Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
degoogle.jmoore.dev
degoogle.jmoore.dev
The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail).
Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is.
On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one).
One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc.
I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too).
The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube.
Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose.
They better hope their ad revenue doesn’t decay.
Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.
It‘s hard to leave google completely behind.
Edit: Replaced Chrome first with Safari, then with Firefox and never looked back.
Edit 2: Moved all my photos from Google‘s cloud solution to iCloud when I migrated from Android to iDevices.
Edit 3: Fastmail (although a rather smallish company) do a phantastic job with their mail service. Their contact management and calendar are also superb. Fastmail + MailMate on MacOS are a dream-team.
Try Searx[1]. It's a search engine aggregator that works with DDG, Google, and dozens of other search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances.
> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
I have the same experience; I’ve tried switching multiple times, but at least for scientific topics, I find DDG far inferior to Google Search. My current workaround is to use StartPage.com, which is just a website that searches Google for you, but without letting Google track you.
> Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.
If you don’t need to actively publish or comment on videos, you don’t need a Google account to get most of the convenience of YouTube. Personally, I just use a good old RSS client to track my YouTube feeds in the same place I track other content (e.g. HackerNews posts). If you say that you use iDevices, I can recommend “News Explorer”, which syncs your feeds via iCloud (in contrast to all the RSS solutions that require a separate sync account).
In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).
Drop-in replacement for same/less cost & better privacy while supporting a slightly better cause? I'm switching tomorrow.
However, for me, the problems are: Maps. Google Maps are great. Calendar: my calender provider online has ICS calendar sharing, not e.g. itip.and imip.
- iCloud
- iCloud syncs to my Windows PC
- Backblaze backs up my Windows PC
- Google Drive
- One Drive
absolutely great to see you do this
I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts
Anyways
Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.
Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened
They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that
Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google
Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone
Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari
Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either
avoid all google services as mucha s possible
Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games
One more search engine to try is qwant.com.
For phone just use microg lineage (https://lineage.microg.org/) and use aurora store instead of play store (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/) for apps.
Agree. It would become a little easier if all major broadcasters would at least mirror their youtube content on other networks like Peertube. That would not solve the recommendation problem to discover new videos, but at least the hosting itself would be taken care off this way.
Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.
Why not use LineageOS with microG? Aurora Store and f-droid for installing apps. It works pretty well for me.
For privacy and security oriented folks, there’s Puri.sm Librem 5 phone that looks interesting. I wouldn’t mind buying one if the reviews are good.
I am particularly excited about the removable battery! Anyone has any hands on experience with the phone? Links/resources would be highly appreciated!
Outlook decided it would be a nice idea to change my "Thank you" signature to an emoji in a business casual email.
For mobile, I use an Android for all the apps I can't avoid not having, but otherwise I resort to Blackberry like the old coot I am. My Q10 is still reliable af.
You have the Pinephone nowadays. You will lose a lot moving from Android to a Linux based phone, especially if you rely on native applications.
https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-revi...
I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.
On just principles, I tried switching to DDG, Gmail alternatives like Hey etc, Maps alternatives but they are not even close to making your life easy. At the end of the day, I really don't want to take time categorising every email, handle spam on my own, worrying about data security. Services like Gmail seem far superior to alternatives to me.
Edit: Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people.
I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average).
Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use.
DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).
My only potential concerns are: spam (I still get most email to my gmail address and imported by fastmail, which filter out spam on the gmail side, so I don't have a good sense of their own spam filter), and overall security (their own production security as well as resistance to account takeovers, etc.)
There are times when that is true, and there are times when it is simply a matter of adapting to the differences. For example, you mentioned trying a ThinkPad with Ubuntu after using a MacBook. You claimed that the MacBook seems to be at the sweet spot. It reflects your experiences so that's a fair assessment. Yet my experience in moving from a MacBook to a Linux PC was quite the opposite. A significant factor was my extensive prior experience with Linux, as well as a desire to reap the benefits of Linux (rather than to escape the drawbacks of the MacBook).
> Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
Don't confuse "pay for" and "ad free" with "no data mining". At least with consumer goods, companies were mining data from paid products well before the Internet was a thing. I also wouldn't be surprised if Google mines some data from business accounts, even if the scope of that data collection is severely limited.
Perhaps the change was made more difficult by the fact that you changed two variables at once: the OS (macOS -> Ubuntu) and the hardware (Macbook -> ThinkPad). Something to consider.
Now some aspects of how businesses conduct business is somewhat of a "practical reason."
For example, even if Apple products actually provided decent cost/performance ratio, I would never switch over to them because of how hostile they are to leaving their ecosystem. I don't have a huge problem, as a user, with more nebulous complaints about hostile business practices and the like. The issue is simply that it would be a pain in the ass for me personally, and require making a lot of annoying compromises, or swapping to more, and less effective apple hardware.
Like if we roll back the clock to 2015 when MBP's are probably hands down the best business laptops, from a hardware standpoint I'd love one compared to alternative laptops, and at least for a work-only computer when I have zero other devices and interactions to worry about, it could be a decent option.
Don't like some of the ways they do business? Who cares, I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot on general principle.
The difference with google services is a lot more stark though, there's nothing I would even remotely consider competition to gmail now, and the things were only worse when gmail first came out. These days migrating would be an absolute nightmare. I'd still do it if someone offered me a way better option, but people in this thread are talking about downgrading to some shite service on general principle, causing themselves significant pain in the ass in order to give some other company that definitely does not give a shit about acting in some morally upstanding way money, for a lower quality product.
There's no replacement for youtube, and frankly video services are are starting to look like a natural monopoly to dwarf all prior uses of the term, as youtube could never survive outside of google's business model, and can't be split up without just destroying it completely.
So anyway, I don't think people are being all that honest about their "switch from google" being ever so easy and worthwhile. Personally I lose a lot by swapping purely because the alternatives are shit, so I won't be doing it.
People switching from android to iPhone because "goOgLe bAd" are the height of irony though.
YouTube has the content I want to watch, creators that use YouTube rely on it for their revenue and recommendation algorithm.
Until that problem is fixed the alternatives won’t work.
Or moving to Nebula. Somehow https://watchnebula.com/ gained a lot of attention recently with maybe half of my yt subscriptions also publishing there. (Or maybe it's just my bubble)
I do mean an entire day, I basically did it for 12 hours.
Have to find some ways to entertain myself during the pandemic lockdown :).
So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.
I too switched to Fastmail and have been happy. I have a new Google account I use with YouTube and very occasionally Google Docs/Sheets, but I run it in a container tab in Firefox.
If you have a password manager and have been using it for awhile it makes things a lot easier since you can identify what you have tied to the account. I had over 100 sites tied to my GMail account and was able to mostly clean it up in a Saturday.
Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.
I had been keeping on there my side-project domains, which didn't really need a full gSuite backing them, since only a handful of emails would go in or out per month.
If Migadu's were a more reasonable price, I would have shrugged and upgraded. But going from $0/mo to $29/mo is a stretch.
This is particularly true when most of the people you’re emailing have gmail anyway.
Things like proton mail make no sense to me in that context.
Fastmail works well and has design incentives aligned with the user, I thought they were the best of the options available when I switched.
But this goes to show how basic the opsec is for some companies. Similarly with Twitter, each time I create a dev account for a bot, if I use fastmail my account will get locked 3-4 times in the first 20 minutes after creating the account (and not so with gmail). I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account, and are more likely to use fastmail.
Because it requires a phone number? Or does fastmail do too?
Every time google has done something to piss me off over the last few years, I have channeled that into migrating a few accounts away from google. It's a good way to unwind and has the bonus of being an action that speaks louder than words.
I would include Maps to this list. Outside of the US (and presumably China although I do not have experience here), Google Maps has no real competitors.
I haven’t deleted the old account yet and do have it importing right now (that’s a good strategy for catching any straggling accounts or friends you haven’t given your new email too).
I don’t have a good answer beyond some weird sense of aesthetic tidiness. I have a dash of wanting to compulsively organize things, so having the old account bothers me irrationally.
For me, google docs was the hook that made me create another account. Every volunteer project I go near uses them.
I tried creating aliases for the projects so that each product team could reference me by an email address that reflected the project. But after a year or two I had loads of these aliases and would accidentally open a doc for one project whilst logged in to gdocs as the identity for another project.
I now just have one identity for google. And I feel dirty.
Have you considered this in your threat model?
In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law).
You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.
I have this problem on Steam of all places. Way back when, I guess you had to sign up with your email as your username. I've long long since left that email behind, but it's still my username for logging onto Steam.
For following channels, I personally use Feedly and can only recommend it - it's not exactly the same but for me it comes close enough.
the reason people use their search is that it's default -if it was bing no one will notice. ads? super customized ads are not worth the money to companies, lighter cheaper personalization is available from many vendors.
google literally is yahoo.
to tech people -the ones who made google what they are, google is actively their enemy, and for the regular user, they want an iphone, and they want customer service with a smile -google has none.
me, i never googled-up. zoho for $1 a month, create new aliases for spam and filter them into folders. no gmail needed. maps? apple for iphone is ok, but i just use heremaps. you click a country, click download, and a couole of gig later you have full search offline.
now youtube, that's an interesting product that's only popular because it's popular. and it was popular before google bought it. there are many unpopular competitors. all it takes to take down youtube is an app for another service included by default on samsung and iphone home screens, and youtube is gone.
the same goes for facebook and twitter. myspace, yahoo, aol -all had their 15min of fame, all thought it would last forever. who cares. google is old news.
Still use YouTube and Google search. They have no (decent) competition still.
Interesting, how do they such sites deal with people who lose their email account (phishing or others?)
My email style is inbox everything and route emails to folders or delete on read.
If there’s something I’m always routing without reading then I unsubscribe.
Workflow may not be for everyone, but it keeps my email under control and organized.
If I did I would need a google account just for that purpose.
edit: Let me say some nice things about them. I put them towards the end for a reason, and they probably don't belong with Oracle. I don't think they are a big problem in the world, if at all. They aren't the company they were in the 90s. Gates has become one of the worlds most staggeringly successful humanitarians because of his direct effort and indirectly from the giving pledge, and it has redeemed him many times over again. Nadella seems like a decent person and truly great executive, and they have improved enormously as a company under him. I would probably work for them. But I don't have any problem with Google, either. What Microsoft does have is a vastly greater potential for abuse.
The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.
There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.
Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.
I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.
That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.
I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.
My own personal views, not Google’s.
Sure you can go and use the items on this list. But I don't think they will be better. Google has spent a lot of time and money to make a set of best in industry tools and people use them as a result.
Oh so they just don’t think about it at all. To be product focused is just to do what your boss tells you to do. Sometimes the easiest way to go about things is just to fully embody one’s role as a cog with no agency.
To answer another part of your question - I strongly believe in my mission, I consider what I do at Google helps people, that said I'm not deluded, I'm partly helping to sell ads, but that doesn't detract from my primary objectives or the beneficial impact of my work.
1. I find most criticism of Google on HN either wrong or overblown. To clarify this point, I suggest you name the 5 worst things that come to mind about Google; I'll be happy to explain how I feel about them.
There is one significant moral issue I see with Google: they like to collect and hoard massive amounts of user data, and they have a lot of users so the resulting centralization of data creates a big risk. Note that the issue I see is "only" a risk. I'm not even sure what the concrete bad scenarios are that would make Google specially bad when the risk is realized, but I'm sure they exist.
2. I think they do a lot of good, which far outweighs the issue mentioned in point 1. Here are the 5 best things that come to mind right now:
- They do amazing good for open source. I have seen Google criticized for "paying lip service to open source" or worst, which I find laughable. They have published 3 open source operating systems (Chromium OS, AOSP, Fuchsia). They have created a huge number of very useful open source libraries I have been using for personal and professional project, from big ones like Flutter and gRPC to small ones like libyuv.
- Related: they do a lot of good for open standards. Case in point: their work on open, royalty-free video codecs, which has been a boon for open source. I have seen Google called evil on HN for this, which again harms the credibility of their detractors in my eyes. Even for Google Chat / Hangout / whatever, for which they got criticized a lot, I think it's fair to say they tried harder than all the other big players to make it work with an open standard before giving up.
- They have been a driving force for a more secure Internet: early use of https for webmail, 2-factor authentication, lately ubiquitous https...
- They have been leaders in giving users access to all their data, with the Data Liberation Front / Takeout.
- They are the most transparent when it comes to the privacy policies and collected data (for example I get prompts to check the policy whenever I do something in Incognito mode). And relaed to the previous point: the My Activity page is awesome! It helps realize what they collect on me, and it makes the collected data actually useful to the user. For example I used it to find a place I knew I had visited on a given day, though I had forgotten the name and location.
Just how many parts of the stack does Google have its fingers in?
EDIT:
Consider this:
1. a user at home, wearing a Fitbit walks over to their computer, with their Nest camera recording their movements
2. they open their Chromebook, which uses Chrome OS
3. browses to their Gmail inbox with Chrome, and clicks on a link in one of their emails, sent by a friend using a Google Pixel phone running Android.
4. via their Fiber ISP
5. using Public DNS (8.8.8.8)
6. transfers between the US and Europe via the Grace Hopper subsea cable
7. transfers with HTTP/2 (based on SPDY)
8. to the website on the .dev TLD.
Google is in every step above. Thankfully the webpage doesn't use AMP, or Google would be in that step as well. And good thing it's not a page built on Angular, or hosted in Google Cloud...
As noted in https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle/blob/master/MIRRORS.md for GitHub Pages: "I am using my personal domain as some firewalls block GitHub"
To be quite honest I would prefer to not use GitHub either, but in the interest of easy collaboration GitHub is the optimal platform to manage the project from.
Don't get me wrong: I totally agree with the irony of using a Google TLD. But as @franksvalli said, I do not use AMP, Angular, or Google Cloud. Any tracking done on that page is from GitHub Pages that I do not have control over, unless I make my own auto mirror for that domain.
Another thign to be aware of is that unusual combinations of filtering and other privacy-seeking behavior on the Web is usually detectable, and can permit you to be fingerprinted better than if you'd been using more common combinations. Though presumably most parties don't care enough to put the work into detecting that, I'd guess some subsets of users probably are targeted for at least experiments in this regard, such as Tor users. (I have this "problem" myself now, since I've been building a training/familiarization set of 10K+ Web request filtering rules, which I dogfood with uBlock Origin in Tor Browser, and the set is pretty unique to me. If I cared more about my immediate personal privacy, rather than on ongoing understanding of practical Web privacy&security, I wouldn't do all that counterproductive work, but would instead pick some popular stock stuff to run.)
I especially don't recommend ClearURLs, Privacy Badger, Decentralays. Users or these are begging for problems [1]. Look at how bloated their code is. Prefer smaller extensions focusing on one thing only.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/g2dett/firefox_75_...
I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that eliminates a lot of spam and commercial sites to allow users to find small sites made by real people, just like in the early days of the web. I hope it’s not just a nostalgic impulse. I’m going to investigate it myself after I graduate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
Edit: forgot to add the link for [1]
I recently de-googled myself almost completely (still have a couple domain names with them, still use YouTube). Yeah Apple has their own issues going on too, but I am just happy to be mostly cut out from the Google madness.
Apple is saintly by comparison.
jackiechan.jpg
You can avoid Apple by not using anything from Apple. Done.
That's how I lived for most of life when I still used Windows. Not one encounter with Apple. Now, I haven't used anything from Microsoft for 10 years until they bought GitHub.
But you'll always be feeding Google just by visiting completely unrelated third-party websites.
Google (like Facebook) fits most definitions of cancer, creeping into places where it doesn't belong.
My plan:
- use a custom domain for my email (actually done this already)
- switch to Fastmail instead of Gmail
- update all services I have signed up for
- remove any important docs off of Google drive and either switch to sync.com (they have E2E encryption) or use syncthing
- I've already started using syncthing to sync my keepassxc DB between all my devices
- start monthly backups of the rest of my Google drive but still continue to use it (this includes all my Google Photos as well) onto a local NAS (which I have yet to buy, suggestions welcome)
- I've already switched to FireFox on both desktop and Android as my main browser but I still use Chrome as well, just more for work
I still plan on using Google products but I just want to make sure if they go away or if their algorithm mistakingly decides one day that I've violated something and locks me out without recourse that I'm not totally screwed.
It started with downloading Firefox on desktop and web. I love Firefox mobile. It's performant and supports multiple tabs. Also comes in Dark Mode.
Next came email, which was difficult. I'm still transitioning. Protonmail was my pick because of the price point and ProtonCalendar (currently in beta). Gmail and Gcal are deeply integrated and wanted an alternative that could offer a similar experience. The only con here is that ProtonCalendar is web only (please support on mobile soon, Protonmail!).
Duckduckgo is a solid search alternative. Results are quality. Between these services, browsing is a joy again.
One reason why our web became so successful is Decentralization. But, in recent years I feel like we are heading to more and more centralized web, where only a few big companies control the entire ecosystem. Take email and instant messaging as an example. Everybody can maintain it's own, independent mail service, but everybody can still communicate with each other. On the other hand there are very few messaging services that are totally incompatible to each other. Depending on where you live, you might only use iMessage, Whatsapp or WeChat. Even tough it may be technically possible to use other services like Signal or Threema, you are most definitively going to experience a lot inconveniences. In my personal bubble only very few use these apps and as if that were not enough, these few users are also distributed across a wide variety of different services. If it were like mail, everybody could use his/her preferred messaging system and still talk to each other.
Thats only one example and I dont want our web to be like Whatsapp in a few years from now. So I encourage everybody to try and use his own infrastructure. You are also going to learn quite a bit while doing so.
If you are unsure about where to start, here is a nice list of awesome self hosted services, that are relatively easy to deploy: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
It is easier said than to be done. I was hosting my own email for a long time and with the current state of play it is not as easy to provide the same UX as Gmail or Outlook. Even AWS struggles to provide an email solution that is worth switching over.
Privacy was not that big a deal for me, but if I had lost access to my email for any reason, I would have had zero rights to demand what is mine - because nothing is really mine, as I have never paid for the service, so I was never a customer to begin with.
I moved off gmail last year after using it since 2004 (I remember getting an invite and using the service even before it was launched).
Great comment :) What beats one body gravity is bigger body's gravity. I escaped to Apple few years ago, except search. Safari should have custom search engine setting, though. Is it missing because of the deal with Google for default engine?
Really sad to me that it came to this.
Edit: The universally accepted "best" seems to be Grasshopper[1] which is $29/mo or $26/mo billed annually ($312/yr).
I remember switching from AltaVista to Google and thinking they're much better. I remember a friend forwarding me an invitation to join GMail on its first beta day and how impressed I was with the 2.2 GB storage. I remember switching to Google Chrome when I read about its beta release on Slashdot. It was much faster than Firefox.
Personally, the company I loved to hate was Microsoft, and for me Google was the good guy.
Question to those who hate Google - are you old or young? Have you used the Internet in the 90s, before Google came? Have you used email where you lose your emails once you exceed the 20MB capacity, and you need to pay money to increase it? Have you used Internet Explorer because it was everywhere?
Have you seen what Google replaced?
I don't think people forgot about those days, but mostly think that the Google they liked has kicked the bucket. (Google's motto was "Don't be evil" those days, remember? It was removed from the code of conduct in 2018).
I think today, Google (together with Facebook and friends) is actively harming the open internet we loved. So, yes, we see what Google has replaced, but I don't think that is enough to worship a corporation forever.
Corporations tend to lose the original good feelings of their founders.
On the other end, people is coming to recognize, more and more, the value of privacy. To understand that "I have nothing to hide" is a meaningless phrase in this context.
What can we do?
The primary thing is to always pay attention and be vigilant towards those to whom we give our data. Even if it's very difficult, being the tracking so pervasive nowadays, even for us HN' readers.
Another palliative is to split our data among different cloud vendors, in order not to let anyone have all your information.
In my opinion, at the end, we should use more paid services.
Advertisements? Are we gonna pay for Gmail and Youtube?
Is it them treating certain search results as preferable? Yes, that's the point of a search engine.
The worst thing that Google does is just shut down good services too quickly but that's not really something to hate them that much for.
Maybe I am just ignorant.
I don't think Google is evil like Microsoft was in the 90s but I don't blindly trust them as I might have done in the past.
Off the top of my head, I distinctly remember GMail beta being on april fools day in 2004ish, and it was exactly 1 gb of storage
My plan so far: - Gmail -> Fastmail + custom domain - GDrive -> Nextcloud + openoffice (it's really nice, includes notes and libreoffice) - Chrome -> Firefox (FF made a tremendous progress in last 5 years) - Google -> DuckDuckGo
No disrespect to Google, the whole platform is very convenient, but it's going to be a fun experiment to use services that are dedicated to one goal (email-only, storage-only b2, search only etc)
The only one I look to stop spending time at is YouTube, hard to replace, however bloggers have to start protecting their value and own their things.
EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to deliver relevant vacuum cleaner ads, I don't care. I block them anyway.
You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this case Google) have not only yours but everyone’s data. It’s astonishing what you can do with just some metadata. You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
You’re not just giving them your uninteresting data you’re also giving them an enormous amount of power.
Someone tries to access your account from a random place, or maybe an old camera video you uploaded to youtube gets flagged erroneously by some contentid or appropriate content automation, and an automated system locks your account permanently, with you forever losing access to your emails and files. And not being allowed to use google services ever again without breaking ToS.
People have been locked out of their Google accounts with no explanation and no recourse.
To compete with that, other engines would need to be at least as aggressive in their data collection as well as trying to gain market share.
Obviously any other engine who uses principles like privacy as part of their mission are at an inherent disadvantage. Search engines can return meaningful adverts pretty much based on keywords used and location searched from- there isn't a "need" for all the other tracking and data collection other than profit.
1) your account can randomly disappear so you shouldn’t depend on it. Not just for political reasons but things like password reset using a heuristic that can fail leaving you permanently locked out.
2) the abusive anticompetitive behavior was starting to affect me directly.
3) very recently google has started deleting private data containing content they don’t like
If you leave over just the data collection that’s extremely noble IMO. In most cases that’s something that affects everyone around you more than it affects you.
The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com
Whether or not it's possible to transact genocide at similar scale without computerised data records, it's quite clearly far easier to do so with them. Worse, with comprehensive records and rapid identification of any particular meddlesome priest, activist artist, or woman who was warned but nevertheless persisted, it's possible for such regimes, state or non-state, to dip in and retaliate with pinpoint effectiveness. Even the mere suggestion that this is possible can be extraordinarily chilling.
Google also censors results a lot compared to Yahoo and DuckDuckGo so you'll mostly get popular sites. An example is how when I searched "youtube deleted documentary" Yahoo and DuckDuckGo got the right results but Google didn't.
For Youtube, it dominates video uploading so it can delete and censoring things easily and all you can do is complain.
There's also the whole "just because open source allows people to review code doesn't mean that they do" problem, but I don't expect that attack vector to be used by state actors because it would make the beneficiary of the attack too obvious to the public.
I will say, however, that I never realized just how infrequently I receive mail that actually warrants my attention (let alone a reply) and that feels sort of lonely in a funny way.
• Does not ask for phone number.
• Allows actual aliases (instead of a self-defeating YourRealAddress+Alias@Gmail.com)
• Does not sneakily sign you into Search and every other Google service when you just want to check your email.
In addition to all the privacy advantages.
There was a time period where people were trying to use/put services in Iceland or Switzerland because they weren’t part of a known default sharing arrangement and people completely relied on poor interpretations of laws acting like the government took a completely hands off approach to data. The reality is that absent a treaty, these places can all choose respond to foreign warrants and often times do.
China and Russia being notably separate from the rest of the world, and also large areas.
What specifically do you have in mind?
Just changing from Google to N does nothing towards this goal, and we're now even further away from the promise of a decentralised Internet than ever before I believe.
Wake me up when a non-tech user can spin up an email server the same way they can open a browser and and send emails to any other person on the net. And with phones being powered on 24x365, one would think the dream of being a home server would be easier than ever...
But of course this way promises no money/profit for businesses in general. Or at least less so, since vendor-lock in and data monetisation would be much more difficult if not impossible.
It's a convenient middle ground between Google Maps and OsmAnd until the FOSS apps improve.
I did de-facebook myself. IMHO Facebook is far more invasive, far more harmful than Google.
doesn't look like it since you are using Chrome...
Why not just use Firefox?
Looked at a few others, but my need for a reasonable UX pushed me back to Gmail last year, this time with my own domain on G Suite (I figured paying a fee means I’m marginally better protected from account lockouts and other Google shenanigans, and at least I can take the domain with me when I leave). It’s so nice not to be constantly battling with email these days. But... in the back of my mind I do still want to get my email off Google. For privacy, control, and because I think getting off other Google services will be easier after that.
If I’m going to put the effort into switching again, I feel it might as well be to a somewhat privacy-focused email service (preferably not located in Australia or any jurisdiction that could force the company to break their own privacy guarantees without telling me). It doesn’t need to replicate Gmail’s feature set perfectly — I’m willing to put time into learning a whole different approach to email if necessary, but only if the UX/design is coherent and inspires confidence. Has anyone with similar requirements got any recommendations?
I hear the same argument with search and maps. Yes, DDG and Apple maps is not quite as good as Google’s. But, if you want privacy you will have to sacrifice something. Google has so many resources to put into their core product. Off course they will be better. And they use user data for some features which privacy focused companies just can’t provide. You just can’t have it all.
A working instance to test before hosting your own: https://searx.info
Let me know how you liked it.
Nothing else comes close to this kind of convenience and UX, and it's more secure since accounts are not co-mingled.
Through search alone, Google knows exactly what other big corporations are up to (perhaps even better than the corporations know themselves). That is something that should scare companies. I know GMail has been banned for this reason in a lot of places, but search is just as important.
My problem as I mention is that I am at the same time regoogling...
Android -> Iphone (more expensive, but can last longer with reasonable user experience and I can resell for better prices)
Contacts and calendar -> Apple icloud
Google Maps -> apple maps (still have to use waze sometimes, traffic information works best in Waze in Brazil)
Search -> Duck Duck Go
Web -> Firefox (The multi account containers in Firefox is to good to stop using)
Google Drive -> Ondrive (I had to buy an Office 365 licence to my dad. End up buying the family licence, and 1 TB cloud storage endupd being very usefull). A shame I really dont use office, but, is there in the cloud if I ever need to open a word doc.
I still havent found a viable alternative to Youtube videos, but, I think is a matter of time for an alternative product reach enouth users)
Living in foreign countries it's obviously useful, and I would have been royally screwed in Vietnam without the offline translations when I crossed the border and no place was accepting my ATM card. Related usually to financial institutions, I don't keep an active US phone number and my Voice account is basically a 2FA front for places not using TOPT or FIDO2 for security or I couldn't access my cash or credit.
I don’t know much about mining, but in the era of ASIC miners, how much dollar value does a minute or two of JS mining in Firefox get you? How many visitors do these rogue sites get?
It seems like a lot of effort to get a couple of cents for free, but I assume I’m hugely underestimating. I’m also still puzzled by why my partner’s MacBook was overheating last night, and wonder if I’ve just found out why.
At the moment I'm looking out for whatever service provider will let me have the equivalent of email, drive, calendar, docs and sheets all in one place.
Does anyone know of any that might have slipped under my radar?
Edit: anything comming up that is I can't see anything on the list that does everything. My best bet at the moment is proton will come up with something.
Try iCloud.com
I think you can only sign up from an Apple device but otherwise it's all free (except for extra storage) and doesn't spread your data around.
To get rid of ads and get Spotify-like music on Youtube there's: https://www.youtube.com/premium
Mail - FastMail (spam detection not great but still works)
Search - StartPage (still google but proxied since DDG results are inferior in my experience)
Browser - Firefox (syncs to all my devices)
Maps - keyworded bookmark on Firefox to go to DDG maps powered by Apple Maps. Otherwise on phone it’s Apple Maps
Storage - Dropbox
Docs - local files synchronized to Dropbox
Last remaining service: YouTube. I’d love for the content providers I consume from to start posting on other platforms but that’s just not the case. For that, I use a google account for just YouTube.
Losing your domain name can happen due to any number of reasons: hacked account (at the registrar), social engineering, etc. There can also be issues with registrars going bankrupt, increasing fees (see dot-org case), laws changing (especially with ccTLDs - see the dot-EU case with British citizens post-brexit) and much more...
Some of these alternatives, however, offer low content moderation compared to their corresponding Google products.
I see no disclaimer, for example, that bitchute is known for harboring conspiracy theories, often after they are banned from youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
It is worrying to see it presented as an "alternative" to youtube without this disclaimer.
I know that my data is used to make me an advertising target, I am going to get advertising anyway because we haven't found a better business models yet.
I don't use google search and chrome. But not sure if I will be able to switch to another email provider and will be able to spend the time and energy required to update my email everywhere.
Sure, Google steals your data. However, we have no guarantees that these new companies won’t steal just as much once they get a big userbase too.
Now, I can do just fine with OpenStreetMap (and such) as a physical or even a road map; but there are just so many venues and businesses that are listed on Google Maps... with their opening hours and links to websites.
Also, a lot of municipalities transfer public transport data to Google, which you can't quite get anywhere else (ignoring Google-reliant apps).
Search, browser, email - I don't use them.
You'll note the list doesn't have solutions to replace Google Reader, or Google Music, or G+.
Someday I'm sure I'll have to replace Google Domains and Calendar and YouTube. Maybe I should do that on my schedule instead of waiting for google to decide for me.
Fastmail is an Australian company, a 5-eyes country, subject to the Assistance and Access Bill [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Australia...
Are you expected to run 25 extensions? Many which do similar things and can be done by forcing the browser to delete cookies upon quit/exit/restart?
If the idea is a buffet, then what's the point? You're going to have a gap and DNS is going to be your weakpoint.
Does anyone know a good way to avoid AMP reliably on mobile? What I currently do is pretty convoluted (see below).
On my iPhone, I use a DNS-based ad-blocker[2] and I just associate amp.* to 0.0.0.0 so most amp pages will fail. When the page fails to load, in the address bar I edit the URL manually and remove the "amp" portion, and finally I'm redirected to my news article.
Needless to say, sometimes this gets annoying so when I'm in a hurry I might disable this DNS rule temporarily.
On desktop, on the other hand, it's much easier because I use an extension that blocks AMP automatically[1]
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
[2] the app AdBlock for iPhone/iPad can import "PiHole compatible" lists (such as the ones at https://firebog.net/ ) and it does dns-level content blocking (in addition to that, it also works as a standard ad-blocker within Safari) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579
My big problem with Google is that they are evil and in denial - they want to slurp up all the data about everyone and monetize it, but they honestly don't get why that is bad.
My list:
-ProtonMail
-Firefox
-DuckDuckGo
-iCloud
-Visual Studio Code
(edited format only)
We’re a (by far) market leading B2C & B2B company in a “non-shithole” G7 country.
Yes, Facebook is not a real improvement, but at least they eat their own dog food!
https://superuser.com/questions/1414410/how-to-disable-pop-u...
Cut all big cos out. The Internet already gives us tools to run everything as a community, yet we are not doing that.
We can fund open source software/hardware, crowdsource their continued development. It takes leadership, like the big cos have. But we can get it done.
If you're looking to detangle yourself from the Google ecosystem, you can do so one tool at a time over any period of time.
Maybe you'll get all the way off it, maybe just 80% - either way, you will make progress.
Edit: aww, they bought nest didn't they. Dammit Google you weirdo Borg creep.
Oh yeah people use their DNS to resolve my domains.. and every site that uses them for hosting.. and my work email..
oh wait youtube
If you are a startup we have generous free plans for you.
- https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives
- https://www.privacytools.io/
At least prism-break and privacytools have a community-process for suggestions and evaluations. I don't know how this project does it.
Google maps is probably the product I am most dependent on.
To de-google quickly, you can just pay a different vendor like iCloud or FastMail or whatever Microsoft offering is.
Google is the one I would trust with my data.
They know how to do hosting at scale (unlike some really quite large and famous companies who suck at that), although not perfect, they have a humanist moral compass in their culture, and I don't expect them to go out of business.
I would not make myself reliant on a niche Google product (like Google Reader) as those tend to vanish, but a mainstream Google service like GMail or YouTube is a great reliable thing. If you think other companies are more moral than Google, you are fooling yourself.
More education is needed to implement something like this.