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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

After being a keen Google user in the late 2000s to mid 2010s, I’ve been in on a process of extracting them from my life now their true creepy colours are on display.

YouTube => Deleted

Google plus => Deleted

Gmail => Deleted, switched to Soverin [0], works great, less than $4 per month for 25gb email hosting

Drive => Deleted, moved to iCloud

Docs => Deleted, use iWork for docs and Bear [1] for text

Search => Duck Duck Go, getting better all the time

Chrome => Safari, excellent battery life, good tracking protection

Google Photos => Deleted, moved to Apple photos

Next project is to move my website off of Google Analytics.

I’d love to fully switch to Apple Maps as it’s getting better but don’t know if I fully trust it yet. Google Maps is the gold standard.

[0] https://www.soverin.net

[1] https://bear.app

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Soverin sounds like a good project. What do you make of the fact that the warrant canary hasn't been updated since May, though?

https://soverin.net/warrant-canary

Does Gmail even have a warrant canary? I don't think so, so comparing apples to apples it seems like a wash.

That's a poorly phrased warrant canary. Aren't warrant canaries intended to be for FISA-type warrants?

Aren't warrant canaries valid until removed? Dates on them don't matter.

It says "Up to date as of: 2018-05-22". That seems to imply that it may have been invalidated at some later point. If it is valid until removed, then it shouldn't have a date at all.

Got to assume that anything online is being gobbled up by a security service somewhere.

My email may not be 100% safe (what is?), but at least it’s not being used to sharpen an ad-targeting algorithm.

I used Apple Maps when I had my iPhone and it worked great for me. Loved the UI. When I saw error on the maps, I gave feedback so Apple could improve the thing. I do the same on Google Maps.

I'm using a Pixel 2 XL now and while Google's services are indeed quite good, Apple's own suite of apps worked quite well, too. I like that the image recognition for photos was done on device instead of some remote servers.

Great list, thanks for posting. I've been anti-Google for a long time and never was a fan. The only product of theirs that I find is indispensable is Youtube. They bought it, but it's by far the most useful and enjoyable product they keep going. Google Maps is close and it is the gold standard for maps, but I could get by without it for sure and just stick to Apple Maps.

I'm a Firefox/DDG/Dropbox+OneDrive/Outlook.com guy. No social media.

I just suffer with whatever battery loss I get on my laptops with Firefox. But I do think it draws less than Chrome. I tell people to just use native browsers that are already installed on their laptops for power/performance reasons, with a note that the only other browser that's customizable and powerful enough to be worth sacrificing battery efficiency for is Firefox. I love the features of Firefox and if it weren't so vastly customizable and superior to Edge/Safari I'd use and recommend native browsers only.

I do tend to prefer Apple and Microsoft over Google but that's a long held bias of mine. I didn't care for Google when they were popular with everyone in the early days of Chrome's release. Hated Google before it was cool, hipster Google hater.

The sad thing is, you just confirmed they‘re doing the right thing. They probably still make money with you as youtube, analytics, adwords „user“ and they never got a dime from you with the products you stopped using (except ads on Search perhaps). Their net income from you probably increased when you stopped usig their free products.

I understand most of the switches, but unfortunately any gmail address you correspond with will eventually tag and index you. Its difficult to fully separate your email history from Google when the whole market has been colonized.

What I'm trying to say is your data will be accessible by Google servers regardless of which email service you use -- so why the paid switch?

How is Soverin delivery? It's the first time I've heard of them so they don't seem to have been around for many time. Newer mail companies sometimes have problems delivering to Microsoft or Yahoo servers. Can you comment on that? I'd be very interested to switch.

I’ve not had a problem so far, but then I don’t know many people who still use Yahoo or hotmail email addresses.

My wife’s company use Exchange and I haven’t had any trouble there.

About Soverin — how is the spam filtering?

Ruthless spam filtering without false positives is Gmail’s “killer app”, with insane scale and network effects protecting that lead.

I’ve noticed a bit more spam, but not hugely so. Apple Mail’s spam filtering has caught everything pretty well.

A few years ago, when I was using gmail my address got used as the sender on a spam campaign and I was overwhelmed for weeks. Had nothing like that so far.

Maybe I’ve been lucky.

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