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Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

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Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#151

Post by Youden »

dtx1 wrote: post #148
Youden wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi isn't a Google/Bing proxy, it's independent. Its quality is similar or better than Google/Bing.

From their FAQ > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. It's a fucking google proxy with some nice css

Ah, I wasn't aware that they pull content from Google and Bing.

However they do it, I get different search results from Kagi than I do from say DuckDuckGo and I have no reason to believe my privacy is compromised.

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#152

Post by m3adow »

gaws wrote: post #140
memorable wrote: post #8

Here are some of my additional recommendations: Analytics - GoatCounter, Counter.dev Keyboard - Unexpected Keyboard (A very cool keyboard) Search - Neeva Translate - Lingva Some notes on the post: - Protonmail as a company doesn’t have a very stellar reputation. I recommend hosting an e-mail server by yourself, or just use providers like Disroot Mail - K9 Mail is an email client, not an email provider

> Unexpected Keyboard (A very cool keyboard) For Android, to be specific. I'd love for an alternative to SwiftKey after Microsoft acquired them.

I just blocked Internet access for it. Some minor functionality like GIF search is lost, but nothing serious.

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#153

Post by PufPufPuf »

Some of these make very little sense. For example:

• Google Images

— Unsplash - Pexels - Simple Gallery Pro

First two are stock photo sites, last one is an Android app for browsing local pictures. Google Images is a search engine for images, which is covered by the "Google Search" section anyways. Perhaps you confused Google Images with Google Photos (which is missing from the list), but even then the alternatives don't make sense.

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#154

Post by f1refly »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #82

1. Bought a couple of personal domains and signed-up with Fastmail. Configured Fastmail to periodically pull emails from my legacy gmail account. I use the Fastmail webapp on desktop and their android app on phone/tablet. 2. Removed google analytics from my personal website/blog. 3. Uninstall Chrome on desktops and disable it on Android phone/tablet. 4. Use Firefox with Multi Account Containers add-on so that I am by…

> b. Migrate off Google Photos. I take a lot of pics with my phone and google photos is just so convenient. I try to only keep six months of pictures on google and archive the rest to a machine that I own.

Not knowing why it's so convenient for you, have your tried syncthing for your images? You could write a cronjob on your machine that automatically removes old files from the synced folder as well.

> c. Google Movies/TV. I have a fair amount of bought content, mainly because its convenient to stream on a tablet. Not sure what the solution is there.

Just wait until your licensed content becomes inaccessible because google stops paying the copyright mobsters. You can then repurchase all that stuff without feeling bad about it.

> e. I still have an android phone and tablet, and I'm sure they're still phoning home about me.

We still haven't reached the day of fuchsia, so there's other distributions that will separate google from your life:

https://lineageos.org

https://calyxos.org

https://grapheneos.org

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#155

Post by andyjohnson0 »

f1refly wrote: post #154
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #82

1. Bought a couple of personal domains and signed-up with Fastmail. Configured Fastmail to periodically pull emails from my legacy gmail account. I use the Fastmail webapp on desktop and their android app on phone/tablet. 2. Removed google analytics from my personal website/blog. 3. Uninstall Chrome on desktops and disable it on Android phone/tablet. 4. Use Firefox with Multi Account Containers add-on so that I am by…

> b. Migrate off Google Photos. I take a lot of pics with my phone and google photos is just so convenient. I try to only keep six months of pictures on google and archive the rest to a machine that I own. Not knowing why it's so convenient for you, have your tried syncthing for your images? You could write a cronjob on your machine that automatically removes old files from the synced folder as well. > c. Google Movi…

Thanka for the suggestions!

Rightly or not, I'm always a little cautious about synchronisation - I worry about stuff getting overwritten, and this has bitten me in the past. But I've not used syncthing so I'll take a look at that.

Movies: I remember when Microsoft dropped PlaysForSure, and i think that over a long enough timescale "my" google content will go the same way. No easy solutions there, unless i go back to physical media. Ideally there would be a backup solution like Kalibre for Kindle ebooks

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#156

Post by kleer001 »

sizzle wrote: post #128
kleer001 wrote: post #125

No. I don't care. I'm happy to hide in the crowd. IMHO any data I generate is basically useless chaff. I still have yet to be convinced that there's a downside to this parasitic relationship. How exactly is my life, in a practical way, negatively impacted by this data going walkabout? Does it take years or months off my expected lifespan? Does it give me cavities? Does it turn my family and loved ones against me? Doe…

They track your every move when your device pings their servers with your location and that is an invasion of privacy to have this 24/7 log. This is barely scratching the surface, imagine how you are being manipulated with target advertising.

> imagine how you are being manipulated with target advertising

Imagination is not the question. I want facts. I can imagine all sorts of stupid. The majority of targeted ads I get are for things I just bought. This is not scary.

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#157

Post by kleer001 »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #130
kleer001 wrote: post #125

No. I don't care. I'm happy to hide in the crowd. IMHO any data I generate is basically useless chaff. I still have yet to be convinced that there's a downside to this parasitic relationship. How exactly is my life, in a practical way, negatively impacted by this data going walkabout? Does it take years or months off my expected lifespan? Does it give me cavities? Does it turn my family and loved ones against me? Doe…

It can send innocent people to jail: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/03/10/google-data-puts...

And once a cop came home to the wrong apartment and shot a dude.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45632941

Food poisoning kills dozens every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foodborne_illness_outb...

Some estimate that nearly 10% of people in Jail in the states are innocent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project

Your example is a base rate fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

aka Extension Neglect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_neglect

"One swallow does not a summer make"

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#158

Post by kleer001 »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #149
wmeredith wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it can, but in the link you provided it definitely did not.

> McCoy was lucky. He and his family are also a bit poorer because of the incident. If his parents hadn’t helped him out by giving him thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer, things could have turned out differently, he says. Out of partly luck and partly a lawyer. He could easily have ended up in jail.

And that's one example out of hundreds of millions. Still not scary.

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#159

Post by helloworld11 »

The advice and practical suggestions of this post are great, but for those who claim to have a hard time leaving google behind regardless (without a major business or work obligation that makes it difficult), the drama is overblown. It's not only possible, it's also relatively easy. I use google for exactly four things: Two gmail addresses for random crap emails and obligatory sign-ups if I want some document (serious email goes to a protonmail address); a phone with Android built into it (invasive but meh, I keep my smartphone engagement to enough of a minimum that it isn't a huge invasion of privacy); Google maps for random addresses and youtube for music I seek (and later download anyway), which in any case can be used without signing in.

That's it. The rest is easily superfluous for most personal uses and I suspect that claiming otherwise is pure self absorbed convenience-hunting.

Re: Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

#160

Post by jawerty »

endo_bunker wrote: post #47
jawerty wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lmk if you're interested in the tech behind it. It's for my personal use now but could also release it if people are interested. I call it myAlgorithm.

that sounds pretty neat, I'd be interested in seeing the source

Hey! here's the repo https://github.com/jawerty/myAlgorithm I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts
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