De-Googling: My Progress
geekgonecrazy.com
geekgonecrazy.com
- there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me)
- not as SEOed (still not great though)
- the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads
- on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omnibox experience
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
(Edited formatting)
Some non technical searches are more difficult though.
It comes up every time DDG is discussed on HN and I don’t understand why they don’t fix it. It’s the main thing that keeps me using Bing on my phone.
I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.
If you want relevant results, don't use the global weighting. Use the UK weighting. That's why it's there. Literally so people with your preference of localized results can have localized results.
https://i.imgur.com/i6fb6sz.png
Now I set the region to the UK, I would expect the more relevant results. It shows the map for the US Worcester and mixed results again, but differently mixed:
https://i.imgur.com/OdhCQg9.png
This doesn’t make much sense to me.
YMMV, of course, but this search works fine for me.
DDG completely ignores my country or when it doesn't, the results are misclassified. And you can forget about local searches, DDG being worse than useless for those.
What strikes me as odd is that DDG is worse for computer science results too.
DDG often ignores search terms that Google doesn't. And which terms it ignores is a complete guess, so you do this back and forth putting relevant query words in quotes to try and force it.
I use DDG as my default search engine, but there's no point in denying the obvious. UI might be nice, but UI is unimportant.
Best decision ever!
The problem, is that during a pandemic or crisis, you sorta miss the cable news. Local TV broadcasts are not as sufficient, but at least I can get some good digital signal coverage for a few channels.
Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings, on my phone? I don't think I've ever typed out the word leggings on the internet before this very comment.
If Kaczynski had good ideas, he did them a terrible disservice by resorting to terrorism.
I use 'Adblock Fast'. Seems fine, but I admit I have nothing to compare it to.
Just this week I installed NextDNS and it brought back my ad blocking glee. It’s fantastic.
Of course I had to pay for it - which I am more than happy to do.
I do prefer not leaving all my data with Google though to combine with other activities of which I may or may not know of and I think it's good to use alternative services as much as possible, especially when I use Google just as an interface to surface information from site like Wikipedia or Stackexchange.
(note I'm not affiliated with DDG, I just also went through the process of De-Googling after Inbox was shut down)
PS uh, rather the whole page is related to dart.
I'm asking because adding the "!g" takes about 6-7 screen touches so it's quite inefficient, and it basically keeps me from using DDG.
Also google having more results you are looking for sometimes doesn't mean you can't have DDG as your default search. Just enter 'dartlang !g' when you want to search google.
P.S. Bojler eladó.
I find when searching for manuals on devices, for example, there are lots of garbage results or PDF spam sites that I would not recommend people click.
The other night I searched a question (I forget what) and the entire first page was Quora links to possibly the same question over and over, and not the question I asked.
tldr: I use !g, !i, and !usps a lot.
The result for copying the link of a search result item for e.g. "git book pdf"
from DuckDuckGo: https://progit2.s3.amazonaws.com/en/2016-03-22-f3531/progit-...
from Google: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
from bing: https://progit2.s3.amazonaws.com/en/2016-03-22-f3531/progit-...
People mention that more people should use Firefox because google controls the Blink engine and Gecko is the only real competitor, and if Blink has too high of market share, than google can add exclusive functionality to blink for developers to use, edging all other browsers out of the market.
Congrats, we live in that future.
I use Canvas every day in Firefox and have never had a single problem or error. Anecdata, I know, but that's my experience.
Also (unless I missed something) there's still no way to get hardware video acceleration on Firefox on Linux outside of Wayland. When I'm on Linux I'm also installing Chromium (with the VA-API patches applied) entirely for YouTube as my CPU usage ramps up immensely when watching videos. Watching videos in mpv (or equivalent software) is an alternative, but I like the convenience of watching videos directly through the browser.
Other than that though Firefox has been rock solid for me and has been my daily browser for years now.
Features wise I prefer Firefox (containers are amazing, extra privacy features/blockers by default nice, the new picture in picture for video is nice, dev tools have a lot of cool extra features etc), but Firefox often struggles and stutters for me, whereas I rarely have issues with Chrome.
The devtools are a good example, sometimes just having them open on a page I am developing slows everything down. Closing/re-opening the tab seems to fix it for a bit but then it just starts to happen again, Chrome's devtools are always snappy. Similary if I want to inspect an element on a page Chrome never has a problem doing it instantly, Firefox has to think about it for a while.
In general everything that uses the GPU I find far faster in Chrome. The other day for instance I was working on a d3 SVG visualization that strained Firefox but was no problem for Chrome, canvas performance is similar but not as bad in my experience. The most common offender is trying to watch a video: in Firefox everything slows down and the fans spin up, in Chrome no effect.
It is also true that all Google services that I am unfortunately tied to (GMail, Maps, Calendar etc) are snappy in Chrome and like molasses in Firefox...
I think it comes down to what one is used to. We probably learn to sidestep problems with any browser we use, but using a different browser inevitably leads to frustration.
Of course, this is not true if you are using Google services. Google seems to put an extra effort in making sure that their pages are as slow as possible in Firefox... I don't care much myself as I don't use them, but it's a good reminder of how (non)non-evil they have become.
Will probably try to make the switch again at some point.
Firefox's JavaScript engine is still slower and large JavaScript apps become sluggish more quickly.
Also, I still haven't found a way to let users download files from JavaScript (e.g. through a button click that invokes a function) in Firefox, that wouldn't open another window and in the process close their websocket connection.
This was true (I no longer use Chrome and don’t know if it’s improved in the last two years). Chrome needed enormous amounts of memory compared to Firefox. Using RAM is not an issue as such, but it makes other applications running at the same time miserable (and the user too).
Firefox just feels like a solid browser and how it should be.
Whenever I need to switch to chrome to browser test, I notice it just feels like a less well made browser.
Hard to articulate.
Edit: not to mention that the logo itself is uber cool!
The only thing that's annoyed me with FF was the recent update where the url bar got bigger when clicked.
i'll tell you though, the #1 subjective thing i hate is that single-click in the Chrome (Chromium) omnibar doesn't honor OS selection convention. unless you're on windows, where single click selects-all. having this behavior forced on Mac is jarring and awful and no amount of pleading would convince the dictatorial "my way is the right way" attitude of the gatekeepers. they refuse to even have a hidden flag to control this behavior. it's actively hostile.
the incongruity can be seen by clicking in any form field. eg chrome://flags search field. Note that single-click merely places the cursor on mac in a form field. then go to the omnibar. single-click selects-all. ARGH!
I had hoped Edge would fix this, but alas, no. (Also Opera keeps this behavior.)
Fast forward to newer behavior of hiding the protocol from the omnibar, until you click on it. Now when you click (or click-drag, the "proper" way to select less than the entire URL in one stroke, thank you oh overlords), as soon as you release the text changes and your mouse is no longer at the selection point. ARGH!! so awful.
I can't tell you how much I hate this poor implementation choice. However it's not enough to push me to FireFox, which is subjectively very much worse than Chrome.
I play games and use complex web apps (GCloud, Office 365) exclusively in Chromium
No, you are not. You are a Google marketing tool.
And this is not ad-hominem from my side, since you made a claim about yourself the main part of your argument.
Google is known for intentionally crippling Firefox performance on their services. That doesn't make Firefox itself slower.
Unfortunately the Firefox codebase itself is the only marketing tool at work here. I still use Firefox for everything else, not least due to the fact it isn't trying to swindle every last private detail out of me, but for work stuff and gaming (O365/GCloud) I don't really care about any of that.
Hiding behind lies and random personal attacks will not make Firefox better, but comparisons to its main competitor in key areas might help
And IE being better than (any browser)? Let's not get carried away. They still have multiple zero day vulnerabilities discovered every year.
Main reason why I use firefox is container tabs.
Chrome tabs load and appear instantly. As you add more tabs they shrink down to a tiny but still usable favicon size. As you close tabs they resize well and with nice little UX behavior like the next close button always appearing directly under your mouse. They close and re-open instantly.
When you press enter in the address bar Chrome always loads your Search, unlike Safari, which often requires second press, or weirdly loses focus. Even doing simple web search feels so slow and broken in Safari tabs. When you have a moderate number of tabs Safari switches to this horizontal scrolling mode where half of your tabs are no longer visible. Basically unusable.
Chrome tabs are so good compared to the standard macOS tabs found in places like Safari and Finder. I wish I could have them everywhere.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
(To anyone who plans to try it, you may need to edit userChrome.css to turn off the top tabs; there's guides on this. I also recommend tweaking TST's settings, imposing a limit on nesting, and preventing auto switching tabs )
I have nearly 1000 tabs open in Firefox and navigate them extremely efficiently. Does chrome do that?
I was lured in initially by the novelty. But it has become an amazing tool for organizing myself. When I browse HN, I shift-click on everything interesting, and it automatically gets organized into a nice collapsible tree.
When I am working on a project, I move search results, project pages, and relevant info to a single tree.
I leave other things open indefinitely, which effectively replaces bookmarks.
I assume there are more factors that go into this than just the browser itself. For example, I find Ubuntu to be one of the more sluggish distros out there in general, while Fedora and Arch feel way snappier, but am sure this isn't the case for everyone.
When in FireFox I am still experiencing weird bugs but am willing to give her some slack and hope they get fixed. Come on Firefox, FireFix and Rock!
My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the very least we all need readily available choices.
Interestingly, although I went through all the steps to delete my Google account I got stuck at the point of wondering what to do with my Youtube videos. Although, since last time I checked, it seems now I can actually move them to another Google account, I'll look into that.
Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?
And doesn't it use the same "state of the art" encryption as WhatsApp?
As far as I know yes Whatsapp uses some of Signal's tech but doesn't implement it in exactly the same way.
Not GP, but I’ve railed against Signal’s stability and UX before.
Apart from messages not being delivered sometimes (or taking very long) and getting unnecessary “device changed” messages when nothing has changed (this happened as recent as last year), within a year or two of use, Signal makes sure that the user realizes that it’s meant for ephemeral use.
It does this by a few different ways. One is that if you change devices, you’d have to jump through hoops to rejoin groups you were a part of, and then see that you cannot see the list of members or the group’s name. Once you change devices, at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either.
In terms of UX alone, Telegram > WhatsApp > Signal. FWIW, I use all these and Wire too. Signal gets the least amount of use because the people I chat with on it are also fed up with the poor UX and lack of features.
> at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either.
This seems like an iOS limitation that Signal doesn't want to compromise on. On Android it outputs an encrypted backup file that you can use a file manager to upload or send wherever you want.
Note I carefully said user not customer. Except for Spotify (and his email host) he is not the customer he is the product they sell. However in all cases he is a user.
And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting.
And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot less data when you use their apps. For instance, Maps data is never associated with an Apple ID, and significant work is done to fuzz and scramble the anonymous data they store to avoid it being possible to turn it into data about a real person. In comparison, Google Maps logs your location to your Google account every five minutes.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Edit: I can reply anymore but just supply a link of data handling discrimination between paying customers because that's what you imply by "there is not difference between GSuite customers and normal gmail".
It's bullshit
Many of Google's uses of data are not specific to whether or not someone is using G Suite or consumer Gmail as far as I am aware.
https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...
I definitely don't want my email used to train Google's AI models, which might unpredictably cough up sensitive data since machine learning is pretty much a black box.
A big issue is that at any time, Google may introduce a new "feature" and decide to use your data to power it. I also think of how purchase data gets extracted from your receipts to store in your Google account profile and the like (https://myaccount.google.com/purchases although the text on this page has changed... did they stop?) and I feel a privacy-first service would need to at minimum have switches to control what kind of data processing is performed on their email, and default new features to be off.
What sensitive information are you concerned about coughing up? While I haven't actually looked closely at how smart reply works, it isn't just a simple lstm on text, it tracks contextual info like recipient names, so "hey " on the first line will autocomple to "Hey Todd and Amanda" if you're sending am email to two people named Todd and Amanda.
So there's some tokenization and preprocessing happening, which would avoid most of the potential privacy issues I can think up with something like that (which are all of the form of automoplete linking your name to a private fact).
But it has nothing to do with what the actual policy on customer data is. My guess is that you'd be pleasantly surprised be the policy. I just can't find it documented publicly anywhere, so I don't know that I can share the actual policies. There are people who's job it is to share such things, they're like account managers and support people and they have guidance on the way the things they can say. My guidance is more like "don't unless it's clearly public".
Put another way, the training on data handling is longer than the training on corporate communication. So if I'm this careful with my communication, imagine the ridiculous lengths I go to with user data safety.
- If you're going to "autonomy, independance and self-hosting", it's a step sideways for sure
- If you're going to "stop giving all my information to a central entity" it's definitely a step forward. Giving a part to Google, a part to Facebook and a part to Apple is better than giving everything to one of them, whichever they are.
Facebook Messenger I don't get, I'd use Apple Messages over Facebook, or Telegram, etc.
Except when they are
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Yes they advertise, but you are not the product on services such as cloud. They often cannot physically read your data intentionally.
They actually can read your data. They abandoned plans to do end to end encryption [0] on icloud backups. When you get a new iphone you can view all your old messages which means Apple in all likelyhood has access to your private key.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/21/apple-reportedly-abandoned-en...
For other communications I use Rocket.Chat for team collab, signal, keybase chat or sms(which if they do happen to have iMessage does convert). I definitely do not trust facebook any more than Google. And I would agree thats a sideways move not an improvement
*Search(1) -> DuckDuckGo
*Gmail(2) -> Fastmail
*Android -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/)
*Maps -> OpenStreetMaps
*Youtube(3) -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds
*Drive -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing
*Calendar -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar
*Chrome -> Brave & Firefox
(2) Accounts still exist and forward to fastmail as I'm slowly changing my subscriptions etc.
(3) Youtube I feel is the toughest to get rid of, but nowadays I hardly ever go on the website as I hate all the clickbait that the algorithm tries to stuff into my face.
It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality).
Did you figure this out?
Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android, NewPipe is a great client.
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/syncthing-nextcloud-how-to/5459...
Nextcloud runs on Digital Ocean droplet and I upload my photos there from phone, store contacts and share larger files with people. Currently Syncthing and Nextcloud do not communicate in anyway.
And yeah, youtube-dl has been lifesaver to escape that "rabbithole recommendation engine" as you awesomely put :D
I agree with your point about YouTube. I'll try out the combo you have.
I like YouTube for the videos on there and nothing else. I hate all the ads and how if you watch one video that is off topic from what you usually watch then the algorithm gets messed up and your recommended videos become way different.
I should buy "fastmile.com" and use that as an email alias - would solve a lot of problems, lol.
I still use digital for work since it's collaborative but my personal stuff is all inscribed on a dead tree, now.
I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).
1. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?
2. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" - no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.
3. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?
3. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" ...
4. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.
5. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)
OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, "Download is disabled." Why?
To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting "Rate limit exceeded" error just trying to open front page.
A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical-matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.
... 13k+ bangs available. Yep!
I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.
For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.
My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's https://www.libimobiledevice.org/ but it looks like it only works for images.
For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.
The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.
Amazon is !a, etc. etc.
DDG has some neat functionality via bangs (aka !): https://duckduckgo.com/bang
When I want to look something up in the norwegian Wikipedia I do !wno, for english just !w or !wen (and if I for some reason unbeknownst would want search in another language, it would be just a language tag away), I was very happy to see bangs for both the online norwegian dictionaries I use (!naob and !norsk), and some of the nicher sites, though, maybe not quite so niche here in HN: !dfw (Dwarf Fortress Wiki), even !nhw (nethack), etc.
This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).
I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.
I've had this same experience. Looking up businesses is pretty much the only time I use Google.
I'm using the B2 storage (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html) since I'm backing up multiple machines and arbitrary sets of files, and it works on a pay-for-what-you-use basis. You can get more storage (they say unlimited, and I couldn't find anything in their literature to contradict that assertion) in the basic backup plans, but you don't get as much choice: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html
Also, if you have hundreds of accounts where you used gmail to register and hundreds or thousands of contacts which might send you mail, it's hard to switch.
Also, you don't have to delete your Gmail account completely. Mine sits there mostly unused just in case, it's fine.
You just became reliant on the iOS system instead of the Google on. Hardly an improvement.
I don’t feel locked in at all.
If I went feet first in iEcosystem then for sure would be different story
I have a Brave Heart Edition PinePhone, and I'm hoping to switch to a real Linux phone soon, but for now, carrying an iPhone as a pretty basic phone is still a big privacy improvement.
I think it is much more scary if you realize that google works very hard to identify who you are accurately, and even matches it with things like offline purchase data.
The opposite of privacy is identification, and google is arguably the most capable and well-funded identification service on the planet.
I also think we as tech people should set a good example.
We could map the path for the less technically adept folks around us to take steps in the right direction.
We could provide support instead of ridicule when people make inconvenient choices instead of giving in.
And we could BE people who care about privacy, even if it is just to read the privacy policy, or block some trackers.
Yeah, moving from Google over to Apple is just cheating. It's better for privacy, but I'd rather thinker with my system to remove the spyware than remove the spyware and largely give up the ability to easily tinker with my system.
I switched to an iPhone recently, but I'm not really engaging heavily with Apple's services or ecosystem.
After a point of tinkering, flashing Roms, getting stuck in hairy situations where your phone is bootlooping and you don't know if you will get it back.
At some point having to mess with configuration gets annoying.
I kinda view this like an experiment to see how the other side is living with my eye very much on Android waiting for an excuse to jump back over.
I wish there were more good options for De-Google'd Android shipped from a vendor that actually cared about privacy and had the chops to make a smooth experience
Apple respects your privacy everywhere they're legally able to.
Google violates your privacy everywhere they're legally able to.
It’s definitely something I’ll probably look at
Huh? LineageOS has been rock stable for me for years as long as I go with stable builds. Maybe the author meant using something like microG to replace all the google frameworks?
Source: I've been using Cyanogen/LineageOS for years on various phones, and even tried getting it working on an officially unsupported phone (without luck).
Then the whole Drama with Cyanogen the company also was weird.. kept me from messing with cyanogen specifically for a while.
Over all felt like playing the lottery. I'd do tons and tons of reading through xda forums and had to do things exactly right if misunderstood even a single step some of these phones were bricked.
Kinda like anything at some point you just need a break and it just needs to work :)
Replaced Chrome browser with Firefox
Replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo
Replaced Gmail with ProtonMail
Replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap
Replaced Hangouts with Telegram
Replaced Google for news with Feedly
Replaced Google Translate with DeepL
Aside from self-hosted email, my list is very similar to yours, I just wanted to highlight Deepl because few people seem to know it and it's a German company so I trust that a whole lot more from the outset.
So, I’ve switched browsers (Edge), switched search engine (DDG), but I don’t know an email system that’s as good as Inbox was, so I can drop gmail?
For messaging, Telegram FTW, but can't seem to convince a lot of my friends to move over.
It's not as faulty as it used to be, but I see the old times made a reputation for it.
I am aware of that, though I think in the second case it's better to pretend messages are not encrypted at all on the server side since mere storage encryption can be circumvented all too easily.
Anyway, having the choice between encryption and no encryption is exactly the problem. How many Telegram users choose e2e-encrypted chats? AFAIK you have to enable this for every conversation separately, right?
It's their approach and I'm personally ok with it. Due to my friends I use FB messenger a lot and they say it will take years to be e2e encrypted, so I believe it's a fair compromise from Telegram.
I made mostly the same choices, but swapped in:
* Email/Calendar/Contacts: Fastmail
* Docs: I don't use a hosted solution for this
* Messaging: iMessage/Signal/Discord
* Music: local music library
Oh, actually I am a Google Fi customer as well -- it's the cheapest way I've found to keep my US number active.
Of course the best choice for maximum flexibility is to have your own domain, then you can always move if you want. We want to keep you by being the best, not due to lock-in!
That seems odd. An auto reply "this email address is no longer in use" didn't do the trick?
Does any other HNer have experience with their search result ? I'm still not using it enough to have a reliable conclusion of my own.
I'd recommend trying these Google Alt's:
Protonmail or Fairmail for email.
DuckduckGo or Bromite for low-ad/tracker browsing, or button down your Chrome with Umatrix/UBO and a host of other extensions (Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, etc.)
Been using Protonmail beta's Calender feature with success, can't wait for their Android App.
Have begun pulling all my photos off Photos and moving to both local drives and PCloud, and considering encrypting them at rest there too.
DDG/SearX for Search.
NextDNS for secure and adfree DNS mimicing PiHole (which I have at home) when away.
If you want to keep your awesome Android hardware (OnePlus6T here), you can disable Google Services Framework and neuter everything at will using NetGuard, with the paid version allowing individual link granularity, so you can stop that Facebook link Spotify spawns upon launch, among all others.
This allows you to fine tune each app to comm with only links you allow. FB is particularly pesky..once it fails to connect to it's obvious servers, it spawns other numerical IP's that you have to do lookups on to see where/who they are...often returning to FB, so it's an ongoing task, recommended only for those most commited. I was on this path well before Shoshana's book, but her presentation was reaffirming.
EDIT: of course...Signal, how did I forget that..most used app of all.
Also I have an android phone with google apps, facebook, twitter, scores of other apps tracking me. There's not much I can do about giving google my location data atm. I like waze and fitness apps too much.
resolution as mentioned is another big factor but that was also annoy having the default resolution. Maybe I would have gotten used to it, but I tried for many weeks with the firefox anti fingerprint setting but eventually gave up, it was too inconvenient.
Oddly one of the few things I actually kept is Google search itself after noticed that I basically add !g to every DDG search, and I've tried to firewall it off as much as I can.
I had never to use "!g" before. Now it is required for 1/3 of my regular searches, and "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches.
I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field.
Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for their license selection feature, but I figured I should double check, and whaddayaknow? Bing can do license filtering too. Not sure how good it'll be, but I'll definitely be trying this.
Note that instead of typing !something (which I find quite annoying), you can just bind your browser to a keyword. I type "bi test" in my address bar for Bing Images "test" search, instead of having to type a bang and some by-ddg-defined shortcut and giving DDG the data (not that I distrust them, but need-to-know...). Wiki searching is also super convenient like this: wi for wikipedia, dwi for deutsch wikipedia, owi for openstreetmap wiki, etc. Right click in the search field and choose 'Add keyword for this search' usually does the trick.
I do still use Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive for secondary backups for my photos on iCloud (my iPhone auto exports to all three when I am on WiFi) and I sometimes use Google Search in a FireFox container (I use one container for all Google web properties).
Respect to Aaron for running his own email service. I think about doing that but never do. My problem is that I enjoy spending time writing, and designing and writing code, and I don’t make time for some things that I would like to try. Time management is a pain sometimes.
EDIT: something I forgot to add: when following a web link, copy the URI and then open the appropriate FireFox container for the domain and copy the URI to a new tab in the correct container. Good hygiene.
Email was the hardest for me. But felt the most freeing also.
Useful for technical searches, where ddg is sadly, not good enough.
edit: clarity
De-Googling services is quite easy for the most part as there are many competing alternatives including good self-hosted options.
As a web user, I block all Google JavaScript that gets embedded in 99% of sites using a combination uBlock, NoScript, and my own DNS. Most sites load fine but some that use the Google API fail to show anything—which is silly when most of them are plain text and image articles.
You can sync contacts via CardDav and your calendar via CalDav.
Even better, if you have a work Google account like I do, you can import your calendar as an overlay on Fastmail's calendar using OAuth2.
If you'd like your calendar without the pesky forced management profiles, it's a neat workaround while still remaining relatively secure. It also doesn't break when your arbitrary forced password rotation kicks in every 90 days ;)
It's fucked up that's the way world is, but it is the way the world is.
Not really. You can install LineageOS an many Android phones.
LineageOS is a de-googled Android.
And the latest Huawei Android devices are also Google-free.
But the worst thing is that to get most use of Android, you have to have Play store and attached surveillance services. There's a lot of cool stuff on fdroid, but your city's public transport? Your bank's app? Your local taxi's app? Your city's meal delivery app? You're not getting that without Google Play.
You can get some stuff from sites like apkmirror, but that's at the risk of getting malware (again, the two of us can see what's malware and what's the actual apk, but most can't) and at the cost of automated security updates.
I lived like that for a while, and it's not worth it. Maybe if you don't mind you're smartphone is actually a dumbphone - which is a good thing for some people who want it that way because of minimalism and somesuch, but most people don't.
- DuckDuckGo for search mostly, trying out qwant
- Runbox for email, I like the service and its incredibly cheap and have my own domain
- Youtube -> miniflux for subscriptions & newpipe on my phone
- I cant delete facebook but I've mitigated it to using matrix + a facebook->matrix bridge
- Using osmand~ and open street maps for directions, i dont have a way to get public transport directions, I helped write a program that does this in college but,, its not very good
And people ask why I have su on my phone. I want ownership, nothing more...
Anyway, for public transport directions, have you checked the apps available in F-Droid? The main ones that come to mind are Transportr and Öffi, I don't know if they work (well) whereever you're located though. Newer versions of OsmAnd can also do this to an extent, but doesn't pull the schedules (let alone realtime delays) so it only shows you "you can take bus 6 and then train 9" without knowing anything about their schedules, so that's largely useless at the moment.
Android app support is what allowed me to transition because of banking apps etc. It's not 100% polished (especially the Android app usage) but at its worst works well enough and at it's best, the experience IMO tops any other phone OS that i've used.
Wish it had more native apps though.
I need to find a replacement for Google Keep (love how easy it is to move text/urls/photos between devices, jot down ideas / record thoughts) and Hangouts Dialer still.
Feel you on Instagram habit. I de-social-mediaized (?) in late 2019 and haven't looked back, but it was tough!
How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.
Though it only became usable in the final month or two before the actual sunset.
If you're having issues, do follow up with Google tech support, it's among the few components that actually gets bugfixes.
I've used this 3rd party tool and it worked OK: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/
- Use the .tgz option, not .zip
- I had to manually create several large albums by year, and then created a takeout archive with just that album. Then created another archive with the next album, ... You may not need to do this, try the whole enchilada first. My wife's photo takeout didn't require this, for example.
- I had to pick smaller archive sizes. 8gb worked for me. Yes, it was a lot of chunks.
- I had to switch to Chrome (not Firefox, which is my daily driver) before the download would complete successfully.
- Downloading to my NAS directly made it fail. Had to use local disk.
- wired, not wifi
Even with all these in place, my ISP sometimes didn't allow downloads to finish successfully. I had to run them early in the morning over several days.
I had to go through and redo several chunks that corrupted themselves somehow. Verify the chunks with `gunzip -t`
Also: now that you've got your photos and videos back, you might be interested in PhotoStructure! Details are in my profile. I'm providing free access to the beta in exchange for feedback.
I switched over to OneDrive and thankfully it still works that way.
It would be a nice if there was a way to get all this functionality beyond Gmail.
I use https://awardwallet.com/ and they added similar features but even better. Problem solved for me.
It could effectively replace iCloud, hackmd (maybe) and has calendaring features too.
Is there a paid service that's similar to Google Voice where I can get an extra phone number and have calls to it routed to my normal phone? I'd like to have a phone number that's "out there", so to speak, but not my real number.
Calling out might be a bit more tricky though
Add bandwidth, management and other hardware fee to that. It makes sense.
Pcloud also makes you pay separately (and quite a lot) for having encryption turned on.
For me the point of using something else is to trust it enough to not add my own encryption, which is a pain especially on mobile.
I didn't know it's possible to upload mail (without actually sending it) with IMAP.
Do hosted providers allow that? Looks like it's additional cost with no benefit if you don't data-mine email.
Some people also implemented 'cloud storage' over IMAP to (ab)use the free storage that comes with gmail/hotmail/ISP/etc.
In summary, I don't see the purpose of de-googling as an individual. And if de-google collectively, we're all worse off. And yet I de-googled last year.
PS: I use Brave, Android, flutter & duck.com, which only exists to its quality today because of Google.
What do you mean? Everyone on the planet is a target. They want data on everyone so they can target ads to everyone.
They might claim privacy, but de-googlers forget that Google is a much bigger target for law enforcement than any of its alternatives.
If you don't trust Google to not collect your data, in spite of turning that behavior off in your profile, why would you trust Startpage?
A listing of search alternatives, including Qwant (French-based, so EU/GDPR), SwissCows, SearX, and others, with good rationales:
1) Startpage provides Google results, but Google never sees you. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. For more info on we keep your search private: https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st.... 2) Startpage is HQ'ed in the Netherlands, meaning we don't have to comply with US government or law enforcement and comply with EU/Dutch privacy laws such as GDPR. Also, we’re not likely to receive requests by governments to hand over user data – simply because we don’t have any. 3) In 2019, Startpage announced an investment in Startpage by System1 through Privacy One Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of System1. With this investment, the plan is to further expand privacy features and reach new users. (Lots of new privacy features in the works!) The Startpage founders have control over the privacy components of Startpage. And! After conversations with the privacy community, Startpage was recently relisted in PrivacyToolsIO. More info on that: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
That's a lot of text, but I hope it helps.
That's not very friendly behavior.
Perhaps it's something else, like your IP range, that's triggering it?
On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.
It happened again one day, and when Firefox exited I just started Chromium up instead.
It feels, to me, that Firefox and Mozilla have a very annoying "We know better than you" attitude towards a lot of things. That's great for people who want that, but I don't.
I haven't had a problem restarting Firefox and having all my tabs appearing again. Maybe something is corrupted in your profile?
I also haven't found that to be Mozilla's attitude. Luckily a lot of things are configurable in about:config
Also, I have a website which isn't precious; I'm going to reject chrome requests, with a message recommending firefox.
Your first concern and reason for De-Googling was privacy, so I'd say moving to iPhone, iCloud, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and the like doesn't help you much.
I also think you forgot video-conferencing/video chat. I'd go for Zoom, but there's a bunch of alternatives. Most have their drawbacks.
Lastly, move to Europe where we have GDPR. I actually can not read some news articles that are hosted in the US since the site might not have bothered to implement Privacy features and thus chose to just block EU visitors. Tells you something about the 'issue'.
In general though, regardless of your phone ecosystem: Remove as many apps as you can from your device. Only install the ones you need and remove ones you don't frequently.
Maps and youtube are the two google features I routinely use. I'll have to install this on mobile and see how it goes.
Thanks for the tip!
It's great to compare with people who have done similar, thanks for sharing your journey. It is an inordinate amount of work that non-computer-interested most likely aren't interested in. I do wonder what it takes (restoration of privacy rights enacted through judicial interpretation enforced upon companies like e.g. GDPR?) to have default UX that is E2E across most services, probably widely used companies like Apple doing it (which may compel Google, et al, to?). It surprises me to some degree that companies seem to _want_ the liability involved with associating people with their data? This seems odd, as the data is just as useful assigned to some random identifier that can be carted around the internet that can't be tied to our person, and I wonder how the cost of liability remains worth it when technologically it's unnecessary. The human aspect of social networking seems like the weak heel for removing names there, but still things like chat seem like things companies wouldn't want to store (who knows how strongly gov is compelling them to do so to make it worthwhile, maybe, with $$$ or threats). Even things like imessage, most people use icloud to backup and in this case the messages are recoverable by Apple (for law enforcement as it is or their own purposes maybe, more cynically) - this is heavily marketed E2E but in practice isn't, Apple says so on their security page even (this is nice of them): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 - I hope that as an industry we can work towards pushing ephemeral UX that users can adjust to but it will take adjusting, nobody needs a message from Nonna from 2014 and if it was the prized bread recipe, save it somewhere else! In any event, I hope this continues to get better for the lay user.
I haven't changed most of my choices since making the switch. I do use mullvad with wireguard now and I consider moving off of 1.1.1.1 for similar reasons to leaving google (see recent news about large gov partner here). I don't have many complaints. In the past year, I've also stopped reading twitter/reddit and moved to reading the news once a week in some attempt to rewire my brain, I'd say it's mostly good, I spend more time thinking and reading more interesting things and it gives me some perspective, the trade offs are being more disconnected from society (not up to date on memes, miss seeing what friends are cooking!) which has pros/cons. I'm rethinking this, it's all about values really, I do think social media can be used in a privacy preserving way to still keep in touch with friends/family (fingerprinting is slight issue) that doesn't have to constantly fight for your dopamine receptors. Anyway, it's interesting to discuss with like minded people, I know very few who aren't constantly plugged in now and it can be hard to relate (ie talk about more interesting things imho).