Comment by vertnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vertnerd | Hacker News Reader

We (wife and I) de-googled ourselves about a year and a half ago, moving half a TB of photos to Ente and canceling our paid Google subscription (while still keeping our gmail addresses). We set up our (Android) phones to back up photos to Ente and everything was lovely.

Then I started noticing my wife's Google Photos storage use growing again. Somehow her phone had been switched to backing up on Google again. I turned it off. Then it happened again. And again. She couldn't explain how it happened, but I suspected she was the victim of a scary prompt warning that her photos weren't getting backed up.

This wasn't happening to me because I had switched my phone to LineageOS, but hers was still a stock Pixel with Android.

Lately, I have run across a different example of Google locking in its services. As part of our process of leaving Google, we moved our email, contacts and calendars to mailbox.org. I set up her phone's calendar app to use the new server but to my dismay every new appointment was defaulting to use the Google calendar service! I switched her to the Etar calendar app (which is the default app on LineageOS), disabled the default calendar, and asked her to use Etar instead. Everything was great until I began to notice that her new appointments were showing up on Google again! I look at her phone and see that Etar is completely gone and the only calendar app available is the default Android one.

This calendar fiasco only just revealed itself the other day, so I haven't had enough time to figure out how or when it happened but it feels like it might be the same Google Photos tactic of sucking people back into Google.

I have another, similar example, though not quite as insidious. I switched to GrapheneOS and it's been mostly great. Unfortunately Graphene's stock camera creates drab shots compared to what the hardware supports. OpenCamera is available, but due to OS restrictions it doesn't work with hardware controls. In other words if you want to take a quick shot you have to unlock the phone and select OpenCamera. Bummer if you're into wildlife shots.

Graphene recommends installing google's pixel camera and sandboxing it, which, fine, I did and it takes beautiful pictures. However the pixel camera locks in google photos for it's gallery. As a result going from the camera to the gallery requires going back home first and then selecting the gallery.

Glad to hear about experiences like this because it was getting tempting to install and sandbox google photos as well.

https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider to choose any gallery while still using pixel camera

holy cow thank you!

Google's workspace features are almost hilariously transparent in how they do this. I have to use it for work and have chosen to do so on a single device also for personal use because I don't want two devices. I don't have Chrome installed on this device, but if you click a link from any Google app, it will still popup a selection menu with Chrome as the default and a generic "this device's default browser" last option with no distinguishing name or icon, unlike every other app I am aware of that chooses the default browser by default because that's the entire point of having a default.

My work uses Google. Many websites now have a popup 'sign-in with Google' to keep you using their ecosystem.

It's not the websites. Your browser has that popup.

No. It's the websites.

If I used Chrome, I could see this happening. But it happens on both Edge & Firefox.

I thought you were referring to this: https://underpassapp.com/news/2025/7/5.html

It looks like the pop up is part of the browser UI in Chrome, and displayed as part of the website if using non-Chromium browsers. I block ads and don't use Chrome, so I don't see any version of this often.

This happens exactly because you're not on Chrome. For some reason the sign in with Google pop up only triggers on non-chrome browsers. Especially on Firefox.

Is it not happening on Chrome even when you don't have the browser itself logged into a Google account?

It takes up quite a sizable amount of the screen, too, so anything in the corner is effectively hidden without interacting with the popup. These pop-ups have been the bane of my life.

There was brief time when Pinterest automatically logged in Google account users if you made the mistake of clicked an image in Google search results. Popups sound downright civilized and principled by comparison

>> Many websites now have a popup 'sign-in with Google'

> These pop-ups have been the bane of my life.

Adding the below in Ublock Origin->My Filters helps with this:

    ||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p

(which I run on Ungoogled Chromium, Cromite, etc)

    winget install -e --id=eloston.ungoogled-chromium
    winget install -e --id uazo.cromite

If you use firefox+ublock its very easy to block these super annoying pop ups.

I think you should let your wife use Google, as it doesn't seem she's very invested in your degoogling.

It's not a matter of "letting" her do anything. She can choose to use whatever service and hardware vendors she wants, as long as she can take care of her own tech support.

Obviously I didn't mean it as her asking for permission, but as him not questioning her if she wants to go the Google route. People will make sacrifices for their significant others if they think that'll make them happier, out of their own choice.

Who would even honestly interpret it that way nowadays? This isn't the 19th century.

How did you effectively download 500GB of photos? Did you just use Takeout?

I did, takeout worked pretty great actually.

Remember to choose the `tar` version, not the `zip` one, unless you like downloading ten thousand zip files one by one. The tar files can be up to 50GB, the zip ones are much smaller.

The zip files can be up to 50GB as well, but they recently changed something on the backend so that if you do use the zip option you may still get however many 50GB files then maybe a 1MB, a 7kB, and a 1GB file, I assume because of the way they parallelize the tasks. I don't know if the tar option behaves in the same way.

Oh, interesting - I wonder if that's new. The last time I checked (granted, a few years ago), it was limited to something much smaller.

I have noticed that the tar files toward the end tend to be smaller, but they still typically weigh in at multiple gigs apiece - 37, 14, etc.

Did the same. One issue was the links had some # of retries you can do before they become invalid. Solved it first by exporting them to google drive instead :D

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