At least it’s in line with their reasoning: https://geekgonecrazy.com/2020/04/27/de-googling/. But yes, the threat of lock-in/deplatforming/being at the mercy of a massive corporation is still present.
Yes, there are just two generally usable mobile OSs - ios and android. The only way to not share you every living moment with google while still having a snartphone is to have an iphone.
It's fucked up that's the way world is, but it is the way the world is.
There is a better way: Google-free Android. You get to use/keep one of the many supported Android devices without giving either Google or Apple insight in whatever you happen to be doing .I've been doing this for more or less as long as I've used Android, i.e. close to 10 years now. Back then LineageOS was still called Cyanogenmod. There were - and still are - alternative AOSP-based distributions which do more or less the same thing. These are Google-free by default, is you so choose you can either add the Google bits ('gapps' - a package containing the Google services framework and Google apps) or a free-software alternative which tries to emulate GSF, or none of the above. Nae lairds, nae kings -> nae Apple, nae Google (to paraphrase Pratchett)
That's what I meant by "generally" usable. You can install Lineage. I can as sell. But most people can't.
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.
I still don't understand why people are moving from G products and use Apple+self-hosted? The author is saying he is hosting the e-mail server but, for example, not an iCal server.
Google has no problem browsing through your data to serve you "better" advertisement, while Apple claims to respect your privacy (I would be tempted to believe them).
Takeout doesn't work in practice for bigger collections (archive creation routinely fails, timeouts while downloading, 50GB max size results in many splits)
Thanks! Quick question, does gphotos-sync download the images in the original resolution? One of the limitations of tools like this in the past is that they could only download the "high resolution" (compressed) images.
- 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.
That is scary, I migrated off of Google Photos before the integration with Google Drive was removed, but I was only ever comfortable using it knowing that as I snap photos they were being downloaded to a hard drive at my house.
I switched over to OneDrive and thankfully it still works that way.
DDG’s definition of “global” is essentially “American” though. Presenting results exclusively for Worcester, MA, when I search for “Worcester” from a UK IP address (near Worcester, Worcestershire) isn’t being global, it’s being dumb.
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.
Worcester has a higher population than England's Worcester, and as such probably has more backlinks to pages related to it. That is global. Expecting global results to be regionalized is silly; just use regionalized results.
That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it.
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.
Then use regional results! I, personally, am not an engineer. I'm a person who has an actual use for 'global' results, and my main reason for using DuckDuckGo is the ability to not have regional results.
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.
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:
When I do it from the UK, with localisation on I get a whole page of links on the UK Worcester, with it off the hits are mostly the US one, but the Wikipedia page like is still UK.
YMMV, of course, but this search works fine for me.
For me all results are worse, computer science or not.
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.
That’s odd, because from my experience, it’s Google that’s constantly ignoring my search terms. With Google, I often had to quote “every” “single” “keyword” when it came to searching for computer science stuff. With DDG, not as much.
DDG returns mostly Norwegian results when I set the region to Denmark. I get that our languages are very closely related and thus hard to tell apart, but it does get annoying.
That is funny. The thing that annoy me most when writing in Norwegian on DDG is that most results are from Denmark, often including did you mean "Danish spelling for the same word"
Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc).
I got rid of cable tv. Was spending $80 a month ($960/year) for something that’s mostly previously taped.
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.
Been avoiding internet ads and tracking for 15 years now. I feel like the unibomber. Facebook and google probably still have a good fingerprint on me, though, due to iOS not letting you use good ad blockers.
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.
But you live in the same household, and probably use the same internet connection, as someone who did likely search for and buy leggings. They use this information when correlating.
Unabomber not Unibomber, not that it matters. Ted Kaczynski, the man you are referring to is a fascinating man, try to ignore all of the recent hype and delusion following that Netflix series. I encourage everyone to read his book "Industrial Society and Its Future", he is without a doubt a luddite but presents some very compelling reasons in the book, if nothing else it will give you some insight into a rather notorious but perhaps unfairly represented character.
As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very new languages like Unison are a lot better at Google) I unavoidably have to use !g to turn to Google. To the point where when I am at work and cannot afford wasting time, I use Google by default.
Good point, it's possible to send a request to add a bang, but it would be better if there were an interface like in Chrome or Firefox to set up own searches.
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)
I'm sad to have to agree. I tried ddg as my primary search engine for about 3 months. By the third month I was just adding !g by default because I just wanted results without testing quality first. Then I realized how silly it was to use it for almost every search, which I'd been doing for about a week, and switched back.
I just searched for "dart" on ecosia and the programming language showed up on the first page of results. I also have bad luck with duck duck go, but I think ecosia proves that the only reason bing is bad is because Microsoft is incompetent
Cannot reproduce this -- Searched DDG for 'dartlang' and all links on the first page relate to dart programming language.
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.
I use DDG as my default, and I do like the bang syntax - in fact, it wouldn't be my default otherwise.
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.
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?
For some phones, proper hardware support is iffy at best, and things constantly crash at worst. The stability of LineageOS seems to correlate roughly with how popular that phone is with LineageOS devs, so if you have a phone with only one maintainer, chances are that some things might not work super well. (It also depends on how committed to open source the manufacturer is, but these days, the answer is "not at all" for the vast majority, so it doesn't really matter.)
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).
Yes this! I probably picked some bad phones to give this a go. I had a Samsung Captiva for a while and I flashed hundreds of times on that. Lots of different roms and it took a while for the Cyanogen Rom become stable.
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 :)
Yes, and I believe OnePlus is one of the few manufacturers that is fairly welcoming to open source and third-party ROMs (which makes sense since their original phone was based on Cyanogenmod). My current phone, the Sony Xperia XA2, is similarly very stable, even with microG, because Sony provides open device configurations for most (all?) of their phones. But almost all of my past phones (mostly Motorola and HTC) have had various stability issues that didn't exist on the built-in ROMs. It's still worth it for me, but I would definitely not recommend it to anyone that isn't willing to roll the dice and potentially put up with some pain.
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.
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.
Signal does not play nice with other protocols and centralizes everything. Hardly an improvement. Better go for real alternatives that will likely survive way longer like Riot/Matrix.
Or 'plain and simple' XMPP with OMEMO [1] encryption. This is easy to host yourself using Prosody or Ejabberd or another XMPP server, Conversations (or one of its forks) on Android, Monal or Siskin or iOS, something like converse.js in a browser, etc.
I have Fastmail and other private email services but I've been unable to really move over because of all the integrations that Gmail has. Automatic email scanning for trip details, calendar integrations, searches from the web also surfacing details from emails, google voice, tons of other apps and extensions.
It would be a nice if there was a way to get all this functionality beyond Gmail.
I use a private Searx instance which includes searches over my own document archive in its results. To achieve this I made a new Searx 'engine' [1] - which is essentially a proxy between the Searx instance and another search engine - which connects Searx to a Recoll instance. Since Recoll can also search email it would be fairly trivial to include results from there as well although I have never used this. The 'engine' would need to be extended in such as way as to communicate the (logged-in) username to Recoll so it returns results from the correct email account (or no email account for anonymous users) but that is a fairly trivial change.
Protonmail is my primary email, I had initially planned to eventually shut down my gmail account after a 2 year grace period but have left it open for various google integrations I still need. It's useful for siging up to things I don't want to give my actual email to as well.
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!
Yep, I use myname@mysurname.com as my email... It costs 10 dollars a year to keep my own domain, and that lets me not only have my own website on my own domain, and my own email address that will never have to change, but also for my whole family! Really good "investment".
Try looking at a VoIP service like voip.ms for parking and forwarding numbers. I think I pay less than a dollar a month to maintain and forward each one of my phone numbers. Flowroute is another provider to look at as well. I’ve used both for years and don’t have much to complain about.
I'm a bit wary of services with recurrent costs that offer a lifetime pass. But I guess even if they fold in 5 years you're getting your money's worth anyway.
Pcloud also makes you pay separately (and quite a lot) for having encryption turned on.
Have been considering encrypting locally (which pCloud already does, but at the cost) using File Guard extension on Chrome, and Cryptomator on Android. All encryption passwords to be stored in BitWarden.
After having n photo startups (paid and free) disappear into the mist, along with my photos and videos, I decided self-hosting was the only thing I could trust. I couldn't find any software that would reliably scale to my library and fix my mess of duplicates and bitrot files, so I made it. I'm providing access to the beta for free in exchange for feedback, if you'd like to try it. https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/ is dropping this week.
I switched to Bing first for all queries that can result in non-PC content, and then discovered that technical search is better on Bing also. I first switched to Firefox because I wanted to read newspapers. I find it hard without Bypass Paywalls Firefox add-on, that is banned by Google Chrome. As a result, Firefox with Bing default search is my browser. Things like deletions of alternative viewpoints (e.g. Dr. Erikson Covid19 briefing yesterday) and unbearable ad load are making me switch from Youtube. Unfortunately there is no good alternative to Youtube yet.
I've found that if you aren't using Chrome while signed in Google account you are punished by annoying recaptchas triggering often and when trying to use Google search, clicking on second on third results page will trigger anti-bot response.
I'm a little bummed out that I just switched back to Chromium after several months on Firefox, but Firefox has some very annoying bugs that were driving me crazy.
On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.
The most annoying is the way it handles updates. There's no easy way to turn off auto-update (I get updates via my package manager), and the functionality in Firefox is completely broken. It downloads the update and then refuses to open any pages until the browser is restarted, but the restart functionality is broken, and it just exits, losing all of the tabs that were open.
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 definitely share the frustration with Firefox refusing to work if it detects that it was updated, and just showing the "Please restart Firefox" page. AFAIK that's a recent addition, and done on purpose, so not a bug. But definitely not the best user experience.
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
Yeah fully realize the move to ios and using iCloud could be another form of lock-in. But other than now not having Google apps all the other apps are the same. I’ve picked up my old Android a few days back and nothing would prevent me from easily switching back.
I don’t feel locked in at all.
If I went feet first in iEcosystem then for sure would be different story
You can use an Apple phone without using a lot of Apple services and contributing a lot to a cloud profile of you. Given how many apps on the Android ecosystem depend on Play Services to function, it's nearly impossible to do this with Android.
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.
MicroG still sends all of your data to Google! The only thing MicroG is doing is making the Google API client code on your phone open source. But it's not really protecting you from sending your data to Google.
I'm planning to get a PinePhone to play with. I think has a ways to come. But i'm really excited that an affordable phone like this can land in the hands of more developers to work on mobile OS's.
Yeah, it's really neat. I got the iPhone 11 because I need something reliable for now for work purposes, but my hope is to switch to my PinePhone when I feel it is ready.
After seeing similar threads on HN, I’ve also started a similar journey. I managed to migrate to Firefox with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. But I’ve also added a shortcut for Google search: if I feel like I am missing something I open a new tab and type “go [keywords]”.
You can actually use !g anywhere in the search strings. It's useful when you finish typing your query, you can change your search engine at the last second.
This never made sense to me, if you're concerned about privacy, why send your search queries to an intermediary when the browser is perfectly capable of handling that for you.
I really tried giving DDG a chance but I always found myself having to go back to Google to find the right information. This would especially pertain to technical matters. The 'average-joe-browsing' (e.g. amazon, movies, songs etc.) worked fine, but when it came down to research papers or solving software problems, I was too often left disappointed.
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.
Am I missing something with that flag? when I do that it just redirects to the google scholar results. I'm therefore nto sure the gain of going to duckduckgo.com and having to type !scholar before every query instead of just scholar.google.com
You could add !s before your search query to get Startpage results(google results without tracking) for that query. See the complete list of bangs here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
You can put the bang commands anywhere in the query — in the beginning, in the end and anywhere in the middle. Startpage (!s) is another option to get results from Google without directly connecting to Google.
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.
At the time Signal didn't have the swipe-right-to-reply behaviour, nor the ability to lock audio message recording so you can record handsfree. But it has both now!
As far as I know yes Whatsapp uses some of Signal's tech but doesn't implement it in exactly the same way.
The problem with WhatsApp is that the other participants in a given chat are likely to back up the conversation to Google Drive of iCloud which defeats the purpose of E2E encryption. And, of course, the metadata.
> Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?
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.
EDIT: As someone pointed out in a reply, iOS would in fact support this file functionality, so it would presumably be up to Signal to add it.
> 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.
No, that’s not true at all. There’s been a Files app in iOS since iOS 11 (which was released in late 2017 and allows you to store the data on device or on the cloud, including creating folders), and before that there was iCloud Drive. Either of these could be used to save the file. The share sheet on iOS also exposes other apps that the user has. So for example, if someone has the Dropbox app, it can be used as a destination to save files.
Thank you for the correction, I will edit my comment. Sorry about that, I haven't owned an iOS device in a few years and clearly didn't search online intelligently enough to find it.
Hi - Startpage person here. Maybe I can clear some stuff up.
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...
The trouble with de-Google is you have to replace a highly integrated suite of apps with separate bits which lack integration.
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.
I didn't kill off my gmail accounts, but they all forward to my ProtonMail accounts for those contacts that haven't been updated to my ProtonMail accounts yet. Those get handled piecemeal, which is pretty easy.
I switched away from Gmail after using it as a main email for more than a decade. I just went through all my accounts in my password manager and changed it. It doesn't have to get done quickly, little by little does it.
Also, you don't have to delete your Gmail account completely. Mine sits there mostly unused just in case, it's fine.
I'm actually in the slow process of this as well. Moving to DDG is the easiest starting point; in the beginning it's tempting to type g! with every search until you start trusting the results. Next I changed from my Pixel 2 to a SailfishX on a Sony phone. I'm planning on moving to Owncloud for contacts/storage/docs next. It's surprising how I've paid for Google to deeply invade my life.
I bought an used Xperia and installed Sailfish on it. LOVE IT! The gestures feel so natural way to use phone, ambients make it look badass and the program management is really creative.
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.
Agreed, if I could have Sailfish on a Huawei P40 I'd be ecstatic. As it stands using Here maps, built in browser, and basic phone tools get me 90% of the way. I'm cheating a little in my transition -- I've moved my must use apps over to my iPad pro. 2FA, Instagram (a drug habit I hope to kick later in the summer), Keybase, mobile check deposit, etc.
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.
For files/photos I recommend self-hosting NextCloud. The new version of SailfishOS containts native Nextcloud services(!!!).
For 2FA you can install Android app Authy. Foil Auth is a native one, but haven't tested it though.
Feel you on Instagram habit. I de-social-mediaized (?) in late 2019 and haven't looked back, but it was tough!
I've been slowly de-googling/de-large-corporationing.
- 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.
Yes, they do allow it. That's normally how you migrate mailboxes as an individual. Most providers have storage limits so it's not really subject to abuse.
So far I haven’t seen any limitations by providers. I can see potentially rate limiting. But I’ve done this before even helping move client emails via outlook to another provider. The client just happily syncs any email you toss in
Yep, IMAP is a pretty stupid organizer. Some servers also support a feature: when you upload a message into outbox folder, the server picks it up and sends to the specified recipients.
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'.
iOS provides a lot less ways for third party apps to dig into the OS and interact with other apps. The same thing Android fans hate about it, the lock-in and lack of customizability, offers it a lot of additional privacy protection.
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.
More or less the same as a stock Android device has, the difference is that it keeps on sending data to Apple instead of Google. If you trust Apple at their word about being good stewards of your data you might think this is OK. If you see Apple as the corporate entity it is and you have a healthy distrust of any and all such entities when it comes to them keeping their word when money comes into play you probably want to limit exposure as much as possible.
Although I agree with the actions this person has taken, and I agree that privacy is an excellent reason, his webpage describing adwords and adsense was not that scary at face value.
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.
Hmmm... I did give in :) Google locked my account and I was like "okay.jpg", no google for me anymore. Uneventful story, not even enough for a blog post.
347 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadIt'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.
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
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.
- 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-...
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 :)
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.
[1] https://omemo.top/
It would be a nice if there was a way to get all this functionality beyond Gmail.
[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257
I use https://awardwallet.com/ and they added similar features but even better. Problem solved for me.
I made mostly the same choices, but swapped in:
While I lived in Seattle I was using Apple Maps, but since moving to Sydney I have switched back to Google Maps.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?
https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans.html
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.
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
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.
Useful for technical searches, where ddg is sadly, not good enough.
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.
[1] https://about.qwant.com/
... 13k+ bangs available. Yep!
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
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.
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:
https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/
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.
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.
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!
- 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.
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.
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.
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.