Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
degoogle.jmoore.dev
degoogle.jmoore.dev
The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail).
Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is.
On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one).
One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc.
I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too).
The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube.
Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose.
They better hope their ad revenue doesn’t decay.
I do mean an entire day, I basically did it for 12 hours.
Have to find some ways to entertain myself during the pandemic lockdown :).
So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.
This is what I did for password manager, I migrated each website on a per-use basis. Every time I used a website with a manual password, I replaced it with a generated password. This automatically prioritizes more important websites, which you tend to use more often.
For email, similarly, you migrate to the new email, and you give people the new one gradually too. Eventually anything that's left over will be spam, and that'll actually be your "less-important" secondary address you can give to websites you don't care about.
Published "privacy policies" seem to be a way of preserving opacity. It is nigh impossible, absent litigation discovery, to decipher what the company is actually doing.
I too switched to Fastmail and have been happy. I have a new Google account I use with YouTube and very occasionally Google Docs/Sheets, but I run it in a container tab in Firefox.
If you have a password manager and have been using it for awhile it makes things a lot easier since you can identify what you have tied to the account. I had over 100 sites tied to my GMail account and was able to mostly clean it up in a Saturday.
Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.
It‘s hard to leave google completely behind.
Edit: Replaced Chrome first with Safari, then with Firefox and never looked back.
Edit 2: Moved all my photos from Google‘s cloud solution to iCloud when I migrated from Android to iDevices.
Edit 3: Fastmail (although a rather smallish company) do a phantastic job with their mail service. Their contact management and calendar are also superb. Fastmail + MailMate on MacOS are a dream-team.
I was trying to rotate non-image / non-word-art text in a Google Docs table cell the other day and it’s literally impossible. I ended up having to create it as word art and position it as an image so it appears to be in the table but actually is on top of it
When I searched for Google support threads on how to rotate text in Docs, I only found forum posts by Google support agents stating that you can’t do it, which read to me approximately as “fuck you go away.”
I hate using Office 365 with a passion. The usability is horrible. Google Docs is much more pleasant.
But in any environment where privacy or security matters, I'd pick it over Google Docs in a heartbeat. In my day job, I work with data with compliance issues. We use Microsoft technologies and zero Google. As obnoxious as Office 365 is, that's the right choice.
Google Docs, on the other hand, the things it does, it does well:
1) Works reliably and without bugs. Last Word document I worked with began crashing Word at some point.
2) Works collaboratively. Google Docs keeps docs in sync in realtime. Office 365 has enough lag to suck at collaboration.
3) Keeps better versioning and version history. Word has a half-dozen different ways to do this, none of which are as good. Again, this is important for collaboration
4) Works better with people outside your organization.
The things it doesn't do, well.... it doesn't.
I've never had issue with Google Docs around UI speed. I have with Word. I think part of the reason is the simpler document structure and format.
In addition, Google Docs has working search tools (so you can find documents), albeit not great organization tools.
For most of my work, I'm not doing fancy formatting or other crap. I'm writing plain text, often on a team. For that, Google Docs would kick Microsoft's butt, if I trusted Google to allow me to comply with legal requirements (Google makes clear I shouldn't), and if I trusted Google not to disconnect my account tomorrow, based on some ML algorithm which decides I look like a scammer, or randomly discontinue something I'm using mid-document.
I don't collaboratively edit documents with people - I'd rather send them a version, take comments/revision, go through the comments and decide, instead of having them change the document text without my knowledge.
As for my use case I use spreadsheets.
I make spreadsheets that query databases and perform analyses and then spit out reports. Anyone with excel, db permissions, and the right db connector can use them. Google's version doesn't even have half the features I'd need to get it to work when I checked a little earlier this year.
The UI on google sheets is brutally slow and painful to use compared to something running not in the browser. Maybe I'm an odd case because most of my files have tens or hundreds of thousands of rows.
also, on point 4, I think this is some kind of computer tech bubble. once you go away from computer tech, google sheets is not great with people outside my organization because they're all expecting excel.
You seem to have an odd, complex workflow which is representative of 0.001% of the population. I'm glad Excel works for you. Microsoft does well with a number of complex oddball legacy workflows, full of VBA macros and what-not.
Your style of working collaboratively isn't very collaborative. Google Docs does allow that (you can share with suggesting changes), but for the most part, there's a gap between getting feedback on a document, and working together on one. I find version control to be super-helpful too; it's not like I don't see the changes after someone makes them.
Try Searx[1]. It's a search engine aggregator that works with DDG, Google, and dozens of other search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances.
There even are some which are accessible over Tor.
Sometimes I still fall back to Google but if that was becoming the norm on DDG, not anymore.
Another thing that helps is configuring custom search engines on Firefox. For example, for me typing `gh something` in the address bar does a GitHub search directly and so on.
Not necessarily better data sources, but different data sources and a slightly different approach.
For organic results, the biggest different is that Runnaroo uses Google as the base for web results (similar to Startpage) where DDG uses Bing.
Outside of the organic results, Runnaroo's strategy is to integrate results from different vertical specific search engines who specialize in a niche topic. I call these 'Deep Searches' because they are essentially pulled from the database of the vertical source. It's the difference between getting an link to a website's home page vs. landing on the page and using their own search function to see the results.
For many queries, I believe this can provide higher quality SERP. For example, see the below results for "parkinson research" [0] or "react.js" [1]. The results are a lot more informationally dense than other search engines. Again, not necessarily better, but different.
DDG is still better for many queries(currency conversions, weather, etc), and definitely more polished, but I only launched Runnaroo a few months ago and new features and Deep Search sources are being added almost daily.
So TL;DR, Google results (with privacy) plus additional search results from relevant niche and authoritative sources.
It is. We integrate the Google results through their web search API, and comply with their usage terms of service (as we do with all the data partners we integrate).
"Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal worth mega-millions"
Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
I didn’t have a really strong need for either though and I do use iCloud to sync among my apple devices.
They are not used for anyone outside China.
But if it hadn't, then probably this: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/...
Dropbox was such a great and conceptually simple tool, having a kernel extension for smarter syncing feels like a step into Enterprise lala land.
I also wondered why she dropped out of public for a while, for current events.
Another feature lacking is sharing with a non-resilio user is not possible with Resilio Sync.
https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announces-goa...
The blog post only talks about integrating Keybase's team - no mention of their product.
"Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice."
No update since. Keybase still works (and I use it constantly), but will it be around in two years?
They're both for-profit US companies saving your data overseas, so yes, for your last point it doesn't matter much. However, there are two advantages:
1) You're giving your data to a company aiming to sell you storage space vs a company which tries to make money of selling your (meta-)data, where selling storage space is only a minor accounting item. This also gives clear priorities: Dropbox loosing or being caught selling your data is a big reputation hit to them [0], while for Google it would neither change their reputation nor their total revenue by much.
2) You're not putting your eggs in one basket. If you're all in on Google, loosing your account does kill your calendar, contacts, mail, storage (possibly with the backups you need right now) ... . Also, that one company has basically full access to your life. If you're using diversified services you're far less likely to suddenly loose access to multiple services [1] and those services only own a part of your data vs your whole life [2].
Concluding this, selfhosting surely is the superior solution. But if you must use external storage providers (i.e. as worst-case backup or due to lack of money/space for own servers), choosing Dropbox over Google has its advantages.
[0] Yes, I'm aware it has happened.
[1] Assuming 2FA and a reasonably secure mail service, of course.
[2] One could argue that Google is going to guard your data with world-class engineers while the other services are probably less well equipped and therefore you have an increased risk of (at least!) parts of your data being leaked. That's personal risk management, though, and the consensus seems to be diversification.
You go on to partly refute this, but not strongly enough. Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security. Unless you spend all of your time managing your personal storage solution, self-hosting will be far inferior in these respects, and probably also in cost if a true accounting of time is included.
Availability: Raspberry Pi plus USB battery pack is more available than the Internet, since when my home power's down my Internet connection goes.
Durability: Have you ever heard of a Raspberry Pi dying?
Security:
sudo apt install unattended-upgrades
echo "0 4 * * * reboot" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab
I'd not go as far. You can have your setup behind a VPN on a high port, go for distributed storage (for example at your home and at your parents) and be rather secure with a stable, auto-updated distribution. Cold backups could be an encrypted blob in a cloud or a tape somewhere.
Now, of course this needs quite some upfront investment in time and money; without a solid setup, I fully agree that the cloud is superior (unless your prefer your data lost over read by the NSA).
Other than that, it mostly boils down to risk management: A third-party hacker might have an easier time with your network than Google or Dropbox, but being script-kiddie save is not that hard [0], so it needs to be someone with time and skill. TLAs can't simply subpoena your data, so it might be harder for them - unless your home network is setup badly [1] or they're willing to possibly burn a zero-day. Your day-to-day ad agency is not going to lay hands on your data. It really boils down to what aspect you optimize for; given the grandparent, I assumed it to be privacy and therefore selfhosting to be probably better. But I should've been clearer on that :)
[0] Yes, mistakes happen, but big corporations have also been hacked with trivial exploits, so let's call it even.
[1] This also poses a danger to your login data, though, so the Cloud security team does not help either.
That might be true, but I'm not sure. Outside of local searching I am skeptical of the benefits of filter bubbling.
I think it is just as likely that you and your brother have different opinions of relevance (even if you were both returned the same exact results unrelated to past activity), and the relevance decisions Google makes more align with your brothers perspective.
I am the creator of one of the search engines [0] named in the post. It will return the same exact organic results no matter who you are or what your prior searches were. Feel free to give it a go with your brother and see how it compares for both of you. For organic results, it works like DuckDuckGo does with Bing, but the difference is the main source of our organic results are actually from Google.
Now go to DDG and search for "tires". Useless results only. All advertisements and commercial results, but nothing relevant to me. "Getting out of my filter bubble" did not help me in this use case.
I bought a large refurb iPad Pro and pencil this spring. Presumably a high value segment, since YouTube, amazon and google keep on pushing me iPad related ads and content for months now, for things I have already bought, out of my own research.
I guess I’ll have to fake some baby related purchases to have their focus changed.
I have yet to find a case where "profiling" benefits me, as a user.
That's actually a really interesting example. The tire sizes for a 2020 Honda Insight EX are either 215/55/16 or 215/50/17 [0].
So taken at face value, the filter bubbling was either incorrect or Google was just returning results for a very common tire size in this case.
I agree that context is important, but Google doesn't return results blindly when they are not able to do personalization. They already know the results that millions (billions?) of other people who have searched for tires have clicked and found relevant.
I've been using it for a few years now and I can't complain.
You can delete the number once you've signed up, though of course that means that if you forget your password is reduces the channels by which we can validate that you're the same person! (this is also quite common: many HN users would be surprised how often people forget passwords)
- iCloud
- iCloud syncs to my Windows PC
- Backblaze backs up my Windows PC
- Google Drive
- One Drive
How's the iCloud syncing to a Windows PC?
In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).
> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
I have the same experience; I’ve tried switching multiple times, but at least for scientific topics, I find DDG far inferior to Google Search. My current workaround is to use StartPage.com, which is just a website that searches Google for you, but without letting Google track you.
> Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.
If you don’t need to actively publish or comment on videos, you don’t need a Google account to get most of the convenience of YouTube. Personally, I just use a good old RSS client to track my YouTube feeds in the same place I track other content (e.g. HackerNews posts). If you say that you use iDevices, I can recommend “News Explorer”, which syncs your feeds via iCloud (in contrast to all the RSS solutions that require a separate sync account).
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the kind words!
However, for me, the problems are: Maps. Google Maps are great. Calendar: my calender provider online has ICS calendar sharing, not e.g. itip.and imip.
Drop-in replacement for same/less cost & better privacy while supporting a slightly better cause? I'm switching tomorrow.
YouTube has the content I want to watch, creators that use YouTube rely on it for their revenue and recommendation algorithm.
Until that problem is fixed the alternatives won’t work.
Or moving to Nebula. Somehow https://watchnebula.com/ gained a lot of attention recently with maybe half of my yt subscriptions also publishing there. (Or maybe it's just my bubble)
For following channels, I personally use Feedly and can only recommend it - it's not exactly the same but for me it comes close enough.
I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.
On just principles, I tried switching to DDG, Gmail alternatives like Hey etc, Maps alternatives but they are not even close to making your life easy. At the end of the day, I really don't want to take time categorising every email, handle spam on my own, worrying about data security. Services like Gmail seem far superior to alternatives to me.
Edit: Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people.
I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average).
Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use.
DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).
The thing is as you mentioned, with something as personal as email, docs or drive, I would trust a big company to keep it safe. Specially one that has historically has had a very good track record of it. Google hires some of the best offensive security guys, some of them you can see in Project Zero.
My experience with DDG hasn't been good at all with anything other than simple term search or website search.
I like supporting software companies where the product is their main focus (I think the ad driven business model is a corrupting influence on design).
It can also be tedious to go through all the settings and make sure things remain the way a user would want them. I like working with a company that has incentives aligned with the user.
On DDG, I would have said the same thing not that long ago. Everyone will have their own threshold for what’s good enough for them.
I use G Suite at work, and I wondered about this. From Google's modus operandi, I assumed they are mining data, for example, of all work emails to and from the accounts - and probably connected to my personal email addresses somehow, as part of a profile to target ads.
Is there a confirmation that this is not (or is) being done? I suppose, from a security/privacy perspective, it's safer to assume that it is, because it's technically possible.
I have two chromium profiles, one for work using a G Suite account and one using my personal gmail account. I've noticed the browsing history and search from my work profile impacting my personal search results.
I don't believe they use G Suite email/docs to mine data, but the rest is likely fair game.
Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.
It also might be related to all the smart auto compose/grammar features they have been adding, which do really improve your workflow but might add just more resources to load/parse on page load.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
I think it's wrong and something they shouldn't do.
I can't be the only one that has noticed this over the years.
I had actually thought of building such things as a startup idea before Gmail was doing it. Perhaps I should have; perhaps Google would have just eaten my lunch.
My only potential concerns are: spam (I still get most email to my gmail address and imported by fastmail, which filter out spam on the gmail side, so I don't have a good sense of their own spam filter), and overall security (their own production security as well as resistance to account takeovers, etc.)
Perhaps the change was made more difficult by the fact that you changed two variables at once: the OS (macOS -> Ubuntu) and the hardware (Macbook -> ThinkPad). Something to consider.
There are times when that is true, and there are times when it is simply a matter of adapting to the differences. For example, you mentioned trying a ThinkPad with Ubuntu after using a MacBook. You claimed that the MacBook seems to be at the sweet spot. It reflects your experiences so that's a fair assessment. Yet my experience in moving from a MacBook to a Linux PC was quite the opposite. A significant factor was my extensive prior experience with Linux, as well as a desire to reap the benefits of Linux (rather than to escape the drawbacks of the MacBook).
> Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
Don't confuse "pay for" and "ad free" with "no data mining". At least with consumer goods, companies were mining data from paid products well before the Internet was a thing. I also wouldn't be surprised if Google mines some data from business accounts, even if the scope of that data collection is severely limited.
What do you think they do with the data?
Their privacy policy mentions they don't scan gsuite customers data and they were auditted by a 3rd party: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en
Now some aspects of how businesses conduct business is somewhat of a "practical reason."
For example, even if Apple products actually provided decent cost/performance ratio, I would never switch over to them because of how hostile they are to leaving their ecosystem. I don't have a huge problem, as a user, with more nebulous complaints about hostile business practices and the like. The issue is simply that it would be a pain in the ass for me personally, and require making a lot of annoying compromises, or swapping to more, and less effective apple hardware.
Like if we roll back the clock to 2015 when MBP's are probably hands down the best business laptops, from a hardware standpoint I'd love one compared to alternative laptops, and at least for a work-only computer when I have zero other devices and interactions to worry about, it could be a decent option.
Don't like some of the ways they do business? Who cares, I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot on general principle.
The difference with google services is a lot more stark though, there's nothing I would even remotely consider competition to gmail now, and the things were only worse when gmail first came out. These days migrating would be an absolute nightmare. I'd still do it if someone offered me a way better option, but people in this thread are talking about downgrading to some shite service on general principle, causing themselves significant pain in the ass in order to give some other company that definitely does not give a shit about acting in some morally upstanding way money, for a lower quality product.
There's no replacement for youtube, and frankly video services are are starting to look like a natural monopoly to dwarf all prior uses of the term, as youtube could never survive outside of google's business model, and can't be split up without just destroying it completely.
So anyway, I don't think people are being all that honest about their "switch from google" being ever so easy and worthwhile. Personally I lose a lot by swapping purely because the alternatives are shit, so I won't be doing it.
People switching from android to iPhone because "goOgLe bAd" are the height of irony though.
If I did I would need a google account just for that purpose.
My email style is inbox everything and route emails to folders or delete on read.
If there’s something I’m always routing without reading then I unsubscribe.
Workflow may not be for everyone, but it keeps my email under control and organized.
I also have a lot of email for record keeping (amazon orders etc.) I just route those to folders myself.
You’re right though that I probably have it easier than most generally.
This is particularly true when most of the people you’re emailing have gmail anyway.
Things like proton mail make no sense to me in that context.
Fastmail works well and has design incentives aligned with the user, I thought they were the best of the options available when I switched.
As I understand it the oversight is relatively minimal and any company operating on Australian soil can be subject to such a request. Here's their government web page on it: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
It passed around the end of 2018 and a lot of Australian companies (e.g. Atlassian) were not fans of it.
Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.
Also, they are currently collaborating with sourcehut to develop a new webmail client to replace RainLoop. For the record, I like RainLoop quite a bit and find it to be very speedy.
So even though I'll barely use it at all I signed up for Migadu only so that I could have a look at the webmail UI. But I couldn't even get a look at it, likely because I have yet to configured my domain. But I will not disrupt my domain just to get a peak at the UI...
Thanks!
I had been keeping on there my side-project domains, which didn't really need a full gSuite backing them, since only a handful of emails would go in or out per month.
If Migadu's were a more reasonable price, I would have shrugged and upgraded. But going from $0/mo to $29/mo is a stretch.
Fortunately for me, the new Micro plan works fine, but at this point, I think services like Mailbox.org might provide greater value compared to the upper tiers.
The 5-domain limit on the Micro plan is also a "soft" limit, and support has implied to me that you could negotiate something that works for you if need be.
I haven’t deleted the old account yet and do have it importing right now (that’s a good strategy for catching any straggling accounts or friends you haven’t given your new email too).
I don’t have a good answer beyond some weird sense of aesthetic tidiness. I have a dash of wanting to compulsively organize things, so having the old account bothers me irrationally.
Still use YouTube and Google search. They have no (decent) competition still.
Every time google has done something to piss me off over the last few years, I have channeled that into migrating a few accounts away from google. It's a good way to unwind and has the bonus of being an action that speaks louder than words.
But this goes to show how basic the opsec is for some companies. Similarly with Twitter, each time I create a dev account for a bot, if I use fastmail my account will get locked 3-4 times in the first 20 minutes after creating the account (and not so with gmail). I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account, and are more likely to use fastmail.
Because it requires a phone number? Or does fastmail do too?
But, so does a twitter dev account. And they still lock me out like crazy if I use a non-gmail account.
absolutely great to see you do this
I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts
Anyways
Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.
Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened
They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that
Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google
Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone
Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari
Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either
avoid all google services as mucha s possible
Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games
Search - I use Startpage, DDG, Mojeek
Why not use LineageOS with microG? Aurora Store and f-droid for installing apps. It works pretty well for me.
What you state has nothing to do with that. If I understand you right, you are saying that you should be more worried in China than in the U.S. overall. That might be true, I can't judge. I can imagine there are rules in China too, maybe they are just not so pleasent? And I suspect some folks in Portland have some mixed feelings about the "just kidnap" part too.
At some point, if China is the comparison point you always cite when someone talks about the US, it starts to seem like they are actually comparable.
Agree. It would become a little easier if all major broadcasters would at least mirror their youtube content on other networks like Peertube. That would not solve the recommendation problem to discover new videos, but at least the hosting itself would be taken care off this way.
Creators rely on them to drive traffic though and that's part of what makes YouTube sticky for producers.
The creators remain incentivized to use YouTube as a platform because they can leverage the recommendation algorithms to drive traffic to their content.
While this remains true YouTube is here to stay.
People will go to where the content is. The content will go to the platform that makes it easiest for them to build an audience.
You have the Pinephone nowadays. You will lose a lot moving from Android to a Linux based phone, especially if you rely on native applications.
https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-revi...
Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.
For privacy and security oriented folks, there’s Puri.sm Librem 5 phone that looks interesting. I wouldn’t mind buying one if the reviews are good.
I am particularly excited about the removable battery! Anyone has any hands on experience with the phone? Links/resources would be highly appreciated!
Outlook decided it would be a nice idea to change my "Thank you" signature to an emoji in a business casual email.
For mobile, I use an Android for all the apps I can't avoid not having, but otherwise I resort to Blackberry like the old coot I am. My Q10 is still reliable af.
I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with bookmarks or navigating Google. Getting familiar with bang queries I think makes you have a much less siloed view of search.
I guess I'm stuck with Google search.
Just define a search engine with the search string "duckduckgo.com/!g%20%s".
Maybe a couple years ago. I can't remember getting better results with Google over DDG more than once or twice in the past two years.
One more search engine to try is qwant.com.
For phone just use microg lineage (https://lineage.microg.org/) and use aurora store instead of play store (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/) for apps.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_an...
For now, lineage is as good as it gets, sure, I would love to have patched OS, withoug google etc., but for now there is really not much of alternatives available for various models of phones, and quite frankly - probably more than half of android phones are vulnerable, unpatched etc. let me just mention latest DSP vulnerabilities. At least attack surface isnt that big :D
Its on the eyes of beholder.
--- update ---
Looks like I am moving away from android today.
https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Cosmo_Linux_Mobile...
Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux: https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html
In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.
I suppose I'm saying this is a complaint about macOS and/or Windows, rather than about Firefox as such ;)
I would include Maps to this list. Outside of the US (and presumably China although I do not have experience here), Google Maps has no real competitors.
I have this problem on Steam of all places. Way back when, I guess you had to sign up with your email as your username. I've long long since left that email behind, but it's still my username for logging onto Steam.
Interesting, how do they such sites deal with people who lose their email account (phishing or others?)
the reason people use their search is that it's default -if it was bing no one will notice. ads? super customized ads are not worth the money to companies, lighter cheaper personalization is available from many vendors.
google literally is yahoo.
to tech people -the ones who made google what they are, google is actively their enemy, and for the regular user, they want an iphone, and they want customer service with a smile -google has none.
me, i never googled-up. zoho for $1 a month, create new aliases for spam and filter them into folders. no gmail needed. maps? apple for iphone is ok, but i just use heremaps. you click a country, click download, and a couole of gig later you have full search offline.
now youtube, that's an interesting product that's only popular because it's popular. and it was popular before google bought it. there are many unpopular competitors. all it takes to take down youtube is an app for another service included by default on samsung and iphone home screens, and youtube is gone.
the same goes for facebook and twitter. myspace, yahoo, aol -all had their 15min of fame, all thought it would last forever. who cares. google is old news.
Have you considered this in your threat model?
In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law).
You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.
Yeah this is all fine once you have accepted the trade offs and designed your threat model around it. People get extremely zealous around this sort of shit.
One decision for another person does not need to be taken by everyone else just because it makes sense for you.
I, like you am concerned about the use of data but I take a different approach. I don't mind if my data is used for product insight/generation once it is aggregated anonymized data, with the caveat that the website and or service is GDPR compliant.
I give bonus points to any website that lets you nuke your account from the profile page without having to jump through e-mail hoops. I had a recent experience of requesting an account erasure under GDPR via e-mail. I expected the usual "are you sure?", "do you know the implications?", "who are you?" but no they just deleted the account straight away. I only found out it had been done by trying to login to the service again.
10/10
For me, google docs was the hook that made me create another account. Every volunteer project I go near uses them.
I tried creating aliases for the projects so that each product team could reference me by an email address that reflected the project. But after a year or two I had loads of these aliases and would accidentally open a doc for one project whilst logged in to gdocs as the identity for another project.
I now just have one identity for google. And I feel dirty.
edit: Let me say some nice things about them. I put them towards the end for a reason, and they probably don't belong with Oracle. I don't think they are a big problem in the world, if at all. They aren't the company they were in the 90s. Gates has become one of the worlds most staggeringly successful humanitarians because of his direct effort and indirectly from the giving pledge, and it has redeemed him many times over again. Nadella seems like a decent person and truly great executive, and they have improved enormously as a company under him. I would probably work for them. But I don't have any problem with Google, either. What Microsoft does have is a vastly greater potential for abuse.
Sure you can go and use the items on this list. But I don't think they will be better. Google has spent a lot of time and money to make a set of best in industry tools and people use them as a result.
Oh so they just don’t think about it at all. To be product focused is just to do what your boss tells you to do. Sometimes the easiest way to go about things is just to fully embody one’s role as a cog with no agency.
To answer another part of your question - I strongly believe in my mission, I consider what I do at Google helps people, that said I'm not deluded, I'm partly helping to sell ads, but that doesn't detract from my primary objectives or the beneficial impact of my work.
The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.
There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.
Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.
I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.
That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.
I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.
My own personal views, not Google’s.
1. I find most criticism of Google on HN either wrong or overblown. To clarify this point, I suggest you name the 5 worst things that come to mind about Google; I'll be happy to explain how I feel about them.
There is one significant moral issue I see with Google: they like to collect and hoard massive amounts of user data, and they have a lot of users so the resulting centralization of data creates a big risk. Note that the issue I see is "only" a risk. I'm not even sure what the concrete bad scenarios are that would make Google specially bad when the risk is realized, but I'm sure they exist.
2. I think they do a lot of good, which far outweighs the issue mentioned in point 1. Here are the 5 best things that come to mind right now:
- They do amazing good for open source. I have seen Google criticized for "paying lip service to open source" or worst, which I find laughable. They have published 3 open source operating systems (Chromium OS, AOSP, Fuchsia). They have created a huge number of very useful open source libraries I have been using for personal and professional project, from big ones like Flutter and gRPC to small ones like libyuv.
- Related: they do a lot of good for open standards. Case in point: their work on open, royalty-free video codecs, which has been a boon for open source. I have seen Google called evil on HN for this, which again harms the credibility of their detractors in my eyes. Even for Google Chat / Hangout / whatever, for which they got criticized a lot, I think it's fair to say they tried harder than all the other big players to make it work with an open standard before giving up.
- They have been a driving force for a more secure Internet: early use of https for webmail, 2-factor authentication, lately ubiquitous https...
- They have been leaders in giving users access to all their data, with the Data Liberation Front / Takeout.
- They are the most transparent when it comes to the privacy policies and collected data (for example I get prompts to check the policy whenever I do something in Incognito mode). And relaed to the previous point: the My Activity page is awesome! It helps realize what they collect on me, and it makes the collected data actually useful to the user. For example I used it to find a place I knew I had visited on a given day, though I had forgotten the name and location.
They quote from Google's application for .dev in 2013: "The proposed gTLD will provide Google with direct association to the term 'dev', which is an abbreviation of the word 'development'. The mission of this gTLD, .dev, is to provide a dedicated domain space in which Google can enact second-level domains specific to its projects in development."
Google finally opened it to registration in 2019, four years later: https://www.theregister.com/2019/02/21/google_launches_dev/
(Google also added .dev to the HSTS preload list so browsers expect names in that domain to only be reachable via HTTPS, thus breaking in-house uses of .dev.)
Anyone using .dev for that was already broken per the spec. There are TLDs for those cases, they are .test, .local and .invalid.
Just how many parts of the stack does Google have its fingers in?
EDIT:
Consider this:
1. a user at home, wearing a Fitbit walks over to their computer, with their Nest camera recording their movements
2. they open their Chromebook, which uses Chrome OS
3. browses to their Gmail inbox with Chrome, and clicks on a link in one of their emails, sent by a friend using a Google Pixel phone running Android.
4. via their Fiber ISP
5. using Public DNS (8.8.8.8)
6. transfers between the US and Europe via the Grace Hopper subsea cable
7. transfers with HTTP/2 (based on SPDY)
8. to the website on the .dev TLD.
Google is in every step above. Thankfully the webpage doesn't use AMP, or Google would be in that step as well. And good thing it's not a page built on Angular, or hosted in Google Cloud...
As noted in https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle/blob/master/MIRRORS.md for GitHub Pages: "I am using my personal domain as some firewalls block GitHub"
To be quite honest I would prefer to not use GitHub either, but in the interest of easy collaboration GitHub is the optimal platform to manage the project from.
Don't get me wrong: I totally agree with the irony of using a Google TLD. But as @franksvalli said, I do not use AMP, Angular, or Google Cloud. Any tracking done on that page is from GitHub Pages that I do not have control over, unless I make my own auto mirror for that domain.
Another thign to be aware of is that unusual combinations of filtering and other privacy-seeking behavior on the Web is usually detectable, and can permit you to be fingerprinted better than if you'd been using more common combinations. Though presumably most parties don't care enough to put the work into detecting that, I'd guess some subsets of users probably are targeted for at least experiments in this regard, such as Tor users. (I have this "problem" myself now, since I've been building a training/familiarization set of 10K+ Web request filtering rules, which I dogfood with uBlock Origin in Tor Browser, and the set is pretty unique to me. If I cared more about my immediate personal privacy, rather than on ongoing understanding of practical Web privacy&security, I wouldn't do all that counterproductive work, but would instead pick some popular stock stuff to run.)
I especially don't recommend ClearURLs, Privacy Badger, Decentralays. Users or these are begging for problems [1]. Look at how bloated their code is. Prefer smaller extensions focusing on one thing only.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/g2dett/firefox_75_...
I moved most of my custom domain emails off Google some months back and onto Microsoft 365 and it's honestly a great experience.
I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that eliminates a lot of spam and commercial sites to allow users to find small sites made by real people, just like in the early days of the web. I hope it’s not just a nostalgic impulse. I’m going to investigate it myself after I graduate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
Edit: forgot to add the link for [1]
Sure, if I just care about US specific results and I am doing an exact term search or maybe StackOverflow result is my target, DDG comes close but Google gets context of things much better. I keep finding much better search results that had more context with my search. I don't know how to quantify/measure this but to me Google Search is still much better.
Same. I sometimes even type '!g' into Google itself by mistake
I often do want results from commercial sites such as nginx.com, but I want results that real people have found valuable and not results that some paid blog post linked to.
I recently de-googled myself almost completely (still have a couple domain names with them, still use YouTube). Yeah Apple has their own issues going on too, but I am just happy to be mostly cut out from the Google madness.
Apple is saintly by comparison.
jackiechan.jpg
You can avoid Apple by not using anything from Apple. Done.
That's how I lived for most of life when I still used Windows. Not one encounter with Apple. Now, I haven't used anything from Microsoft for 10 years until they bought GitHub.
But you'll always be feeding Google just by visiting completely unrelated third-party websites.
Google (like Facebook) fits most definitions of cancer, creeping into places where it doesn't belong.
My plan:
- use a custom domain for my email (actually done this already)
- switch to Fastmail instead of Gmail
- update all services I have signed up for
- remove any important docs off of Google drive and either switch to sync.com (they have E2E encryption) or use syncthing
- I've already started using syncthing to sync my keepassxc DB between all my devices
- start monthly backups of the rest of my Google drive but still continue to use it (this includes all my Google Photos as well) onto a local NAS (which I have yet to buy, suggestions welcome)
- I've already switched to FireFox on both desktop and Android as my main browser but I still use Chrome as well, just more for work
I still plan on using Google products but I just want to make sure if they go away or if their algorithm mistakingly decides one day that I've violated something and locks me out without recourse that I'm not totally screwed.
It started with downloading Firefox on desktop and web. I love Firefox mobile. It's performant and supports multiple tabs. Also comes in Dark Mode.
Next came email, which was difficult. I'm still transitioning. Protonmail was my pick because of the price point and ProtonCalendar (currently in beta). Gmail and Gcal are deeply integrated and wanted an alternative that could offer a similar experience. The only con here is that ProtonCalendar is web only (please support on mobile soon, Protonmail!).
Duckduckgo is a solid search alternative. Results are quality. Between these services, browsing is a joy again.
One reason why our web became so successful is Decentralization. But, in recent years I feel like we are heading to more and more centralized web, where only a few big companies control the entire ecosystem. Take email and instant messaging as an example. Everybody can maintain it's own, independent mail service, but everybody can still communicate with each other. On the other hand there are very few messaging services that are totally incompatible to each other. Depending on where you live, you might only use iMessage, Whatsapp or WeChat. Even tough it may be technically possible to use other services like Signal or Threema, you are most definitively going to experience a lot inconveniences. In my personal bubble only very few use these apps and as if that were not enough, these few users are also distributed across a wide variety of different services. If it were like mail, everybody could use his/her preferred messaging system and still talk to each other.
Thats only one example and I dont want our web to be like Whatsapp in a few years from now. So I encourage everybody to try and use his own infrastructure. You are also going to learn quite a bit while doing so.
If you are unsure about where to start, here is a nice list of awesome self hosted services, that are relatively easy to deploy: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
It is easier said than to be done. I was hosting my own email for a long time and with the current state of play it is not as easy to provide the same UX as Gmail or Outlook. Even AWS struggles to provide an email solution that is worth switching over.
Privacy was not that big a deal for me, but if I had lost access to my email for any reason, I would have had zero rights to demand what is mine - because nothing is really mine, as I have never paid for the service, so I was never a customer to begin with.
I moved off gmail last year after using it since 2004 (I remember getting an invite and using the service even before it was launched).
Great comment :) What beats one body gravity is bigger body's gravity. I escaped to Apple few years ago, except search. Safari should have custom search engine setting, though. Is it missing because of the deal with Google for default engine?
Now, who has the best incentive to protect consumer's data?
Really sad to me that it came to this.
Edit: The universally accepted "best" seems to be Grasshopper[1] which is $29/mo or $26/mo billed annually ($312/yr).
If someone else registers Google voice with that number, you're going to have a hard time. It'll be removed from your account, and you can't use Google voice without a US phone number.
I remember switching from AltaVista to Google and thinking they're much better. I remember a friend forwarding me an invitation to join GMail on its first beta day and how impressed I was with the 2.2 GB storage. I remember switching to Google Chrome when I read about its beta release on Slashdot. It was much faster than Firefox.
Personally, the company I loved to hate was Microsoft, and for me Google was the good guy.
Question to those who hate Google - are you old or young? Have you used the Internet in the 90s, before Google came? Have you used email where you lose your emails once you exceed the 20MB capacity, and you need to pay money to increase it? Have you used Internet Explorer because it was everywhere?
Have you seen what Google replaced?
Advertisements? Are we gonna pay for Gmail and Youtube?
Is it them treating certain search results as preferable? Yes, that's the point of a search engine.
The worst thing that Google does is just shut down good services too quickly but that's not really something to hate them that much for.
Maybe I am just ignorant.
I don't think Google is evil like Microsoft was in the 90s but I don't blindly trust them as I might have done in the past.
Don't be evil is literally the last line of their code of conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
But I think you are raising a good point. Why is this piece of "misinformation" being spread so much? What do you think? I think it is because it corresponds to people's experience with Google: "an entity once liked by the users and did good deeds has quit doing those." So, it may be "misinformation" as you put it, but I don't think it bears no value.
"Why is this piece of "misinformation" being spread so much? What do you think?"
Because of multiple articles spreading this misinformation a few years back, for example:
"Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct" - https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
Then the article literally mentions at the end that it's still in the code of conduct...terrible reporting from multiple outlets.
Where exactly did you read that?
I don't think people forgot about those days, but mostly think that the Google they liked has kicked the bucket. (Google's motto was "Don't be evil" those days, remember? It was removed from the code of conduct in 2018).
I think today, Google (together with Facebook and friends) is actively harming the open internet we loved. So, yes, we see what Google has replaced, but I don't think that is enough to worship a corporation forever.
Why does this keep getting spread?
But I think my point remains valid. Google's "attitude" changed dramatically in the recent years and we are just responding to that.
Corporations tend to lose the original good feelings of their founders.
On the other end, people is coming to recognize, more and more, the value of privacy. To understand that "I have nothing to hide" is a meaningless phrase in this context.
What can we do?
The primary thing is to always pay attention and be vigilant towards those to whom we give our data. Even if it's very difficult, being the tracking so pervasive nowadays, even for us HN' readers.
Another palliative is to split our data among different cloud vendors, in order not to let anyone have all your information.
In my opinion, at the end, we should use more paid services.
Off the top of my head, I distinctly remember GMail beta being on april fools day in 2004ish, and it was exactly 1 gb of storage
My plan so far: - Gmail -> Fastmail + custom domain - GDrive -> Nextcloud + openoffice (it's really nice, includes notes and libreoffice) - Chrome -> Firefox (FF made a tremendous progress in last 5 years) - Google -> DuckDuckGo
No disrespect to Google, the whole platform is very convenient, but it's going to be a fun experiment to use services that are dedicated to one goal (email-only, storage-only b2, search only etc)
The only one I look to stop spending time at is YouTube, hard to replace, however bloggers have to start protecting their value and own their things.
EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to deliver relevant vacuum cleaner ads, I don't care. I block them anyway.
True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. That seems like a risk you take just by doing business with third-parties at all.
I think that email is a bigger problem as it's the main connection between you and all the other services you use online. Lose your email address? You're going to have a hard time recovering the accounts on all the other services.
Which puts Google in the same camp as every other tech company I do business with, and every other email provider for that matter. Moreover, given the hundreds of millions if not billions of gmail users and only handful of suspension stories, I'm probably less likely to face suspension on Gmail than other platforms.
Yes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22google%2...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11487570?hl=en
"I uploaded a YouTube video, which was a normal video in my eyes.. that got removed for inappropriate content and got my account disabled. Now my access to the gmail address is blocked"
Being banned from Youtube because you violated their TOS is one thing. Losing access to Gmail at the same time, because everything is linked to the same Google account? That's excessive.
Absolutely. And usually the only solution is to make it known virally so that someone that works at Google try to intervene for you.
what's the least pain way to have your own domain fronting an email service provided by someone else?
> what's the least pain way to have your own domain fronting an email service provided by someone else?
If you're asking about moving from Gmail to protonmail, your best bet is to set up forwarding from Gmail and go through your most important accounts to change the email.
You've lost everything at that point.
(Proper security is helpful with or without Google....)
What is relevant is whether or not they could, how easy it would be to do so, how damaging it could be, and what protections we would have once they have done so. This is the threat presented by internet monopolies and their fetish for violating our privacy.
Also consider that no company has managed to stay on top indefinitely. Once their growth slows, and they become desperate to appease shareholders, what won't they do to make that happen?
Long after fads have changed, supposed benevolent coding wunderkinds have moved on, the troves of data will still be there, ripe for the MBA's, the lawyers, the mitt romney's, god knows who, to leverage.
The argument "they've been nice about it so far, so why shouldn't we keep doing it?" is a fucking joke.
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I feel like we have to re-learn the lessons of history every few decades. These things have never worked out well for us in the past and yet despite thousand of historical examples, in every generation or three, a not-small group of people arises swearing that this time is different.
Literally the only way to protect humanity from itself is to prevent the concentration of power and here we are, doing it again.
There's a Richard Feynman quote from the Challenger postmortem: absence of a particular kind of failure in the past doesn't guarantee absence of the same kind of failure in the future.
Google also censors results a lot compared to Yahoo and DuckDuckGo so you'll mostly get popular sites. An example is how when I searched "youtube deleted documentary" Yahoo and DuckDuckGo got the right results but Google didn't.
For Youtube, it dominates video uploading so it can delete and censoring things easily and all you can do is complain.
See, its easy to type nonsense like this.
If we all cared about what every other hackernews user wrote ... We'd probably go a wee bit mad. Certainly my thumbs would be side from responding to y'all
Think of it this way. I walk into a mom & pop clothing store, and one of the sales people on the floor takes note into a little pad the items of clothing I touched, so that they might optimise their purchasing.
Contrast that to one person from one of the worlds largest companies, following me at home, work, the shops, the pub, the bedroom, tallying up all the things I do so that they might broker that information to commercial interests, or more nefariously, to further cement their choke-hold on the ever-increasing industries which they've a financial stake in.
One of those situations is clever business, the other is an Orwellian hellscape.
I'll take every opportunity I can to rid myself of that second pursuer, thank you very much.
And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on.
Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it.
I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washingto...
https://whyprivacymatters.org/
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
All companies do this, not just Alphabet, all large companies have PR guys, all large companies have lobbyists.
>For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
AMP and all of the other Google servies don't control access to information, they just collect it. You can find every political view under the sun on Google, and if you don't like that for some reason you can use Bing or DDG or whatever floats your boat. But with the exceptions of platforms with explicit moral agendas like DDG, all those other service options are collecting your data too.
>But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
I'm deeply unconvinced of this, corporations are made up of regular ol folk just like you and me. I've worked for the government and corporations, and underneath the politics and the branding they're all just people. I would need someone to demonstrate a clear motivation and mechanism for why and how the people at Google are going to start harming others.
>And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
For the store metaphor, consider Amazon instead of Google. Amazon tracked sale data from its vendors then used that data to generate its own product line, competing (or outright replacing) the original vendors. You might look at this as a neutral "how does this affect me?" matter, but this puts the multitudes of other vendors/manufacturers out of business, and your own employer might be among their numbers one day. Even if not, the fact that it's harming so many others, and that you happen to not be in that group, doesn't mean Amazon's data collection doesn't do harm, or that you couldn't be taking steps to prevent that harm.
In the case of google, the harm isn't as clear cut as in Amazon's case, and it isn't quite as direct or imminent. Whereas Amazon's data is very concentrated (purchasing and retail browsing habits), Google's data is broad and allows for tracking almost every aspect of a person's life: location throughout the day, personal conversations, browsing habits, purchasing, plans of all sorts.
Their having this data on its own isn't harmful, but as others have noted, it represents harm in the sense of what how it _could_ be used if applied maliciously. This includes government actions, data leaks/hacks, Google abusing the data, etc. The potential consequences of each of those can be explored with tremendous depth in their own right, but that's not important for this conversation. What's important is that it allows for harm, even if the chance for that harm seems low, whether on a global level (it impact everyone) or on a local level (it has impact on individual people).
There's also the consideration that some services you use may be impacting other's privacy as well. You might not be concerned about Google reading your emails, but your email partners might be more averse to this tracking. If they are to exchange an email with you, they have no choice but expose that conversation to Google.
Consider what's going on in Belarus. They shut down the internet, but what if instead the government started demanding data from Google or Facebook to identify and track down members of the opposition? I think we all understand that such events as Belarus aren't a daily occurrence, but with persistent data stores, the opportunity for harm only needs to occur once.
This is basic capitalism, Amazon built a better mouse trap. The rise of the internet destroyed those businesses, Amazon is just the name that got attached to a business model that was inevitable. Now we can debate the values of capitalism, but Amazon the company isn't the problem, if not them it would just be someone else. The unfortunate fact of progress in capitalistic society is that some jobs disappear, we don't have many loom operators today either.
>Their having this data on its own isn't harmful, but as others have noted, it represents harm in the sense of what how it _could_ be used if applied maliciously
This seems to be the crux of the issue, the idea that the data's very existence is somehow a threat. I don't buy the vague handwavey "bad government" versions are valid, if the government has fallen to fascist ideology then Google knowing your step counts and favorite coffee shop are the least of your problems.
And I don't worry about Google falling into some Orwellian nightmare for the same reason I don't worry about the government falling into it, Google is just a bunch of people. On average, they're going to be reasonable people who think using the data to bust down the doors of private citizens and harm them is bad. More importantly I fail to see how it makes shareholders any money to pursue that course of action.
>They shut down the internet, but what if instead the government started demanding data from Google or Facebook to identify and track down members of the opposition?
The Inquisition and the Nazis managed this just fine without Google. If you're relying on privacy to keep you safe from fascists, bigots, nationalists, and hate you're going to have a bad time. Those people don't care about your privacy, and if they can't get the information from Google they'll get it from your neighbors, your friends, or from you by introducing a tire iron to your knee caps.
The fight against fascism starts way earlier than when they start searching for individuals to disappear. If a society reaches that point, the presence or absence of Google won't save you.
The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while.
You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.
I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized.
They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.
You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.
Compared to WHEN? And based on what sources?
I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.
People "opting in" to privacy systems can't work, that's why it needs to be solved politically.
When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable.
My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages.
It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc.
It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another.
What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails.
When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desirability.
DC won't sent somebody to Minnesota because of what you wrote in a gmail alone. However, what you wrote in gmails would likely contribute to a "social scoring system" which would be used against you.
Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it.
If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.
When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark.
However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk.
HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH.
It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over.
For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.
Did you ask the Chinese citizens in Chongqing if they can "just ignore" their social score coz they're not in Beijing?
The answer may surprise.
I understand that things would not so simple of course.
My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.
Why?
Nothing stops me from registering a free e-mail address garbagetime @ somedomain.com, writing any e-mails I want there, then letting your government know about your secret e-mail address you use to discuss politics.
I bet that Google would sooner gladily erase itself all of its data rather than give them to a fascist gov (seems that they cooperated mildly in the past, but not with a fascist government, with a normal one). They already took tough decisions like to ditch Chinese market, under pressure of the employees. Yes Google is clearly leftist, ecolo, all you want, as they are just the sum of their engineers. Great minds.
Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.
If history is any kind of guide, your neighbors are more likely to identify you to the new regime.
I doubt your neighbours will know much about your politics unless they're your Facebook friends too, and why would you add your neighbours to Facebook when you can speak to them face to face? (and do you?)
I think the challenge is not only what you say but also what you don’t say or do?
In other words, do you say the “right” things, do you go to the same church, the same sports club, and so on.
It doesn’t take much for someone to be the wrong kind of neighbor once the fear takes over was my point.
Besides all the hypothetical horror scenarios I have one argument that at least for me is strong: I just don't want them to track me. In some cases (like posting this comment) I accept the tradeoff, but I want to be able to choose.
These sort of evasive techniques are about allowing people who want to make that choice for themselves to also have a choice of participating in modern life.
Minority Report? Just give it some time.
People have issues with user profiling, tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google does it too btw, with AdSense.
---
> Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each?
This is a false choice.
Also, I already pay for YouTube Premium to avoid YouTube's ads. I would gladly pay for a subscription that stopped ads in Google's Search too.
---
> Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).
That's irrelevant.
The danger isn't in Google serving you with more relevant ads, the danger is in that data being collected in the first place, linked to your persona.
And contrary to what other HNers say, no, we don't need to wait for a fascist regime in the US to see the dangers of doing that.
China is targeting political activists and they can coerce any company operating within their borders. Being gay or an atheist already puts your life in danger in many parts of this world. Etc.
But OK, say you don't live in those countries. How about the story of that father finding out his daughter is pregnant from the ads being served [1]. And what would you say if your credit score dropped due to your Facebook activity? Or your insurance prices were affected by those who you befriend online?
There are some real, contemporary consequences of user profiling that go beyond Google knowing if you already own a google fi or not ;-)
[1] https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-...
People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it.
If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite and your own domain.
I have my own domain, it's paid for 10 years in advance, I host my email at Fastmail, but if I get unhappy with Fastmail, I can change the email provider in an hour.
Cambridge Analytica?
That's debatable. CA either bent the rules or broke the rules to get a lot of that info. In many cases, CA was able to get not just the target's info, but all of their friends info too. Facebook was either incompetent or complicit in allowing this to happen.
> Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?
Tracking, in this context, means tracking behavior across other websites. CA got data that was created simply by having a Facebook account and friending other people (they used oauth/login with Facebook). Facebook would have to not have existed, or not provide as much data to third party applications, to prevent their collection.
Walter Cronkite impeached Nixon, Pulitzer and Hearst started the Spanish-American war, and FAANG companies, directly or indirectly, nudge the needle on elections. I don't see how Google is unique or notable in this regard.
Also, comparing the relative power of newspaper men to Google doesn't make much sense.
Yes. Any group that controls information distribution controls what we know about the world. By controlling what we know about the world, they control politics completely. This is axiomatic, there is no way around it, you can't personally observe everything that happens therefore you must have it reported to you. The person or people doing that reporting control your worldview. Google isn't bad for playing a role in that information economy.
>Also, comparing the relative power of newspaper men to Google doesn't make much sense.
You're right, the newspaper and television men of yore were far more powerful than Google is or ever will be. More Americans watched Cronkite than watch all evening network news combined today, and 70% of the people who watched him trusted that his was factual reporting.
No news source in the world today has that kind of trust, definitely not Google.
I agree, so I want to deny as much information and power to powerful institutions as possible and diversify my relationships with them such that it becomes less likely that any one could become the Kingmaker.
My personal thing with Google and "convenience" is that the convenience is with just a low barrier to entry. Once you set up your own workflow with "Google alternatives", the convenience factor disappears.
People have been locked out of their Google accounts with no explanation and no recourse.
You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this case Google) have not only yours but everyone’s data. It’s astonishing what you can do with just some metadata. You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
You’re not just giving them your uninteresting data you’re also giving them an enormous amount of power.
Right, so, has Google done this? Asking because from what I remember the answer has been largely no, but I remember FB selling data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016.
It has always worked out well for us to give power to completely opaque entities right? Guys? Guys?
It's not Facebook's incompetence to blame, no matter how much you try spinning it that way.
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/insider-blows-whistle-ex...
Business is booming for Google right now. Imagine Google still have all of that data but are slowly going bankrupt and desperate for new business ideas.... and then Google is approached by a company with ethics and practices like Cambridge Analytica?
Someone tries to access your account from a random place, or maybe an old camera video you uploaded to youtube gets flagged erroneously by some contentid or appropriate content automation, and an automated system locks your account permanently, with you forever losing access to your emails and files. And not being allowed to use google services ever again without breaking ToS.
The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com
Whether or not it's possible to transact genocide at similar scale without computerised data records, it's quite clearly far easier to do so with them. Worse, with comprehensive records and rapid identification of any particular meddlesome priest, activist artist, or woman who was warned but nevertheless persisted, it's possible for such regimes, state or non-state, to dip in and retaliate with pinpoint effectiveness. Even the mere suggestion that this is possible can be extraordinarily chilling.
Global censorship is not an example - Google doesn't need to collect someone’s data to implement it.
To compete with that, other engines would need to be at least as aggressive in their data collection as well as trying to gain market share.
Obviously any other engine who uses principles like privacy as part of their mission are at an inherent disadvantage. Search engines can return meaningful adverts pretty much based on keywords used and location searched from- there isn't a "need" for all the other tracking and data collection other than profit.
1) your account can randomly disappear so you shouldn’t depend on it. Not just for political reasons but things like password reset using a heuristic that can fail leaving you permanently locked out.
2) the abusive anticompetitive behavior was starting to affect me directly.
3) very recently google has started deleting private data containing content they don’t like
If you leave over just the data collection that’s extremely noble IMO. In most cases that’s something that affects everyone around you more than it affects you.
There's also the whole "just because open source allows people to review code doesn't mean that they do" problem, but I don't expect that attack vector to be used by state actors because it would make the beneficiary of the attack too obvious to the public.
• Does not ask for phone number.
• Allows actual aliases (instead of a self-defeating YourRealAddress+Alias@Gmail.com)
• Does not sneakily sign you into Search and every other Google service when you just want to check your email.
In addition to all the privacy advantages.
I will say, however, that I never realized just how infrequently I receive mail that actually warrants my attention (let alone a reply) and that feels sort of lonely in a funny way.
What specifically do you have in mind?
There was a time period where people were trying to use/put services in Iceland or Switzerland because they weren’t part of a known default sharing arrangement and people completely relied on poor interpretations of laws acting like the government took a completely hands off approach to data. The reality is that absent a treaty, these places can all choose respond to foreign warrants and often times do.
China and Russia being notably separate from the rest of the world, and also large areas.
The question shouldn't be if they "can" the question should be if they "can be forced to and be legally required not to disclose it".
There is a reason American companies have tried to hack around the law with warrant canaries.
But the answer is yes they can be forced, absolutely. All countries have more to lose with the US (not that there is an ideological line in the sand, countries willingly cooperate with FBI, which is instructed by Congress to handle foreign investigations as well) and this is exactly what has played out in case after case after case.
Just changing from Google to N does nothing towards this goal, and we're now even further away from the promise of a decentralised Internet than ever before I believe.
Wake me up when a non-tech user can spin up an email server the same way they can open a browser and and send emails to any other person on the net. And with phones being powered on 24x365, one would think the dream of being a home server would be easier than ever...
But of course this way promises no money/profit for businesses in general. Or at least less so, since vendor-lock in and data monetisation would be much more difficult if not impossible.
It's a convenient middle ground between Google Maps and OsmAnd until the FOSS apps improve.
I did de-facebook myself. IMHO Facebook is far more invasive, far more harmful than Google.
doesn't look like it since you are using Chrome...
Why not just use Firefox?
Looked at a few others, but my need for a reasonable UX pushed me back to Gmail last year, this time with my own domain on G Suite (I figured paying a fee means I’m marginally better protected from account lockouts and other Google shenanigans, and at least I can take the domain with me when I leave). It’s so nice not to be constantly battling with email these days. But... in the back of my mind I do still want to get my email off Google. For privacy, control, and because I think getting off other Google services will be easier after that.
If I’m going to put the effort into switching again, I feel it might as well be to a somewhat privacy-focused email service (preferably not located in Australia or any jurisdiction that could force the company to break their own privacy guarantees without telling me). It doesn’t need to replicate Gmail’s feature set perfectly — I’m willing to put time into learning a whole different approach to email if necessary, but only if the UX/design is coherent and inspires confidence. Has anyone with similar requirements got any recommendations?
I hear the same argument with search and maps. Yes, DDG and Apple maps is not quite as good as Google’s. But, if you want privacy you will have to sacrifice something. Google has so many resources to put into their core product. Off course they will be better. And they use user data for some features which privacy focused companies just can’t provide. You just can’t have it all.
Edit: I’m OK to sacrifice some UX quality btw, just not as much of a sacrifice as ProtonMail and Mailfence. And my love of Gmail’s UX has little to do with any creepy features that rely on data or fancy algorithms. It’s mostly stuff that any competitor could offer. Coherent design language across platforms, and generally well designed features that don’t compromise between flexibility and ease of use.
A working instance to test before hosting your own: https://searx.info
Let me know how you liked it.
Nothing else comes close to this kind of convenience and UX, and it's more secure since accounts are not co-mingled.
Overall Chrome's version is just smoother and easier to use compared to Firefox. Mozilla should add better UI/menus and SSO for Firefox Accounts to get closer.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Containers are also extensible through add-ons. For example, the following two add-ons automatically isolate Facebook and Google into separate containers to reduce the impact of their tracking:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
Temporary Containers goes further by allowing the user to create disposable containers either automatically or on demand:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Firefox's two-tier approach (profiles and containers) to data isolation is much more flexible than Chrome's profiles. Containers handle many common use cases (e.g. logging on to the same site with multiple accounts simultaneously), and are very easy to use.
Through search alone, Google knows exactly what other big corporations are up to (perhaps even better than the corporations know themselves). That is something that should scare companies. I know GMail has been banned for this reason in a lot of places, but search is just as important.
My problem as I mention is that I am at the same time regoogling...
Android -> Iphone (more expensive, but can last longer with reasonable user experience and I can resell for better prices)
Contacts and calendar -> Apple icloud
Google Maps -> apple maps (still have to use waze sometimes, traffic information works best in Waze in Brazil)
Search -> Duck Duck Go
Web -> Firefox (The multi account containers in Firefox is to good to stop using)
Google Drive -> Ondrive (I had to buy an Office 365 licence to my dad. End up buying the family licence, and 1 TB cloud storage endupd being very usefull). A shame I really dont use office, but, is there in the cloud if I ever need to open a word doc.
I still havent found a viable alternative to Youtube videos, but, I think is a matter of time for an alternative product reach enouth users)
Living in foreign countries it's obviously useful, and I would have been royally screwed in Vietnam without the offline translations when I crossed the border and no place was accepting my ATM card. Related usually to financial institutions, I don't keep an active US phone number and my Voice account is basically a 2FA front for places not using TOPT or FIDO2 for security or I couldn't access my cash or credit.
I don’t know much about mining, but in the era of ASIC miners, how much dollar value does a minute or two of JS mining in Firefox get you? How many visitors do these rogue sites get?
It seems like a lot of effort to get a couple of cents for free, but I assume I’m hugely underestimating. I’m also still puzzled by why my partner’s MacBook was overheating last night, and wonder if I’ve just found out why.
At the moment I'm looking out for whatever service provider will let me have the equivalent of email, drive, calendar, docs and sheets all in one place.
Does anyone know of any that might have slipped under my radar?
Edit: anything comming up that is I can't see anything on the list that does everything. My best bet at the moment is proton will come up with something.
To get rid of ads and get Spotify-like music on Youtube there's: https://www.youtube.com/premium
Try iCloud.com
I think you can only sign up from an Apple device but otherwise it's all free (except for extra storage) and doesn't spread your data around.
Mail - FastMail (spam detection not great but still works)
Search - StartPage (still google but proxied since DDG results are inferior in my experience)
Browser - Firefox (syncs to all my devices)
Maps - keyworded bookmark on Firefox to go to DDG maps powered by Apple Maps. Otherwise on phone it’s Apple Maps
Storage - Dropbox
Docs - local files synchronized to Dropbox
Last remaining service: YouTube. I’d love for the content providers I consume from to start posting on other platforms but that’s just not the case. For that, I use a google account for just YouTube.
Losing your domain name can happen due to any number of reasons: hacked account (at the registrar), social engineering, etc. There can also be issues with registrars going bankrupt, increasing fees (see dot-org case), laws changing (especially with ccTLDs - see the dot-EU case with British citizens post-brexit) and much more...
Some of these alternatives, however, offer low content moderation compared to their corresponding Google products.
I see no disclaimer, for example, that bitchute is known for harboring conspiracy theories, often after they are banned from youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
It is worrying to see it presented as an "alternative" to youtube without this disclaimer.
I know that my data is used to make me an advertising target, I am going to get advertising anyway because we haven't found a better business models yet.
I don't use google search and chrome. But not sure if I will be able to switch to another email provider and will be able to spend the time and energy required to update my email everywhere.
Sure, Google steals your data. However, we have no guarantees that these new companies won’t steal just as much once they get a big userbase too.
Now, I can do just fine with OpenStreetMap (and such) as a physical or even a road map; but there are just so many venues and businesses that are listed on Google Maps... with their opening hours and links to websites.
Also, a lot of municipalities transfer public transport data to Google, which you can't quite get anywhere else (ignoring Google-reliant apps).
Search, browser, email - I don't use them.
You'll note the list doesn't have solutions to replace Google Reader, or Google Music, or G+.
Someday I'm sure I'll have to replace Google Domains and Calendar and YouTube. Maybe I should do that on my schedule instead of waiting for google to decide for me.
Fastmail is an Australian company, a 5-eyes country, subject to the Assistance and Access Bill [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Australia...
Are you expected to run 25 extensions? Many which do similar things and can be done by forcing the browser to delete cookies upon quit/exit/restart?
If the idea is a buffet, then what's the point? You're going to have a gap and DNS is going to be your weakpoint.
Does anyone know a good way to avoid AMP reliably on mobile? What I currently do is pretty convoluted (see below).
On my iPhone, I use a DNS-based ad-blocker[2] and I just associate amp.* to 0.0.0.0 so most amp pages will fail. When the page fails to load, in the address bar I edit the URL manually and remove the "amp" portion, and finally I'm redirected to my news article.
Needless to say, sometimes this gets annoying so when I'm in a hurry I might disable this DNS rule temporarily.
On desktop, on the other hand, it's much easier because I use an extension that blocks AMP automatically[1]
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
[2] the app AdBlock for iPhone/iPad can import "PiHole compatible" lists (such as the ones at https://firebog.net/ ) and it does dns-level content blocking (in addition to that, it also works as a standard ad-blocker within Safari) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579
My big problem with Google is that they are evil and in denial - they want to slurp up all the data about everyone and monetize it, but they honestly don't get why that is bad.
My list:
-ProtonMail
-Firefox
-DuckDuckGo
-iCloud
-Visual Studio Code
(edited format only)
We’re a (by far) market leading B2C & B2B company in a “non-shithole” G7 country.
Yes, Facebook is not a real improvement, but at least they eat their own dog food!
https://superuser.com/questions/1414410/how-to-disable-pop-u...
Cut all big cos out. The Internet already gives us tools to run everything as a community, yet we are not doing that.
We can fund open source software/hardware, crowdsource their continued development. It takes leadership, like the big cos have. But we can get it done.
If you're looking to detangle yourself from the Google ecosystem, you can do so one tool at a time over any period of time.
Maybe you'll get all the way off it, maybe just 80% - either way, you will make progress.
Edit: aww, they bought nest didn't they. Dammit Google you weirdo Borg creep.
Oh yeah people use their DNS to resolve my domains.. and every site that uses them for hosting.. and my work email..
oh wait youtube
If you are a startup we have generous free plans for you.
- https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives
- https://www.privacytools.io/
At least prism-break and privacytools have a community-process for suggestions and evaluations. I don't know how this project does it.
Google maps is probably the product I am most dependent on.
To de-google quickly, you can just pay a different vendor like iCloud or FastMail or whatever Microsoft offering is.
Google is the one I would trust with my data.
They know how to do hosting at scale (unlike some really quite large and famous companies who suck at that), although not perfect, they have a humanist moral compass in their culture, and I don't expect them to go out of business.
I would not make myself reliant on a niche Google product (like Google Reader) as those tend to vanish, but a mainstream Google service like GMail or YouTube is a great reliable thing. If you think other companies are more moral than Google, you are fooling yourself.
More education is needed to implement something like this.
Life's too short for extreme measures. You gotta pick your fights.
What I did stop using was anything Apple related and that fight was easy to pick. Their repair-hostile-by-design hardware actually harm the environment. Plus it proved trivial to replace their crap with superior tech.
They do everything they can to have your PII and this is something people should care about.
Things like 'accidentally' collecting your BSSIDs for Google Maps or providing Google Fonts not because they want a more beautiful Web, but to have a tracker on your site.
Plus they make our lives easier on a level that was unthinkable not long ago with Best in Slot free products like youtube, maps, search, email, open source browser and accessible smartphones with open source OS.
My only complain to Alphabet is that they like to toy with us by keeping Mozilla alive on a feeding tube. That's just cruel, I expected some mercy.
And for a good reason. I could, for example, take a quick glance at your profile and see that you spread misinformation about VS Code 7 hours ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251487) but what good would it bring? I'd rather argue about the topic at hand.
--------------------------------
Now resuming the discussion about using Google services anyway because life's too short to bother:
That's just how 7 billion people think.
Out of bubbles, there's much more to worry about on a daily basis than what some web site knows about me.
Our privilege blinds us and Maslow's Pyramid gets all sorts of messed up around these parts just because we can.