Degoogling My Life | Hacker News Reader

Degoogling My Life

thefiringneuron.com

128 pointsbenrapscallion181 comments

> A common argument against the need for privacy that I have definitely heard in my family is “but I have nothing to hide”. Well, neither do I

This is completely missing the point of why one should fight surveillance. Surveillance harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.

When people say that to me, I ask them for their phone so that I can give it to a passing member of the public to have a look through. That usually shuts them up.

I initially downvoted you as I read that wrong.

Yeah - we are in agreement - fuck surveillance...

Did anyone on HN also notice that as soon as Snowden released his thing, Palantir employees stopped wearing swag?

And facebook employees are now directed to stop wearing swag?

I think we do need far more shaming of employees in unwanted companies like Facebook, Google or Palantir. Surveillance damages societies, so we need to act against those who would damage us, small wheels as well as the whole drive train...

Have you ever been naked in front of someone? Will you do it to any passing member of the public?

The fact that you trust someone with something doesn't make it that you will trust anyone.

I don't have anything on my body to hide to my SO, still won't be nude in front of you.

The thing that need to change isn't questioning whether you have anything to hide, it's whether you trust the people involved and on the internet it's a concept so hard for people to grasp. Believe me, whatever Google has access about me, I trust them with it, or else I wouldn't have handed them that information. If there's any single piece of information (or aggregate of information) that you wouldn't trust them with, don't put that there, and that include all the service OP put on his blog post.

Personally getting rid of my Google accounts is something I'm slowly working toward, not because of any privacy issue, but because of how they proved that they can't be trusted to keep your account up, and that would screw me up quite a bit more than them abusing my privacy I let them have.

Privacy is like a vaccine. If everyone has it, it promotes herd immunity that benefits those who are most vulnerable.

That was a very interesting statement, and food for thought.

We’re also less likely to have viable alternatives for journalists and activists if they’re the only people who are privacy-conscious.

Getting more people to use Signal and ProtonMail, for example, means more people will see the work of these organizations first-hand, which will lead to more donations, and in the case of Signal there are network effects.

Recently I switched from Proton to Tutanota. https://privacy-watchdog.io/truth-about-protonmail/

This discussion on HN on the news (about two months ago) that Tutanota was forced to monitor and provide emails for an account to law enforcement may be of interest to you. The title of the submission was "German court forces mail provider Tutanota to insert a backdoor". [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337507

Thanks

When people say "I've nothing to hide", I usually say it's just like closing the curtains over the windows of your house. You may have nothing to hide, but you still want privacy. It makes sense to most people right away.

I don't remember, but it may have been Snowden that said something like that in one of his early interviews.

Privacy also protects you from retroactive persecution when ideas change. Many people grow more wise over the years but engage in foolish activities when young that have limiting effects later in life.

Yes, and the environment (political, societal) you live in might change. People think something like the (East-Germany) Stasi-State is impossible where they live, but it isn't. You don't have to look far to see societies and governments that make people regret their actions/opinions of the past.

You might get reprimanded (e.g. not being able to find employment) because you suddenly live in a society that hates cabbage, and one time, years ago, you said something very extreme about cabbage...

This is what most people fail to understand.

Every discussion about "privacy rights" and journalists is unfortunately even more abstract to them, because they never lived in a world where this stuff happens or has any importance to them (i.e. they don't see it).

“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

― Edward Snowden

More than that, "I have nothing to hide" is the finest misdirection ever used. There are 2 kinds of things you may want to hide: legal things and illegal things.

When the police or the government says "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", they're technically talking about the illegal things, but 99% of people haven't done illegal things, so it actually is fine to say "I have nothing to hide". What those 99% of people mean is "I have nothing illegal to hide". But by reinforcing the idea that there's nothing to hide, people have now conflated both and now also believe that "I have nothing legal to hide". Which is completely wrong of course: private life is private, it has no business being shown to anyone.

Not only do people not understand the difference between the two, they are also not realizing that our analog lives are private by default, but by using tools like Facebook our digital lives become public by default; the switch is invisible, it feels like nothing has changed so we don't really care. I still don't know how to make people understand the boundaries that their data really has once it's stored on someone else's server.

Buddy - instead of having to update your email from @gmail to @fastmap or @hey everywhere, get your own custom domain name! You keep the domain forever, and get gmail or fast mail or hey (feature coming soon to hey) to send and receive messages on behalf of your domain. Never update all those websites & friends again. Keep your same email address forever.

This, but I think it isn't easy to do with gmail.

It's actually extremely easy, if you pay.

You used to be able to get gsuite for free with your own personal domain. A lot of people, especially on HN are probably still grandfathered in on that for the free tier. Nowadays I think you have to pay for using a custom domain.

I'm grandfathered into a legacy Google Apps for Your Domain account, and it's nice but there are downsides (it's ineligible for many Google services like Play Music - oh well /s)

RIP google music

I still use it! I have two separate "Google apps" for two domains, and I just add new domains as aliases. It allows you to separately select DKIM keys for even aliased domains.

I don't know what's the limit for aliases, but I have at least 5 so far.

All still free.

$6/mo for the lowest tier of Google Workspace (aka G Suite).

I moved all my gmail stuff to a domain on it and now I feel protected. I can move in a couple of hours, if need be.

Having a custom domain is key! (https://meagher.co/own-your-email)

This service can work well for those looking to wean off of Gmail: https://forwardemail.net/en

Am I reading it correctly that this forwards from your custom domain to somewhere of your choosing, but then you still would need a gmail or hey or whatever to receive / operate as web interface?

yes

in addition to parents advice, You can also setup wildcard DNS and inbox, giving you the utmost flexibility in handing out e-mail addresses that are topic based, and not your private address.

You may get to keep the domain until the mob lobbies your registrar to drop you. An unlikely event to some, but it can and does happen.

Care to explain what you mean by that? What mob? Who would force a registrar to drop my domain, assuming it's not c0ca-co1a.com (zero and one) or "I-Wanna-Kill-<insert politician's name>.kill"?

Any company with the trademark. And if they throw enough money at it, it won't matter who had it first (see: Amazon, Apple, /.+book/, etc).

As I mentioned in my comment above, if my brother-sister-friend-mate (today) claims a domain called "amaz0n" (with a zero) then I would also support Amazon to go and take it off their hands. No apologies here. Unless they lived under a rock for the past 20 years, they know what Amazon is and (unfortunately) many young people are thinking of theThey know what they would know that this is shady.

But if my surname is "Smithopapadoakarian" (assuming someone with UK-Greek-Armenian roots) or if my product/app/service is BakeAPizzaOnYourOverheatedLaptop.com then the Amazons of the world better be ready for a fight because there is no way in hell that they have a product like that (unless they made one before me).

Using gmail means Google still gets to read your emails and metadata

I did this for a few years but I found it to be a hassle, there's always that small percentage of websites that only accept well known email domains. And it's not like I can't use their services since it's for stuff like local utilities.

> there's always that small percentage of websites that only accept well known email domains.

I've never come across that. Do you have any examples? There are hundreds of thousands of non-well-known domains that people use for email.

It could be that your domain was missing expected setup, like SPF records, or you ended up on a blacklist somehow.

Nearly 25 years running my own domain email and I have never encountered this either. (Currently using GAFYD for email, but at times it's been virtual hosted, as well as home hosted on a Pentium Pro and dial-up)

Same here, I have been running my own domain for 20 years. I have gotten the 'reverse' though... trying to register somewhere using a gmail throwaway account and getting the message that they do not accept free service emails.

There were a few obscure online stores that I can't remember but the ones I do remember I don't want to link for privacy reasons. One was a local water utility company and the other was my university which offered academic email address forwarding for alumni. It was silly as a Protonmail address also didn't work for one of them.

Anecdotal, but I've seen lazy/clueless developers in some companies who allow only a .com email address to be provided. And this was a few years ago. I don't recall the name. I'm not going to do any business with such services.

For people who have done this, what naming scheme do you use? firstlast@firstlast.com and first@last.com both feel awkward to me. I've seen me/hi/hey@firstlast.com which would be good for a public business email but feels pretentious for personal.

I use first@firstlast.com because that's the less awkward one i found (given the domain name). But I'd love to see better options.

I do human@firstlast

I use a domain-hack for my domain. So it's "name@na.me".

I need to point out the obvious map solution that hasn't been mentioned yet: OpenStreetMap.

For what it's worth, I've find Here Maps to be a step up from Apple Maps. Used to be owned Nokia, now it seems to be a big partnership between VW, BMW, Daimler, Intel, Mitsubishi and NTT.

Here has our complete transit system; Apple only has our 2 light rail routes and is missing our 80-some bus lines. Here has walking instructions and is adding Biking (still poor, but at least it has something). They have pretty good business contact information and hours, reviews aren't great since they're partnered with Trip Advisor, which is about a wash compared to Apple's Yelp partnership though.

There's the Facebook SDK malware in their app though, at least on iOS. That's a dealbreaker for me.

Interesting. Do you have any more information about it? I haven't been able to find anything.

Their privacy policy seemed reasonably OK by modern standards, and all I can turn up is Facebook is getting map data from them; but nothing about Facebook being integrated into their products.

Look at the network traffic from the phone while the app is running. You will see traffic to graph.facebook.com on every app launch.

I've just tested it and the latest iOS version of Here Maps as of today does indeed still include the Facebook malware and it's very eager to try and reach outside (dozens of failed connection attempts, looks like it doesn't take "no" for an answer).

Confirmed, on every launch. I think it might be hitting some other undesirables, but FB was enough for me to close the Pi-Hole interface and delete the app. Disappointing, but Apple Maps doesn't suck enough for me to get terribly upset, except for one less acceptable alternative existing.

On Linux there is also the relatively new GNOME Maps, in case people here aren't aware.

If it’s not included in their privacy policy, would sharing with Facebook not be illegal? Are you an EU resident by any chance?

In the U. S., where we don't like to get in the way of our corporate overlords.

It would be, but the question is whether the law is being enforced?

As far as I know, you can't directly sue over a breach of the GDPR, and the regulators who are supposed to enforce it on your behalf are unwilling to do so.

I don't know if this will be satisfactory to you, but you could install an on-device firewall app like Lockdown [1] and block Facebook connections completely from all apps. The default doesn't block all Facebook domains, but you can change the configuration.

[1]: https://lockdownprivacy.com/

HERE is really good in some places (Chicago area benefits from a major HERE office being located here), and pretty sparse in others. It seems particularly in international markets, the availability of even basic map data can differ wildly, much moreso than if you're in a major US city.

Yeah, unfortunately that's a problem with basically all the competitors I've looked at. OSM is pretty terrible in a good chunk of the US as well, and even varies neighborhood by neighborhood in most cities I've checked.

At least Apple is fairly uniform in their coverage - it's equally not-all-that-good everywhere.

In Germany HERE WeGo (how Here Maps is called nowadays) is my default app for all things navigation. I am very happy with it and it's especially nice to be able to download offline maps for the whole country.

If you're looking for something to clean up the mess that Google Photos Takeout leaves you and give you a fast, self-hosted UI, you're all welcome to try PhotoStructure: it'll de-dupe the mess into nice (customizable) timestamped subdirectories.

https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

Wait, wait. "Run it yourself" but it's going to use a subscription plan? Um, no. Not a chance.

Charge a price up front, maybe even charge for major upgrades... subscriptions are for services, not software.

ICYMI, I wrote down my thoughts about this topic (both as a fellow consumer and as an author of commercial software):

https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-9/#-this-_really-will_-...

Subscriptions are rife with dark patterns. Confusing language, hidden unsubscribe buttons, requiring extraordinary actions (such as phone calls), unexpected price increases - you'll see these popping up every day across social media (including HN).

And, in my opinion, a subscription is inherently a dark pattern no matter how good the intentions may be, since their very nature encourages people to forget about them and keep paying long past the point of usefulness. Throw in CC auto-update for subscriptions, and there's no natural event that would ever cause the subscription to end (short of death, and even that's questionable).

Desktop software is not the place for subscriptions. Such recurring revenue may be great for your business, but that literally comes at the expense of your customers.

As an addendum, pinky promises of continued access to your own media aren't worth the bytes they're stored in these days. Feel free to blame your corporate predecessors.

> Subscriptions are rife with dark patterns.

Agreed. As some random internet person to another, there's not much I can do (that I haven't already done on my website) to try to convince you that I'll do my best to avoid grotty/slimy UX patterns: I'll make sure there's a warning email sent a couple days before any charges are applied, and easy cancellation via the website. The fact that much of the functionality remains when subscriptions lapse mean you only need to pay when you feel like you'd glean value.

> pinky promises of continued access to your own media

Well, that's why it's self-hosted. There's no trust you need to apply to the app: you can even use PhotoStructure with a read-only bind-mount to your assets directory to make sure it isn't doing anything nefarious.

No pinkies needed.

> I'll make sure there's a warning email sent a couple days before any charges are applied,

Since you're still figuring the best possible options and seem to be open to feedback, a reminder email two days before the charge is never enough. Ideally, it should be a few emails spread across a longer period, such as one month before, two weeks before and five days before. You could choose when and how many emails to send (bother the user), but it shouldn't be just one, and that too something that could be missed, like just two days before.

FWIW, I'm not a fan of subscriptions. Since key features will be disabled unless renewed, I don't think it works as much for the benefit of the user as it does for the developer.

> Ideally, it should be a few emails spread across a longer period, such as one month before, two weeks before and five days before.

That's a great suggestion, I'll try to make that happen.

> key features will be disabled unless renewed

It just disables advanced "curators" which happen during import. Your library is still browseable, and all prior tags exist, it's just that new assets aren't tagged with the "plus" taggers. As soon as the subscription is renewed, it'll automatically reapply the "plus" taggers.

Has anyone found a good alternative to Chromecast? I prefer it to having a smart TV. However, it seems like the app ecosystem is converging around that protocol, making it harder to completely degoogle my life...

Apple’s AirPlay works okay. I like good old HDMI cables, they work reliably.

I’ve had terrible latency and connectivity issues with both chromecast and apple tv. Audio lagging, randomly deciding not to be discoverable, etc.

A cable always works

Regarding your AirPlay woes - have you checked the health (strength) and throughput of the wifi signal?

I have a lot of noisy stuff around my house so one thing I did was hardwire my AppleTV to be one less wifi device. That resolved all of my issues.

Additionally, I later ended up adding more Wifi APs to provide consistent throughput across the house. Previously I had "slow" zones. Not really dead zones, but annoyingly slow enough to force you to switch temporarily to 4G.

If you can't hardwire the device specifically, consider repositioning the WiFi AP closer, add/or add another AP if you are able to.

Hope this helps.

There's Miracast, but it only does screen mirroring.

Roku is an option. Supports both Chromecast and AirPlay.

if apple is not a problem for you, their appletv hardware is pretty awesome. I have one connected to every tv.

I use an old Linux box. Works great for Netflix and Amazon Prime. I'm sure it's not for everyone, though.

Netflix only streams 720p unless you use Edge on some edition of Win10

Unless you're sitting closer than two screen diagonals to your TV, it's a scientific fact that even with 20/20 vision you can't tell the difference between SD and HD.

Please reference the NHK's book on their analogue HD technology, Hi-Vision Technology, where they go into the psychovisual research extensively.

I used to think that too but when watching GoPro footage over the years there is always a visible difference between 720p and 1080p. And I think 4k is also noticeable.

I agree they are all noticeable, at the proper viewing distance. These are scientific facts. Ask yourself, what's the smallest angle the human eye can subtend? All other factors fall into place once you've calculated this.

I didn't want to go into details, but I think we actually get Netflix in 1080(p?) using either Firefox or Chrome, but Amazon Prime looks like 720p using Firefox.

If you know how let me know. There used to be an addon that mimic'd a header it was looking for but I think netflix fixed that loophole. Im not sure if there is a way to verify the info during playback anymore?

EDIT - From their website (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931):

Resolution Windows computers support streaming in the following browser resolutions:

    Google Chrome up to 720p

    Internet Explorer up to 1080p

    Microsoft Edge up to 4K*

    Mozilla Firefox up to 720p

    Opera up to 720p

    Windows 8 app up to 1080p

    Windows 10 app up to 4K*

I use one of laptops laying around the house that wasn't used anymore, connected the TV via HDMI and bought a bluetooth keyboard with a built in track pad. The bluetooth keyboard works as my remote now, and it works very reliably - not just to stream content or play music, but its great to even do split screen, shop together/ look up something together while sitting on the couch, typing on the keyboard/using a trackpad is infinitely better than using the onscreen keyboards on smart TVs/roku etc.

I'm not a Chromecast user so I can't say what is a good alternative but I use a Roku and am pretty satisfied with it. My "smart" TV has apps but they're hot garbage so I keep it offline and just use the Roku.

Keep in mind Roku shows ads on your home screen and gathers tracking data, but this can be blocked with pihole.

Distrusting Google and Facebook while fully trusting Apple is a strange worldview.

What makes one so confident Apple won't behave the same way now or in the future?

I'm not defending any megacorp, but looking at where each corp gets their revenue is probably a reasonable way to determine who the corp is trying to make happy.

If most of your revenue is from advertisers, you're going to try to make advertisers happy. Advertisers are happier when they have more user data for ad targeting.

Apple seems to be getting most revenue from hardware sales, so they're going to prioritize keeping people within their ecosystem, and making sure hardware needs to be re-purchased at regular intervals, either through innovation or through designed obsolescence.

"Apple seems to be getting most revenue from hardware sales, so they're going to prioritize keeping people within their ecosystem, and making sure hardware needs to be re-purchased at regular intervals, either through innovation or through designed obsolescence." The recent events are against this statement. Locking Mac Os further and excluding Apple Telemetry from VPN is not reason for trust.

Can you expand on the excluding the apple telemetry from VPN? Not something I was aware of

In macOS Big Sur, firewalls like Little Snitch or Lulu were unable to block Apple's own services from phoning home. That has now been fixed in the latest beta release and will work as it did before soon. You can see this article for details. [1]

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/14/macos-big-sur-11-2-beta...

I am 20+ years on Apple products. This is not the way for me. I cannot trust them anymore. If I have payed for my computer and the vendor is using it without my permission - there is no fix for this. What's next? Jailbreaking Mac OS? I don't care for Apple apologists or cultists, they have a right to choose. My choice is to move away from Apple products and replace everything that I can with Linux and FOSS.

Anyone have a good alternative to Google Translate?

I hardly use anything directly from Google anymore, just the Search Console to keep track of what people search for on Goole Search for a handful of websites. But I do use Google Translate quite often, from different languages to English, and haven't found an alternative that I like.

I do know Yandex has a service like this, but I forgot about it :) I will check it out, just as the service from Microsoft. I would prefer to stay away from these 2 companies though.

DeepL Translator: https://www.deepl.com/en/translator

Thank you (and the others who replied). It is even from Germany which already sounds good.

DeepL is the best there is right now.

It's probably even better in translation quality than Google Translate.

The free variant allows to translate up to 5000 letters. It does (if one is so inclined) to install small desktop utilities that allow to translate marked/highlighted text with a keyboard shortcut. It also shows alternative words if you click on a word in the translation.

I am for quite some time now totally sold on deepl.

Deepl gives nice results.

Apple has one built into iOS now. I only speak english and haven't used it with anyone else so I can't say how good it is.

Yeah, but it only supports a few languages. At least for me, Google Translate does it because it supports lots of languages. Good luck translating a random Icelandic article, let alone expecting to get results comparable with Google Translate.

I wish there was more competition in this area though.

Unlike many other tools, I find Deepl.com much better than Google translator for all my translations.

I use Papago from Naver. It doesn’t support as many languages, but it’s Korean translations are far superior to Google’s.

Aside from Deepl that has already been mentioned, I've stumbled upon https://nicetranslator.com/. I haven't used it extensively so can't vouch for longer texts.

I've also used https://www.linguee.com/ in the past. I like that translations are taken from actual translations of existing documents, but it has the weakness of its strength: translations have a high chance of being if quality, but only if they do exist. In practice it's better to use it for idioms

fastmail? seems like a curious choice if the goal is privacy. It's not google i guess. I don't know if they use any google services like ads, analytics, or whatever.

As the article says they are based out of Australia which has mandatory meta data collection laws. Whereas America does it in a sneaky way, Australia has a law that mandates it.

I believe but might be wrong they also store mail unencrypted and, rightly so, complies to lawful government requests for mail.

duckduckgo could be the best of the rest in terms of search results, but regardless of how determined they are to be privacy focused, they are an American company with problematic government surveillance.

(Fastmail CEO here)

We don't use Google ads or analytics. We do have a relationship with Google in order to allow our customers to use the OAuth flows for syncing in/out of Google accounts (gmail sync, calendar sync, contacts import). Which has been quite a lot of fun to maintain as they keep adding new conditions - we are about to have to pay a security auditor again for our yearly "make sure we comply with Google's conditions around how we handle data".

We are not required to retain metadata under the mandatory metadata collection law, because we don't have servers in Australia - and that's one of the conditions under which we would be captured by that law.

Yes, we do comply with lawful government requests - they're pretty rare and they are individual identified accounts, not blanket collection. That said, if you're planning to do something which is a crime in Australia and also a crime in your jurisdiction (assuming it has a mutual assistance treaty with Australia, which is most countries) then we might not be the ideal choice for you!

I have a draft for a blog post on the difference between privacy and absolute secrecy (extreme encrypted everything). Am looking forward to having that finished.

So you're not required to, but do you? Does Fastmail share any information with any world government (other than by court order)?

We don't share data except via order from Australian courts, so we're not participating in data sharing with either governments or with advertisers/data miners.

Our whole business model is money in exchange for service rather than having to monitise the data that's stored with us. Among other things it means we don't want to keep eyeballs on our site - the quicker you can deal with your email and go do something else, the fewer server resources you use!

We do participate in spam reporting feedback channels - such that are part of email deliverability and abuse detection of course, but that's about behaviour on the MX side, not about customers. Our list of "badly behaved IPv4 addresses" is quite extensive!

In your upcoming blog post, could you please explicitly mention that most of your servers are located in the U.S. (as I recall) and how the FVEYES cooperation/agreements could work against your users since Australia and the U.S. do work together?

Escaped the clutches of Google and ran into the warm embrace of benevolent big daddy Apple.

They're not even remotely comparable. For Google Maps to work effectively, you have to let Google record your location every five minutes until eternity, which it can and does use for ad tailoring. Apple Maps doesn't associate any location or direction data with account information and goes out of it's way to scramble the data it does store a bit so that people can't be identified.

Is that true? I have location services turned off unless I'm using Google Maps to navigate, and it seems to do a fine job getting me from A to B.

No, it's not. Location History is something you can disable (or set to autodelete history) and Maps will work just fine without it.

The issue I found when I tried using Google apps without invasive data tracking was that Google has no middle ground: Either you let it know everywhere you are at all times, or it doesn't even retain location search history of any kind or even suggest locations close to you.

I feel like a navigation app should be like a weather app in what it knows about me: Roughly, what zip code I'm in. Google Maps without location history doesn't even act that smart, it's too dependent on invasive tracking.

Apple's very keen on telling us the ways they protect our privacy, but let's be crystal clear - there's no way whatsoever to audit these claims, and Apple willingly joined PRISM.

The PRISM partners claim is still pretty interesting: Like some other computer security scares (Supermicro?), years later, the PRISM partners slide has never been corroborated by anyone since. And there's a lot of evidence that companies listed on it have actively fought government collection strategies. If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc.

It is true most web services are impossible to audit the privacy of, as always, storing things yourself on hardware you control is the safest, but I'd argue that Google and Apple have very clearly different stances, if you follow the money.

>If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc.

None of this is convincing, these open ended musings have other answers like, perhaps this infrastructure change was needed to protect against the compromised backbone routers (revealed later by Shadow Brokers release) which it turns out anybody could tap, device encryption, which handy, has had lots of oopsies and gotchas over time which one could almost suspect were planted.

Last year Apple relented and allowed a dead man's family to retrieve photos even though nobody knew the login information. Hm, but I was told by people here on Hacker News and in tech journalism that Apple DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE CAPABILITY to do this.

People need to move to open source communities. Mastodon and Matrix are nice but we need to start having more user friendly user interfaces, people expect Facebook/Telegram type stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE

For a time I had a slightly different perspective.

I did my utmost to actually use Google services for everything I could, on the assumption that as there will almost certainly be tracking going on at least that way only one company had my data. By de-Googling I would be spreading my information across a wider catchment and hence increasing my exposure, whereas by being all-in on Google I kept tighter control.

As Google has become more and more untenable (as well as falling behind on their offerings) I've been de-Googling for a while. All my email is now custom-domain Fastmail, for Drive I use PCloud, for search it's DuckDuckGo, for browser it's Brave or Safari, and I've stopped all 3rd party analytics on principle.

The hold-out, and I think it is probably acceptable, is Go :) - next stop is to de-Amazon.

A while back I went through the motions of moving away from Google. FWIW, a very nice email service (that I believe I found from a article posted on HN actually) is Purely Mail (https://purelymail.com/). Certainly worth putting in the consideration pile.

As pointed out in the comments here: Get yourself a domain and "own your email". If Purely Mail dies, I can move my provider and keep my email.

I wouldn't consider Fastmail being based in Australia a selling point. They're a Five Eyes nation with a burgeoning surveillance state of their own.

“In my opinion, the two most evil companies on the planet with a blatant disregard for privacy because it is so fundamental to their business model are: Facebook (and by extension, WhatsApp and Instagram) and Google.“

Hear, hear! It is my most sincere hope that these companies can be assailed by some small upstarts because it is clear the government is not going to do jack shit about their highly unethical business practices.

It feels pointless to be on the Mac/iOS bandwagon and degoogle, you're just replacing invasive software with more invasive software.

The incentives are different. Apple is after your wallet. Google is after someone else's wallet.

As the other comment has mention their is a very different motive between the business practices of Apple and google. I mean, Apple has branded itself as a company dedicated to privacy. By failing to deliver on that, it is bad for the brand image, and the more extreme the privacy violation, the worse for its images. Overall it seems better.

And Apple is at least domain restricted to a larger degree: no web analytics, no search engine, limited email and ads. Giving a company a small amount of information is much better than a single company controlling a large amount. It allows for much more accurate predictions to be made.

The email entry needs a bit more explanation. I've been wanting to get off gmail as well, but how do I actually do it?

- I have a bunch of accounts that use my gmail as the login, and inevitably some that aren't in my password manager.

- People will email my gmail

Is there some explanation about what to do to make a clean break?

So I imported all my old Gmail emails into Fastmail (they offer an easy UI to do this) and set up forwarding from Gmail to Fastmail for new email. I will add more text to my blog post to clarify this. Sorry the post was a bit rushed and I certainly didn’t think it would make it to the front page of HN!

Same here, leaving Gmail is clearly the most painful and difficult part of this process.

I don't think it can be done quickly, but you have to start somewhere, and use the forwarding features of gmail.

My wife and I just did this. I've been using a custom domain for years, so it was just a matter of changing MX records to Fastmail. My wife only used her @gmail address, so it was a bit more involved. Essentially:

- Set up new email at your service of choice

- Import whatever old email from gmail that you want to keep

- Go through whatever list you have (password manager, your brain, etc) and update email addresses (as a bonus rotate passwords while you're at it)

- For a few weeks, regularly look at both your new and old email. As something comes into gmail, either unsubscribe or update your email for that sender, and delete it.

- A few weeks later, nothing remains to switch over (at least nothing of importance).

IMO the best way to do it is change the contact info in all the accounts you still use from your old gmail to your new address. Tell the people who do email you to use your new email instead

- set automatic email forwarding from your Gmail to your new email service (just buy a domain and use Fastmail or something similar). It's in the Settings and it's easy

- some services like Fastmail have a one click email import Transfer all emails and then delete any content on Gmail

- go through all existing services and change your email address, most services allow you to do it. If it's not possible then consider closing and reopening account

- never use 3rd party logins (Google, Facebook)

- start replying to emails with your new address, people will update the contacts over time, you have to start somehow

- you can keep your old Gmail address around for a long time, it doesn't cost you anything

I have a custom domain with Gandi.net, which also provides a number of free email addresses per domain registered. If the free Gandi email doesn't meet your needs, you can upgrade to their other packages, switch to Fastmail or other.

The advantage of owning your own domain is covered in another thread. Since I can switch to another domain registrar, I'm not even tied to Gandi. But Gandi seems like one of the better registrars. They are French.

I am currently in the "process" of migrating, and like you I have a zillion accounts, some of which I've forgotten. I've stolen this from somewhere here on HN I think:

- I did _not_ setup mail forwarding. First because I don't want Google to know I'm leaving, and I don't want them to know what my new address is.

- like all big changea, the switch to a new, custom domain name is a good moment to make some cleaning. By not forwarding mail I'm curating my existing life to only the things I actually care about. If I haven't received a mail from a specific site in years, maybe that site isn't that important after all

- most emails I receive are from some account on some website, so I know I have to migrate this account

- but I still might receive important mail from people who still use this old adress. I just copy/paste the content from a client connected to the new adress and reply

The issue is that this kind of transition might last for a long time. I haven't decided yet how long I'm going to do it though.

Always good to see people open minded to change, alternatives and privacy conscious.

Personally, I find this list the best of the bunch when it comes to De-googling

https://degoogle.jmoore.dev/

Nice list. I prefer https://prism-break.org though.

Cheers, that looks like it has had a lot of effort put in. Will definitely look more through it.

It may seem weird to some, but as a translator, it's really hard for me not to work with Google Search. Obviously, as zillions of people are using it, it has the best search algorithm of them all. On the first page, I get exactly what I've searched for even though my query is sometimes inaccurate or extremely vague, something I can't seem to reproduce with other search engines such as DuckDuckGo. To be honest, I don't know if there exists one search engine as powerful but I would love to have your suggestions. It's the only thing that prevents me from completing my step to DeGooglization.

Google's largely SEO'd results these days, same as it's been for a decade or more. Most any query will lead you to quite literally hundreds of millions of "hits" but for some reason Google only lets you get 3-4 pages into results any more, it seems.

Search hasn't been an important Google product for a long time, I wager, or they'd clean it up. It's just another extension of Google Shopping.

> Does anyone really appreciate searching on Google for a vacuum cleaner and then seeing photos of vacuum cleaners follow them around all over the web for months afterwards?

Is this really google selling this information?

I assumed that the people selling this information gathered it from the referrer links after you click on the search result. Any of those pages can have JavaScript running that picks out your google search term from the referral link.

The reason the distinction matters is they can get the same referral string from your DuckDuckGo searches if they want to bother.

Seems like very few months these pop up. Sure, it seems like a good idea. Then I try it. It sucks when you've been embedded with Google for a long time. Glad I'm not on Facebook...

What I really wanted, was switch from Google to someone else as the main search ads provider for my business, but nobody come even close to Google's performance :(

Sad and funny at the same time. Indeed, that is where Google's real leverage comes from.

Like a lot of posts about degoogling, this one also does not list a valid alternative to youtube.

https://joinpeertube.org/

My main problem there is content.

The way I 'de-youtubed' is by having a youtube-dl setup where I send channels or single video id's to, and it downloads it without using my home or work infra so google things it's just some random visitor. This downloaded video material is added to a plex server specifically for this and that's the way I consume it.

Was hoping to see some alternatives in those blogposts, but looks like everyone runs into the same problem: most content is simply @ youtube :(

YouTube is the only Google service that I still use and I think that’s fine.

Once you have everything else replaced, paying for YouTube premium and using it like Netflix is a good model.

I wouldn’t put personal videos up there, and if you’re a creator you should double post to YouTube and somewhere else in case your account is killed.

I believe there is a Firefox plugin that redirects to invidious but I don’t have enough experience with it (yet) to include it in my blog post. Also I have found it to be a bit of a hit or a miss.

Of comparable breadth and depth, there isn't one unfortunately.

I don't think there is a valid alternative to YouTube, but I've found bookmarking creators instead of subscribing with an account to be a fine way to enjoy some content without having it tied to your Google account. It's not perfect though. Perhaps Patreon can partly fill that niche instead?

There's no Patreon app for Apple TV from what I can see. I pay three Patreon creators but never log into the account, watching their stuff on YouTube after the fact (they release a few days later on there).

Why is it so hard? That's what I want to know. Is Apple somehow conspiring too?

It's hard because YouTube invests stupid amount of time to get advertisers on board which pay the video creators.

Content is on YT because the creators are being paid for it - and an alternative platform will need to find a solution for that. On top of the existing hard problem of making a good video streaming service that doesn't go bankrupt.

Patreon helps, but remember that most creators now get paid by Patreon AND by YouTube.

I guess what I'm curious about is why there's no Patreon App for Apple TV (and I'm guessing smart TV too but I avoid that due to ads). It feels like Patreon is trapped in a world where they think people will watch things on mobile - something I never do unless I'm on a plane.

Uhm, Patreon isn't a video app though? When you tap videos in mobile app they still open in YouTube for most of my content creators.

There's an app for mobile but not for Apple TV. You view Patreon videos on your television or you stream it?

The stuff I watch on YouTube beckons me to go to Patreon to watch the latest content.

As an app for browsing content exclusively available on YouTube, I use NewPipe on a FOSS build of Android and am fairly happy with it. It does subscriptions (channel bookmarks, basically) without requiring a login, and that's plenty good enough for me.

As far as a video sharing platform, I don't think there's anything with quite the flood of content, since YouTube is such a household name. I'm looking into running a PeerTube instance as an alternative to stuff I want to publish, so I'm not at risk of Google pulling my plug randomly, but I'm also not looking to make money with any of my videos. My limited personal utility will be easily met by a far inferior platform.

Can you explain more about "FOSS build of Android"?

I just started using Odysee(based on/connected with lbry) and I must say while it obviously doesn't compete in terms of content and the front page suggests it's a popular location for conspiracy nuts you can actually find a lot of well-known YouTube channels on there.

In fact I'm pretty certain that if this continues it'll be able to compete with YouTube in the long run; mainly because content creators can just upload everything to both platforms for a chance to reach a larger audience and at the same time have a "backup" in case Google bans their account for a random reason. I've seen multiple channels either moving completely to lbry or just mentioning it in their YouTube videos with the hint that the other platform also has their videos but without ads. Considering YouTube has a terrible reputation when it comes to their weird content filtering, monetization rules and completely broken copyright strike system it might not need a huge push to get some momentum.

An Invidious instance is a good solution.

I am happy enough using ProtonMail and calendar, Duck Duck Go, and Apple services. But, I use tons of Google services that I pay for: Youtube Premium via Youtube Music, Google Photos (pay for extra storage), books, GCP. I like being able to search Google Photos, and that is one killer feature that Apple Photos does not have (my iPhone automatically uploads all pictures to both, as well as OneDrive). As individuals, we all need to decide where to draw the line re: privacy. I found a setup that I am comfortable with.

I am also in the process of removing any usage of Facebook or Google from my habits.

I think the focus should be on diversity. The problem is not simply the lack of privacy but also the lack of competition between those big actors.

Google would be a fine service if it was only search.

A bit off topic, but what’s the best gmail alternative? Been thinking about switching to a paid service for a while and the WhatsApp policy change (I know they’re own by FB and not Google) really reminded me that I should do so sooner than later.

I use and like protonmail.

Best depends on your needs, your technical abilities (using custom domains, for example) and budget. Take a look at these:

posteo.de

mailbox.org

runbox.com

protonmail.com

tutanota.com

mxroute.com

mailfence.com

fastmail.com

In case anyone is looking for an e2e-encrypted alternative to Google Photos, I’m building one[1].

[1]: https://ente.io

What about phone networks? I use Google Fi and I am finally able to switch - should I just go back to Verizon, or are there any other good backload carriers?

https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/

Looks really good, I've been wanting to try the Purism phone. However not being able to switch over my phone number is going to be a blocker.

I use Ting and I've been very happy with them. I switched because they have really good policies working against SIM swap attacks: https://help.ting.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030105653-...

Thanks!

Thanks for the list! My list is similar:

- ProtonMail

- Firefox (uBlock Origin, Multi-Account Containers)

- DuckDuckGo

- Apple Maps

I like the title of your website, a changelog for my life.

Thanks!

Is Google still as evil as it used to be? I have the feeling that a few GDPR fines later they take privacy more seriously, or at least a lot more seriously than the other evil AdTech (Facebook).

I don't want to defend Google, but I noticed:

- Google Drive is now paid (soon even for "low-quality" storage) a clear move away from ad-only revenue.

- Google has auto-delete and a clear privacy dashboard, which clearly shows what Google know about you.

- They have the option of disabling "creapy ads".

A few more GDPR fines, and I think Google will become as privacy-friendly as a SaaS can be. :)

> that a few GDPR fines later they take privacy more seriously

Their current GDPR consent flow is still not compliant (because you can't decline) so I guess the fines weren't enough.

The writer should consider de-Apple-ing next. Time is of the essence.

Yeah, running from arms of one corporation into the loving embrace into another is a bit misguided.

Apple's evil is based around getting the middle, upper-middle and aspirational class to cough up more, whereas Google is far greater threat to freedom and happiness for all. I'd say cynicism is warranted but it is still a step in the right direction.

Touché! The best justification I can offer is that Apple is, by far, the better of the many FAANG evils?

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