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Alternatives to Google Products

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Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#301

Post by 50 »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #81
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the limitations you experienced with fastmail and protonmail?

I have used Fastmail for years with a custom domain without a single problem. Amazingly great communications from the company too. Highly recommended but not free. (Less than $2/month though - so almost free.)

I’m doing this in the coming days — setting my custom domain with Fastmail. I’m planning on making that my main email and trying my best to unsubscribe from things on my Gmail account and move accounts over from Gmail to Fastmail until I think for certain I could delete my Google account entirely with no harm.

Then again, I rarely have and like having subscriptions these days because of minimalism but I suppose this is a good trade off for my entire lifetime.

On a different note, does anyone know how GoDaddy is in terms of privacy? Is there a better domain registrar out there?

Edit: Just realized I’m using Google’s Project Fi on my iPhone SE, with Hangouts.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#302

Post by mihaela »

auslander wrote: post #39
cosmojg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that "privacy-focused" tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code. This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

Apple makes its money from expensive hardware. And respecting your privacy and security helps selling it a lot . And they earned trust by being serious about it for a long time.

I use Apple products instead of Google's. They also look much better.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#303

Post by amelius »

shawn wrote: post #238
chime wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a moderate resistFingerprinting setting? I don't mind my date/tz/language being known. There are 150m+ people living in my timezone who use en-US. I don't want my fonts, plugins, user agent, or detailed HW/graphics features (e.g. canvas/WebGL hash) being known. Those can uniquely identify me according to https://panopticlick.eff.org .

Those can uniquely identify me So does your resolution. And that's hard to mask because JS usually needs to know it. If you're not using the browser fullscreen, chances are that you're using a unique innerWidth+innerHeight. As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.

If fingerprinting uses a hash based on a number of input criteria, then you only need to perturb one of those inputs to make the entire hash unusable. Perhaps Firefox is perturbing the other inputs (?) such that screen resolution doesn't matter much. (Just guessing and looking for a positive angle here).

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#304

Post by FourthProtocol »

robbrown451 wrote: post #209

So I'm one of those who doesn't care if Google tracks me or sells me as a product. [ * ] Is there actually some real, tangible harm that can come to me from using Google products? Not theoretical stuff, not stuff that is less likely than dying in a plane crash. Something that is actually likely to happen, that will affect me in measurable, negative ways? I'm really trying to come up with something, and I'm really try…

In the 1930's (and before) people in Germany were asked (as they are today) to specify their religion in certian dealings with their government. Nobody thought anything of it. And then the Nazis came to power, and there was no ability to undelete anything.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#305

Post by dmos62 »

nemothekid wrote: post #2

I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple. For example, the "best" calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I'm not a fan of hooktube either - it just…

I've been using startpage.com to search Google anonymously for the past year. Startpage proxies your query to google and back while leaving off the identifying metadata, making the query anonymous. At first you notice the slight increase in roundtrip time, but quickly get used to it. I find Google Search to have a better search engine than any alternative I've tried, so Startpage is right up my alley.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#306

Post by Ntrails »

shawn wrote: post #238
chime wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a moderate resistFingerprinting setting? I don't mind my date/tz/language being known. There are 150m+ people living in my timezone who use en-US. I don't want my fonts, plugins, user agent, or detailed HW/graphics features (e.g. canvas/WebGL hash) being known. Those can uniquely identify me according to https://panopticlick.eff.org .

Those can uniquely identify me So does your resolution. And that's hard to mask because JS usually needs to know it. If you're not using the browser fullscreen, chances are that you're using a unique innerWidth+innerHeight. As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.

But I resize my browser all the time? Even with timezone + language surely it's a very short lived fingerprint? When it's not manually sized it's snapped to either side of a standard screen.

idk - it seems like that can't be enough?

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#307

Post by Tepix »

gregn610 wrote: post #298
chime wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a moderate resistFingerprinting setting? I don't mind my date/tz/language being known. There are 150m+ people living in my timezone who use en-US. I don't want my fonts, plugins, user agent, or detailed HW/graphics features (e.g. canvas/WebGL hash) being known. Those can uniquely identify me according to https://panopticlick.eff.org .

That https://panopticlick.eff.org link was interesting, but I don't see what about my user agent string makes it so unique (1: 76540.09) ? Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.62 Safari/537.36 Looks fairly generic, I think I'm running a mainstream chrome browser on a mainstream OS.

Using Javascript the page can query more details about the environment including installed plugins, addons, configuration settings (language etc), certificates and fonts. That combination is often unique.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#308

Post by gregknicholson »

antpls wrote: post #294
halflings wrote: post #249

> All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market. Google has what I think are the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing his…

I don't work at Google, I live in Europe and I agree with you. So far, we didn't heard of any breach in any Google product, and the history of the different products can effectively be turned off. I remember years ago, when I started to care about data collected about me, Google was one of the first company allowing you to download a part of your data. We can see the emphasize about security on the evolution of Andro…

> So far, we didn't heard of any breach in any Google product

A breach would be a security issue, not a privacy issue.

A security issue is where a third party accesses your data stored at Google without Google's permission.

A privacy issue is where a third party accesses your data stored at Google with Google's permission but without your permission.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#309

Post by krtkush »

duckduckno wrote: post #110
marricks wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could empathize with your viewpoint more if not for the fact the lack of privacy wouldn’t be symmetrical. The middle and lower class will lose all semblance of privacy while the elite will be able to buy it. Case in point Mark Zuckerberg buying up that Hawaiian island. Not only is it unfair but when the rich are just getting richer them having privacy while no one else does just allows for so many more ways for the…

I don't think I quite understand your argument, could you please elaborate a bit? I have always been under the assumption that fame grows linearly with wealth and the more famous someone is the less privacy they hold. Is that inaccurate? I could tell you that Warren Buffet is 1.78 m tall and that I know where he was born but I honestly know nothing about the minimum-wage-working Bob Smith.

If you were to find the most personal details of this Mr. Smith it would be far easier to do that. You could sit outside his house whole day long and observe his every move, dumpster dive into his trash and get documents, even bribe a certain official and get more info out of him/ her. I don't think any of that will be possible in the case of Warren Buffet.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#310

Post by amelius »

mattkevan wrote: post #150
Godel_unicode wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I generally agree with you about the soundness of the FOSS==privacy argument, I think you're misstating it subtly. The claim isn't necessarily that the privacy sensitive user specifically will be able to audit the source but rather that someone somewhere will have done, and will have written about problems they uncovered. See also many eyes making all bugs shallow.

Not always. Heartbleed was present in OpenSSL for two years before anyone noticed. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, but if there aren’t enough eyes with the skills or the time then problems will remain deep, even for important software like this. Perhaps everyone thought everyone else had done the work?

Closed source code, even if it has no hidden purpose, may be hackable as well. Nothing is perfect. I think you are making an unfair comparison.
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