Ask HN: How have you left Google's services?
Google seems to be more and more of a one-stop shop for me (and many others). There are privacy concerns, as well as concerns about data being available/under your control for the long haul.
What have you done to mitigate this risk? If you've left Google's services, what services have you replace, and how?
I rely heavily on Gmail, Search, Drive & Photos. The main issue I have is making my data highly available and resilient at low/no cost.
90 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadGmail is hard to replace because it's well integrated with other Google services, in particular Google Apps with its own ecosystem.
Google Search is hard to replace because of the quality. Bing is ok but not close in quality.
For the privacy-conscious, Dropbox is saddled with the same pitfalls as Google and Facebook, unfortunately.
> Google Search is hard to replace because of the quality. Bing is ok but not close in quality.
https://disconnect.me/search used to show Google search results, but it looks like Google has blocked it for the time being.
I personally use https://duckduckgo.com/. The quality of results is definitely below Google, but I believe that'll only improve as more people switch to them.
I know it's totally not perfect, but is it logical?
I can type 'Fall Photos' and instantly see all my fall photos taken in the past 5 years.
My Gmail address is now a forward to FastMail, but I'm in the process of changing it everywhere. Trouble is that lots of people have it in their address book, so I'll never really stop getting emails to it.
Dropbox can replace Drive and Photos easily and quite well, I hear.
On a personal note, it's definitely possible. I've done it without much loss of convenience, which I think is the main drawback.
> The main issue I have is making my data highly available and resilient at low/no cost.
I think you'll find that most alternative, privacy-conscious services will cost something, primarily because they're not able to profit off of your personal data like Google and Facebook are. For me, I'm definitely willing to pay for that value.
Can you share what alternatives you used to move off of Google?
Calendar/Contacts => Apple iCloud
Drive => SpiderOakONE
Chrome => Firefox
Search => DuckDuckGo
Maps => Apple Maps
Photos => Store locally (iPhoto & Lightroom)
Docs => Apple iCloud
Apple may seem like the odd one out, but I trust them quite a bit seeing how they've fought for privacy over the last few years. I also use all Apple devices, so the convenience is also unparalleled.
Fastmail seems to be a popular alternative to gmail as per the comments here and as per you. It is NOT listed on privacytools.io
Should this be a concern? Is it any better than Gmail with respect to privacy?
Edit: moved comment to more relevant parent.
Fastmail, unlike Gmail, doesn't use your email contents for ad targeting. OTOH, unlike commonly claimed, Google doesn't actually sell your info, they just reuse it internally.
Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.
Google is subject to NSA/FISA/etc. Fastmail claims it isn't since they're an Australian company, but their servers are all in the US.
That's a bit misleading, FastMail encrypts their hard drives (and I'm sure Google does, too). It's just that they don't have a special key for your data. That means you can't just break into their (colocated) data centre and steal their disks, but if you hack a machine with the drive mounted then you get all the data on the machine.
There are certainly more privacy-conscious services, but FastMail is good enough for what I'm looking for. The big thing being that they don't analyze my email for advertising purposes.
This list is about a year old, but it provides some more privacy-conscious alternatives: https://www.prxbx.com/email/.
The insistence that everything has to be free is materially harmful to everyone who works in IT, software development, etc. You have Google on one hand and Richard Stallman oon the other.
For $40 you can get full fat service from Fastmail with your own domain name, which costs another $10 a month or so. That's pretty cheap.
Which I think strikes to the heart of why open source only ate specific parts of the world. Things that require resources to operate that users are normally happy about having in the modern world: network and server infrastructure, compatibility testing, support, security testing, UI updates.
A domain name is also much cheaper than $10/month, it's closer to $10/year. Oh and for FastMail, you get a discount if you pay multiple years in advance - the price for n years is $10 + n•$30
Fastmail offer contacts and calendars too. Which have a really nice web interface.
I'm still looking for a Drive/Photos alternative. Any advice?
Resiliency/availability could be issues though. Ever looked into that?
Really liking the customizable options for wildcard addresses in particular. You wanna give out an email address for each place you sign up? You can write it as me@site.example.com or me+site@example.com or site@me.example.com - which I find super handy because to my endless annoyance, most sites STILL don't deal with "+" in an email address.
Well worth the money IMO.
I haven't found any photo storage services that really sell the privacy-conscious angle. That said, I'd trust https://www.smugmug.com/ more than Google, Facebook, or anyone else.
For a vanilla, non-photo-specific storage service, there's https://spideroak.com/solutions/spideroak-one.
Re: Drive/Photos alternative. For the Drive part, if you just need something in the cloud to backup files to (and optionally share them with other people) I highly recommend https://www.spideroak.com. Have been using them for years without issue and they're the only "cloud backup" provider I know of that takes security and privacy seriously.
-I bought a U1 rack used off craigslist and have it hosted in a local data center. -I installed ESXi on it.
made a few VMs -one runs pfsense and the rest of the VMs sit behind it -one runs my email, contacts, calendars (mailinabox.email) -one runs my cloud storage and private wiki -a few others running projects I'm working -each VM is fully encrypted at boot up.
What did this cost approximately - the initial setup and the monthly recurring?
Then my only cost was the datacenter fees. Which runs about $50 per month -- includes 5 IP addresses and unl data.
Like I said though, I use it for multiple things, not just e-mail/contacts/calendar/storage.
EDIT: I believe the server costs a lot less now.
[0] https://www.zoho.com/
I want results for a search where I can exclude those with a number of cookies/js links that would have been blocked by uBlock (or similar) above some threshold.
OneDrive for photos (I was a heavy Windows Phone user for a long time, it was easy to set up and use)
My contacts are spread across Windows Live and Google (Again, because of the Windows Phone)
I use DuckDuckGo for search (With the "!g" modifier when I think the results could be better)
Dropbox for files without sensitive information, Tarsnap for files with sensitive information.
The company is as susceptible to NSA-type stuff as anyone, but I like that they are a photo company, not a data company that happens to have a photo app.
Search - DuckDuckGo, it's not quite as good, but it works fine IMO
Gmail - Still use regularly, I may switch to Fastmail
The goal (for me), was/is to distribute who has my data. This will blur the image of who I am, so to speak. My friends and I will also tag each others faces in photos on Facebook - i.e. I tag myself as my wife, my wife tags me as her. That way it'll screw with any automated process.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Diskless-Cloud-Network-Attached-Stora...
Most of my strategy relies on a home server (full disk encrypted), a server I colocate nearby (also full disk encrypted) and backups.
Email: I use Gmail my own domain and regularly backup my email to my home server. In the even that something happens to my Google account, there are only issues for a few hours while DNS updates propagate.
Chat: After getting fed up with Facebook Messenger, I set up a hosted Prosody server on one of my dedicated servers and use it to communicate with my wife using the Conversations XMPP client for Android.
Photos: I auto sync photos from my phone to Google Photos and frequently (through Google Drive) pull them back down to my home server. My home server backs these up to Google Drive (unencrypted), Amazon Cloud Drive (encrypted) and my colocated server.
Drive: The home and colocated servers give me a ton of storage to do whatever I want with. I've never used a proper "sync" client however, so this isn't a good idea for everyone.
Search: DuckDuckGo is pretty good and I use it whenever I don't want to use Google for any reason.
Generally: I'm happy to use Google's services as:
- They're convenient
- Google operates in and is regulated in so many jurisdictions that I'm confident it's no less protective of my privacy/data than any other US based company
- It's not going away any time soon
- Tools like TakeOut make it incredibly easy to leave
Just used this to backup my inbox the other day. Compresses emails into .eml.gz files. Also has an export option for other mail clients. Love that its a Python package, Installable through pip.
Gmvault gets chats as well (I'm assuming hangout chats also). A pro I see, is with gmvault you can restore the backup to another Gmail account, right from the terminal.
Takeout stores chats separately, not in the mbox file. To restore from Takeout, you need to add the mailbox to Thunderbird (or some 3rd party email client), add the account you want to restore to, and then drag and drop emails between them. Not ideal.
Set up a cron job for that (after a full initial sync), and should be good to go.
That being said, ownCloud is a great open source alternative to Drive (I host mine on digitalocean which is just starting to introduce block storage but amazon is an equally good option and very cost effective), Duck Duck Go is a very good web search engine these days with privacy as a core value.
It really depends how you use Photos. The automatic face detection and searching for people/events/things in your history is just about unparalleled and is unlikely to be surpassed by a more privacy friendly option in the near future. The reason for this is that these algorithms rely heavily on data collection, which is diametrically opposed to privacy. If you are only using it to backup/store photos in the cloud, ownCloud has similar functionality.
I have heard good things about fastmail to replace gmail but I have not used it myself.
I know you didn't mention it but for chat Matrix is a fantastic option with multiple options for open source clients. I use https://vector.im/beta as a client to access matrix.org but you could easily host your own matrix and/or vector server.
Google's results are increasingly full of low quality spam sites, so the switch really wasn't painful at all.
I haven't left GMail yet, but I started using my own domain mail many years ago. As such, that switch will be fantastically simple when I get around to it.
photos: Piwigo
search: ddg
music: mpd and ampache
drive: I use svn/git repos that are hosted on my server
Gmail -> moved my custom domains to Yandex Mail (personal), Outlook.com (corporate), because usability of Gmail to me becomes worse and worse.
Storage + documents (never used Google services) -> OneDrive + MS Office 365 paid subscription
Music -> VK.com (finally they are making it legal by signing agreements with labels)
Social Networks -> VK, Facebook (because friends are there)
Messaging -> Facebook, Telegram (because friends are there)
I'm still using Google search, but not 100% of time. Bing is quite good too.
I don't have tons of messages in FastMail — so take that into consideration — but their web UI search seems very quick as well.
I haven't used their mobile app, so I can't speak to that.
Now I use http://posteo.de as my main email, any new contact or new service I use this email. The only con is that I can't use my own domain on this, but I don't really care.
The only thing that keeps me from closing all my google accouns is google maps, for a person that sucks memorizing street names and locations this is very useful for me.
To replace Google Drive, I'm using Seafile, which I find is a better alternative than Owncloud (based on Python). Seafile has a mobile + desktop client and can be used over webdav. And the killer features: Seafile handles file versioning and encryption. https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
To replace Gmail, I've installed Dovecot + Postfix on my server. I'm using Roundcube as my webmail. There is also Rainloop which is quite popular. https://roundcube.net/
To replace Google Calendars / Contact, I'm using Radicale. http://radicale.org/ . I've found some caldav/carddav connector on the play store.
To centralize everything in one place, I'm planning a migration to Open Xchange, an open source java software which handle your emails, your calendars (with caldav support), your contacts (with carddav support), your files (no more versioning or encryption however but support webdav) and you can even edit your .docx and .xlsx in place. You have a mobile application. But it lacks some documentation and some features are not open source, like IM or the desktop client. https://www.open-xchange.com/
To have a single account for every services, I've installed a LDAP server (openldap).
To conclude, I try to use as far as possible open and standard protocols (webdav, carddav, caldav, smtp, imap, ldap, etc.) as there is always a software or a library to handle them.
And to replace Google Search, I'm using Qwant, or at least trying to.
Don't know if you know about SOGo, but my e-mail provider uses it and it works quite nicely, it might be another solution to consider.
https://sogo.nu/
I'm testing Open Xchange for a few weeks now, and I really like it. There are lot of small cool features: remind an email in x minute, meeting organization, OX Guard (a PGP module), the integration with Sieve, etc.
And that's not a secret, such solutions are not easy to deploy. I've spend a certain amount of time writing my ansible script for Open Xchange - that's why I'm not really motivated to try it on my server now.
If I find something in OX which prevents me from switching, SOGO will be the next candidate.
Email: Private server and domain
Chat: Facebook because few people seem to use anything else, let alone answer their phones or emails. I otherwise hate it.
Photos: Keeping photos is overrated. I keep the few photos I take on a network drive at home and rarely share anything with anyone. If it burns in a fire, I wouldn't care very much. Yet still not worth being in the hands of some company.
Drive: See above. If I need to share something, it's either through Email or Box.
Search: Still mostly Google, but increasingly Bing as I feel like I get better results(I suspect that Google is underhandedly trying to make the web more "friendly"). Just type in some mean or evil phrase into both search engines.
Docs: I rarely have to write docs or spreadsheets. Google's online spreadsheet is pretty good, but for a "document", I end up writing stuff in Markdown using Dillinger.io.
Music: Most of the music and content I enjoy is free on YouTube.
Eventually, I'd like to leave Google all together. Changing search engines is easy, but YouTube and Maps are near impossible to beat at this point.