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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?

#81

Post by barrysteve »

Every google feature you replace with a paid feature is one step closer to the internet freezing over. You cut out the big (free to consumer/product) data farms and soon the internet experience becomes like Cable Tv, you pay for channels/features on-top of ISP access.

I don't really have an argument against this happening, capitalism will force it if it's an option. It's worth noting the internet the millenials and gen x'ers built, the internet we grew up on, could be gone forever and we are seeing it start to go now. The free web might become an altogether unpleasant place.

Google's data centres aren't the Borg hive-mind. They are the future glaciers that will be mined for knowledge and ideas much later on.

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

#82

Post by andyjohnson0 »

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 default signed-out of google unless I need to do specific things, which are sandboxed in specific tabs.

5. Paid for Kagi search and set it as the default search provider on my desktops and devices.

6. Migrated a few legacy accounts from Google oauth sign-in to email/password.

Still to do:

a. Migrate my calendars from Google to Fastmail. For various reasons I need to be able to share calendars on Google and I haven't had time to sort this out.

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.

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.

d. I still find google maps useful for a few things - particularly as a way to discover opening hours for businesses. My car has a built-in, non-android, GPS so I don't use google maps for driving.

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

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

#83

Post by lin83 »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #59

I've been actively degoogling my life for about 10 years, mostly kicked off by Snowden's revelations. Off the top of my head, here's what's left: • Youtube Too much content there to stop using. I almost never use it while logged in. I never subscribe: I bookmark the channel. • Maps Too useful to stop using. Haven't tried alternatives, but open to recommendations. Business locations and open/close times are must haves…

I also have Youtube left on my list. I also find it a little too addictive. Instead of using a browser, I use RSS to subscribe to the channels I'm interested in. From my RSS reader (newsbeat) I can even directly play the video (via mpv + yt-dlp).

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

#84

Post by lin83 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #72

deGoogling is great, but I don't want any corporations to track me or have data about me, and unfortunately the alternatives to Google are usually not any better in this respect. They might, like DDG, promise not to track me and to respect my privacy, but as an ordinary user I have absolutely no way of verifying their claims. I don't trust Vimeo any more than YouTube. I don't trust Authy any more than Google Authenti…

> unfortunately the alternatives to Google are usually not any better in this respect.

I don't that's necessary true. Google (and maybe Facebook) are unique in the size of personal data they hold and they types of data they have access to. If you move email or docs or search to something else, at least that's one less data source for them about you. (Assuming they are not selling it to data brokers Google has access to.)

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

#85

Post by lin83 »

smartbit wrote: post #40
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

Few more additions: • Google Chrome — Firefox - Safari - Vivaldi • Google Chrome Passwords — BitWarden - 1Password - KeePass - Enpass • Google Authenticator — Authy - 1Password - AndOTP - Aegis - Enpass • Google Translate — Deepl - WordReference - Lingva - bab.la • Google Maps — Dark Sky - Weather Underground - OsmAnd - Guru Maps • WeTransfer — Internxt Send - filetransfer.kpn.com

Also you can use the official Bitwarden clients with a free open source self-hosted backend, like vaultwarden [1].

[1] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/

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

#87

Post by N19PEDL2 »

ElectronBadger wrote: post #86

I don't use any of Google services or products. Fairphone 3+ with /e/OS Firefox + uBlock + uMatrix + NoScript Duckduckgo Tutanota (mail, calendar) and ecloud (mail, calendar, notes, tasks) Quad9 DNS SyncThing OpenStreetMap Magic Earth DeepL

/e/ intrigues me. How do you feel about using it?

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

#88

Post by ehzy »

> Using Google on your device stores your location every time you turn it on. It stores your search history across all your devices in a separate database, meaning even if you were to delete said history on all your devices, Google would still have a record of it.

All of this can easily be disabled on the setting page for your Google account? And, location history is off by default.

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

#89

Post by Fnoord »

_int3_ wrote: post #75

I doubt you can get rid of google like that. There is Google services that you and me don't know that we are using. What can be done is stop outgoing traffic to Google AS. You can physically cut off internet connection for google devices. Or set rules on firewall.

Dutch journalist tried this for a month. He blocked FAMAG. The internet was pretty much broken for him, too much depends on these. AWS and such for example.
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