How to Live Without Google: Alternatives That Protect Your Privacy | Hacker News Reader

How to Live Without Google: Alternatives That Protect Your Privacy

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40 pointstempodox31 comments

I use Fastmail and recommend them. I'm never going back to Gmail.

+1 for fastmail

Have used Fastmail for many years and recommend it!

In case folks were not aware, Fastmail is a Calendar, Contacts, Drive, and Keep replacement too, all built on open standards so you can use your favorite tools to interact with them

Since you're a paying customer, there's no front page posts ever saying "I got locked out of my account and there's no one to call" as with some other free mail provider I can think of

A really nice feature of Fastmail is "virtual domains" where you can receive emails on multiple domains in the one inbox. It's a 5 min job to setup email capability (including wildcard addressing) on any new domain you get. They've made it very simple and easy to configure.

Another fun trick is their partnership with 1Password to make "masked emails"; all the fun of mailinator but with much less hassle: https://support.1password.com/fastmail/

The main one that's pretty much impossible to find an alternative to is YouTube (if you're into watching videos on the Internet). Tons of creators/channels only upload their content on YouTube and nowhere else.

Invidious is a solution: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Use NewPipe or another independent viewer for goodness sake.

I never watch YouTube in normal mode. Why watch ads when you don't have to? Also, NewPipe and like allow downloads.

It's a no-brainer.

Recommending an Android tool for de-googling has its own irony.

Take it a step further and buy a pixel to use grapheneos on, totally degoogled phone made by google

I don't use a pixel but I always use a rooted degoogled phone.

Something feels wrong and dirty about using a phone that hasn't been so processed.

I recently upgraded my iPhone and I'm trying hard to live without Google. Google is evil.

The only two Google apps I can't seem to get away from are Authenticator and Maps. I travel a lot, and I find the reviews are helpful for deciding where to go. Even if I don't read the reviews, the number of reviews are helpful to find a useful store of any time.

Apple maps' reviews aren't as helpful.

There are a ton of alternatives to Authenticator. AFAIK Authenticator is a generic TOTP app, easily replaced by open source tools or Authy, which is what I use. Authy has an encrypted backup service to cloud, and there are others which allow local backup. Authenticator isn't just bad because it is google, it's bad because it is an inferior app.

Thanks, I didn't realize that. I thought Authy worked differently. I'll try Authy.

I believe that Authy's encrypted backup is to their cloud service. If you are only going to need to access backups from your Apple devices you might want to consider a TOTP app that stores its backups in iCloud, since you presumably already are using that.

Of course this doesn't matter it all if you aren't going to use backup, in which case I can't think of any reason not to use Authy. As far as in-app TOTP backup goes you may not need it. I'll get to that later.

A good TOTP app for Apple devices if you want something that can backup to iCloud is OTP Auth. It can save/restore/sync with iCloud. OTP Auth also supports making and restoring from encrypted backup files which you can save using the usual share options.

Both Authy and OTP Auth support Apple Watch which is handy. You might not actually need in-app TOTP backup. When I set up a TOTP on a new site I save a copy of the QR code PNG on my Mac. I keep the collection of such QR codes in an encrypted file (which then automatically ends up in my Time Machine backup and my offsite backup). If I need to set up a new TOTP authenticator or restore an old one I simply decrypt that file, open all the PNGs files, and scan then.

If you don't have a large number of accounts that is not much trouble. I think I have maybe 20. I open the PNGs all in Preview, set it to show one per page, then it is scan, page down, repeat. Takes a second or two per code. It would probably get a bit annoying around 100.

Even if your TOTP app does support backup and restore and you use that, I think it is still a good idea to save the codes as described above, because if you ever want to change TOTP apps you likely can't restore from your previous app's backup. If you've saved the individual codes there is no such limitation.

That's what I do. I consider the encrypted file of PNGs to be my main backup, and the encrypted backup I saved in iCloud Files from OTP Auth to be for restoring OTP Auth if I ever have to reset a device or setup OTP Auth on a new device.

If you still have Google Authenticator somewhere, such as on the device you upgraded to your new phone from, you may be able to get your TOTP data out of it and into whatever TOTP app you use on the new phone. See my other comment that is near this one for details on how to do that.

I always register new TOTP accounts on multiple phones as a backup. My main phone and a couple of older phones that are not internet connected. It is no problem to register the same QR code on multiple devices.

Authenticator can be backed up locally by using the same mechanism they use for migrating to a new device.

That mechanism gives you a QR code containing the account information for one or more accounts, which you scan on the new device in Authenticator to import those accounts. Repeat until all accounts are migrated. I'm not sure how many accounts they can put in one QR code (I've only used Authenticator briefly to help someone else figure something out, and only put in 4 codes), but I'd expect at least 20.

To make a local backup just use the migration mechanism but instead of scanning the QR codes on a new device save them somewhere. On Apple devices you should be able to simply screenshot the migration QR codes. I've heard that on Android Authenticator blocks screenshots.

The contents of the QR codes are base64 encoded Google protocol buffers. If you extract the contents of the QR code, you can use the command line tool otpauth [1] to extract the TOTP setup URLs for each of the sites in the Google migration code.

You can have otpauth turn those individual site setup URLs into QR code images. This will do the trick:

  otpauth -qr --link <text_from_google_QR_code>

That will leave one PNG file per account, named after the account, in the current directory. You can use those PNG files to setup those accounts on any other TOTP app that can scan QR codes.

[1] https://github.com/dim13/otpauth

If you are just looking for shopping/restaurant reviews that are local to your location it is pretty easy to use google maps via an incognito/private browser tab. Depending on the country you are travelling to Apple's maps app is almost at parity with Google maps for general mapping and route planning, so you can just pop to the maps.google.com web site when you need location-specific info.

Google Authenticator is just one of the OTP implementation. Apple actually has built in authenticator available in iCloud keychain. https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-use-built-in-password-auth...

It’s a hassle to get codes from within the menu though. There’s other Authenticator apps though and Tofu is FOSS.

Can’t leave Maps as well. I usually keep both on my phone but Maps is taking the cake. Apple Maps is far from usable in some scenarios where I am unfortunately. Also I’m not sure if I want to put everything in apples basket either. I usually feel overwhelmed honestly, no idea how to keep everything as private and not miss out at the same time.

I know it’s polarizing, but I still use Yelp for deciding where to go—mostly because they are “small” big tech and I trust that the information they get from me won’t make it as far as with Google or Apple.

I found this the other day and it aligns to how I've been going about it: https://epsilonmachine.com/nogoogle/

I was hoping for an alternative to Photos, the only Google service I still use.

How do you use it? I don’t use any kind of cloud for my photos, they’re either on my pc or on my phone. How do you utilise the cloud?

Automatic backups, decent editing, magic eraser, great search either by face, context, etc.. I can search for dogs, waterfalls, trees, clouds, whatever and it usually gives me exactly what I want.

I’d have to look into editing and what magic eraser is but my phone offers the same functionality. I don’t have automatic backups though which is a huge plus. Thanks.

What do you mean offers the same functionality, what search options can it do locally? Genuinely curious

I have an iPhone 12 Mini and in the Photos app I can e.g. search for specific faces (it groups similar faces behind a folder) and can e.g. search for „Dog“ and it gives me all dogs. I don’t know by how much the cloud solution is better though and maybe I didn’t understand it and you mean something entirely different?

Ah no that makes perfect sense, Google photos must be the apple Icloud photo app equivalent for Android

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