This is not a "evil conspiracy" by the NWO. It's just the classic banality of evil here: Google uses this info to track in-store conversions of ads they show you online.
This seems to be missing some of the most practical reasons to avoid Google. "Government surveillance" isn't something you can escape from so easily and walled gardens can be well kept. The arguments I find much more compelling:
1) Service quality (and longevity). If you are paying for a service, it is much more likely to go for years or decades without changing anything. It is more likely that you get a human to help with any problems. Avoiding free services is just common sense for anything beyond entertainment.
Google's management has been increasingly derailed over the years. A sane company wouldn't break something like Gmail. I'm not sure how well Gmail will be stewarded over the next decade.
2) Minimising risk. If something goes wrong at Google (bureaucracy, illegal activity, coding error), then the blast radius is huge for someone who uses a lot of Google services. That is just an unwise level of risk to be taking. People with access to my emails shouldn't be storing my accounting data. People with access to my video viewing shouldn't have access to my work documents. My phone custodian shouldn't also be my search provider. Unexpected data cross-contamination or sudden lockout from all these things at once isn't desirable and could be somewhat catastrophic in the worst case.
I'm in a long slow progress of degoogling. I've switched email (to Fastmail), search (to Kagi), browser (to Firefox). Photos are surprisingly tricky to switch away from, I'm trialling Immich for the last couple of months.
No mention of Android and how to DeGoogle it? I mean, I suppose this is mostly an advertisement for ProtonMail & friends, but still...
This is, for me, the area where DeGoogling has the strongest downsides: losing access to the ability to install apps from Google Play, and not being able to run the majority of modern android apps due to the heavy reliance on Play SDK. I definitely get some funny looks when people tell me to "just install the app" and I respond with "I can't install apps."
I've been using CalyxOS with MicroG for Google Play services and the Aurora Store to download apps without logging in. It's been working great and the only thing I've had to give up is reliance on in-app purchases.
I was worried about banking apps in particular but so far everything has worked without issue.
I've been living this way for close to a decade and I'll tell you it's not as hard as it seems. Most of those apps are available elsewhere, most of them still work even without the play services and for the ones that give you a hard time, you can spoof play services. I think I've installed maybe 2 apps in the last decade that didn't run. Granted, I don't play games on my phone. For the odd piece of software maybe you paid for or something, there's usually a FOSS alternative that works just as well. I haven't engaged in software piracy on my phone in many years, it's just not necessary or worth it. I'm not missing much.
All you need is an AOSP rom, Aurora store and MicroG.
Tangential, someone who just willy nilly tells you to just willy nilly execute software on your device is not someone you should be listening to. I'm not installing and running a program on my phone to get a free $5 box from taco bell. I don't know what kind of app recommendations you're getting, but usually, even if I can run something, my response is "no thanks."
Nearly every electric car on the market (and quite a few ICE cars) feature Google voice assistant whether you like it or not, with no way to disable it. Even if you could disable the voice assistant, there's no way to disable the constant collection of data the Android OS on the car's infotainment system is doing.
It's soon going to be nearly impossible to escape them getting data about everywhere you go in your car, who is in the car with you, what music you're listening to, etc.
Article doesn't mention the worst offender in my view: the default GBoard keyboard on my Android phone sends everything I type to Google -- and voice typing goes through their servers too. This is the default keyboard on a billion phones.
I've done tests where I text a friend using Signal and WhatsApp, E2E encrypted apps, and the default keyboard tracks every word. Mentioning how much my sister really loves her convertible BMW, and wondering if maybe I should buy a new convertible (this is LOL, I am a bicycle commuter) and within three minutes the auto ads start appearing relentlessly all over the internet and especially on Instagram!
This is not the thing where you just happen to notice it because you're looking for it -- literally 50% of the ads switched to car ads after I sent that message.
I can install a different keyboard from F-Droid, but how many people do that? And I lose voice typing even though it could be done on-phone. Sad.
I have experimented with "Simple Keyboard Simply" and "SayBoard", both available on F-Droid. I don't love either of them.
On the Signal App, you can request the incognito keyboard mode, and my tests show that GBoard does respect that setting. But that's just for the one app.
Something I've wondered about, because it seems like you might have run across this in your testing: does the default keyboard get anything if it's present on the system, but not the currently active keyboard? I enjoy FlorisBoard for English input, but I've had a hard time finding a quality replacement for Gboard's Japanese input mode.
That's quite the claim that GBoard keylogs. This has come up before and it is claimed that GBoard does not keylog and send data to Google. I feel like if it was really doing that it would be a huge controversy that everyone would know about.
> A technology called federated learning helps Gboard learn new words and phrases. Federated learning doesn’t send the text you speak or type to Google, but will send what it learns to Google, where it will be combined with learnings from other users to create better speech and typing models.
I had heard elsewhere that Samsung really was collecting everything typed on their keyboard. I did a couple minutes of research just now: doesn't seem totally outlandish. Under "information we collect":
> Samsung Keyboard information: The words that you type when you enable Predictive text. This feature may be offered in connection with your Samsung account to synchronize the data for use on your other Samsung mobile devices. You can clear the data by going to the Predictive text settings.
Sorry but no. Proton is a company, a little one respect of Alphabet but still a company, so they share the core model: making money selling something. Change from a company to another is not a solution.
I agree to have private emails but since it's next to impossible avoid ending in spam folders on all giants mail provider we can only:
- own a personal domain
- attach it to some local mail service who offer STANDARD IMPSS/SMTPS without specific constraints
- keep their own mails on their own iron (OfflineIMAP, mbsync, fetchmail, ...) POSSIBLY not leaving them on the vendor servers but downloading to a homeserver and if a webmail is needed host one on it attached to a personal subdomain like mail.mydomain.tld
- the third parties service act just as relays, since almost all mails will be sent to the big there is no more privacy practically possible, your correspondent will not use GNUPG and local client on FLOSS system for privacy
We need to AVOID as much as possible someone else computer, so no, not "encrypted cloud storage" but personal backups, even one in a bank safe-deposit box where a quake of a flood are unlikely to destroy their building, one at a secondary home if you own one or some, one to some relatives and friends sent by mail and so on, of course encrypted but still your iron somewhere, physically reachable to you.
Calendars should be local personal Agenda's like org-agenda, we can just send/read .ics invites if needed.
It's a good thing offer some VoIP options to your friends, there it's complicated since FLOSS on that subject is in a very terrible shape with old glory monsters for giant deploys not for personal usage, fragile and complex modern solution tied to some client, often not much easier to deploy and veeeeery limited documentation. But we have something. We have little options for desktop sharing (RustDesk, with hbbs/hbbr self-hosted, MeshCentral for most common usages) but something is still here.
We need to OWN the infra.
BTW Swiss have hosted for decades some privacy-centric companies then revealed as CIA proxy so well, being in Swiss does not automatically offer any guarantee.
30 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadThis is not a "evil conspiracy" by the NWO. It's just the classic banality of evil here: Google uses this info to track in-store conversions of ads they show you online.
1) Service quality (and longevity). If you are paying for a service, it is much more likely to go for years or decades without changing anything. It is more likely that you get a human to help with any problems. Avoiding free services is just common sense for anything beyond entertainment.
Google's management has been increasingly derailed over the years. A sane company wouldn't break something like Gmail. I'm not sure how well Gmail will be stewarded over the next decade.
2) Minimising risk. If something goes wrong at Google (bureaucracy, illegal activity, coding error), then the blast radius is huge for someone who uses a lot of Google services. That is just an unwise level of risk to be taking. People with access to my emails shouldn't be storing my accounting data. People with access to my video viewing shouldn't have access to my work documents. My phone custodian shouldn't also be my search provider. Unexpected data cross-contamination or sudden lockout from all these things at once isn't desirable and could be somewhat catastrophic in the worst case.
This is, for me, the area where DeGoogling has the strongest downsides: losing access to the ability to install apps from Google Play, and not being able to run the majority of modern android apps due to the heavy reliance on Play SDK. I definitely get some funny looks when people tell me to "just install the app" and I respond with "I can't install apps."
I was worried about banking apps in particular but so far everything has worked without issue.
All you need is an AOSP rom, Aurora store and MicroG.
Tangential, someone who just willy nilly tells you to just willy nilly execute software on your device is not someone you should be listening to. I'm not installing and running a program on my phone to get a free $5 box from taco bell. I don't know what kind of app recommendations you're getting, but usually, even if I can run something, my response is "no thanks."
It's soon going to be nearly impossible to escape them getting data about everywhere you go in your car, who is in the car with you, what music you're listening to, etc.
Article doesn't mention the worst offender in my view: the default GBoard keyboard on my Android phone sends everything I type to Google -- and voice typing goes through their servers too. This is the default keyboard on a billion phones.
I've done tests where I text a friend using Signal and WhatsApp, E2E encrypted apps, and the default keyboard tracks every word. Mentioning how much my sister really loves her convertible BMW, and wondering if maybe I should buy a new convertible (this is LOL, I am a bicycle commuter) and within three minutes the auto ads start appearing relentlessly all over the internet and especially on Instagram!
This is not the thing where you just happen to notice it because you're looking for it -- literally 50% of the ads switched to car ads after I sent that message.
I can install a different keyboard from F-Droid, but how many people do that? And I lose voice typing even though it could be done on-phone. Sad.
On the Signal App, you can request the incognito keyboard mode, and my tests show that GBoard does respect that setting. But that's just for the one app.
[1] Simple Keyboard https://f-droid.org/packages/rkr.simplekeyboard.inputmethod/
[2] SayBoard https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.elishaazaria.sayboard/
https://support.google.com/gboard/answer/12373137
> A technology called federated learning helps Gboard learn new words and phrases. Federated learning doesn’t send the text you speak or type to Google, but will send what it learns to Google, where it will be combined with learnings from other users to create better speech and typing models.
I had heard elsewhere that Samsung really was collecting everything typed on their keyboard. I did a couple minutes of research just now: doesn't seem totally outlandish. Under "information we collect":
> Samsung Keyboard information: The words that you type when you enable Predictive text. This feature may be offered in connection with your Samsung account to synchronize the data for use on your other Samsung mobile devices. You can clear the data by going to the Predictive text settings.
https://www.samsung.com/levant/info/privacy/
Prove it. Seeing targeted ads is not proof.
I agree to have private emails but since it's next to impossible avoid ending in spam folders on all giants mail provider we can only:
- own a personal domain
- attach it to some local mail service who offer STANDARD IMPSS/SMTPS without specific constraints
- keep their own mails on their own iron (OfflineIMAP, mbsync, fetchmail, ...) POSSIBLY not leaving them on the vendor servers but downloading to a homeserver and if a webmail is needed host one on it attached to a personal subdomain like mail.mydomain.tld
- the third parties service act just as relays, since almost all mails will be sent to the big there is no more privacy practically possible, your correspondent will not use GNUPG and local client on FLOSS system for privacy
We need to AVOID as much as possible someone else computer, so no, not "encrypted cloud storage" but personal backups, even one in a bank safe-deposit box where a quake of a flood are unlikely to destroy their building, one at a secondary home if you own one or some, one to some relatives and friends sent by mail and so on, of course encrypted but still your iron somewhere, physically reachable to you.
Calendars should be local personal Agenda's like org-agenda, we can just send/read .ics invites if needed.
It's a good thing offer some VoIP options to your friends, there it's complicated since FLOSS on that subject is in a very terrible shape with old glory monsters for giant deploys not for personal usage, fragile and complex modern solution tied to some client, often not much easier to deploy and veeeeery limited documentation. But we have something. We have little options for desktop sharing (RustDesk, with hbbs/hbbr self-hosted, MeshCentral for most common usages) but something is still here.
We need to OWN the infra.
BTW Swiss have hosted for decades some privacy-centric companies then revealed as CIA proxy so well, being in Swiss does not automatically offer any guarantee.