbox.com - Based in Norway * *

They forgot #5, runbox.com

If you use something like protonmail aren't you sending a signal like, "Look at me I've got something to hide!"?

If I were role-playing as some mighty and wealthy intelligence bureaucracy, I'd likely monitor anyone using such services as well as Tor, etc. No?

I do like protonmail btw and am concerned about privacy in general, esp for the maintenance of democracy. And I'm not at all against the intelligence bureaucracies, presuming that their true goals are... to protect and serve, and that they are law abiding and accountable.

+1 for Tutanota, love the fact that you can sign-up without a phone number: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/anonymous-email

self hosted iredmail on a raspberry/old laptop/home server/rented server/VPS?

I pay for Google Apps, $5/month and I'm quite certain the anti-privacy factor is drastically reduced vs when one just freeloads their apps where as the OP says, "you are the product."

I would be interested in hearing any feedback from folks here about the email providers listed in this article. Or any other alternatives that people have had good success with.

Any alternatives to Inbox? It's one of the biggest reasons why i am stuck in the google ecosystem. I can't go back to a normal email interface anymore.

Don't forget https://www.sync.com for secure cloud storage and file sharing.

A few more things...

Google DNS (8.8.8.8) -> Quad9 (9.9.9.9) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1).

Google Domains -> Namecheap or Porkbun.

Google Hangouts -> Wire or Signal.

Google Groups -> Groups.io

At the risk of revealing my ignorance, but how can we trust those alternative services any more than Google?

Any alternatives for Inbox? it's one of the biggest reasons im stuck in the google ecosystem.

I've been doing most of those things for years. Just never got into Google services.

Add Safari for browser, iCloud Drive and iCloud for email, to complete the list.

Unless you live in China. In that case the Chinese government has full unfettered access to your iCloud Drive data and iCloud email.

Alternative to Google Photos?

I would like to add YouPHPTube to this list as an alternative to YouTube.

Check "Prism break" website. Man - humans have short memory.

Any recommendations for a self-hosted alternative for Google Photos?

Why not just turn DNT on? Sure, not all websites respect it, but all Google services do.

Surely should add Safari among Chrome alternatives.

this is awesome

14M Users affected by Facebook Privacy Bug that makes Posts Public

What's wrong with data collection and tracking? Privacy seems extremely overrated here on HN. Am I missing something?

Why would anyone take such efforts to avoid using Google products? That doesn't seem very rational...

There are plenty of discussions on HN (including ones where you've participated) regarding privacy. Different people value privacy differently (and privacy means different things to different people). You may not value it as much as others, and that's fine. Ignoring this as you have here with what appears to be a naïve question amounts to trolling. Please don't.

I'm actually more worried about Google banning my account and every service along with it, and having no way to get it back or even speak to a human about it because I don't have a large Twitter following or a buddy that works at Google.

> What's wrong with data collection and tracking? Privacy seems extremely overrated here on HN. Am I missing something?

Plenty wrong. It seems you're not new here so I'm amazed you asked that question. Have you been living under a rock in 2013?

Just to start, it creates a big power imbalance between consumer and corporations [1] and due to the tightly knit relationship between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley it's also a civil liberties problem [2]. It also screws with your ideology by turning your internet usage into an echo chamber.

And here's some books:

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10384432

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/452645

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/5/digital_disconnect_rob...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16006587-spying-on-democ...

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2309703

[2] https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

I am more interested in the Google specific problems and tracing it back to Larry and Sergey. I have written an essay about one problem: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-moz...

I'm convinced that "privacy tools" have become the homeopathy of computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com