Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alternatives to Google Products

restoreprivacy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 527 posts

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#311

Post by Matt3o12_ »

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.

One problem is that your user agent is matched against all tested user agents from all times. This includes very old ones. If the user agent was used to track you online, they would account for that it frequently updates and for a lot of users (considering that most browsers update automatically these days).

So the site should really only take into account your OS, maybe its major version, and browser version (which changes frequently so trackers can’t rely on that). Or at least not count any that are not used anymore.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#312

Post by xccc100 »

malloryerik wrote: post #68
mailbomb wrote: post #40

Besides the Gmails alternatives: 1. Mailfence – Based in Belgium – 500 MB free; 20 GB Pro 2. Tutanota – Based in Germany – 1 GB free; 10 GB Pro 3. Mailbox.org – Based in Germany – 2 GB storage 4. Protonmail – Based in Switzerland – 500 MB free; 5 GB Pro 5. * * Runbox.com - Based in Norway * * They forgot #5, runbox.com

If you use something like protonmail aren't you sending a signal like, "Look at me I've got something to hide!"? If I were role-playing as some mighty and wealthy intelligence bureaucracy, I'd likely monitor anyone using such services as well as Tor, etc. No? I do like protonmail btw and am concerned about privacy in general, esp for the maintenance of democracy. And I'm not at all against the intelligence bureaucrac…

Why would someone who really has something to hide use protonmail?

Just because it is in Switzerland it can still be subverted, either structurally or by a single planted employee.

Crypto AG is also in Switzerland.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#313

Post by ywain »

scarface74 wrote: post #154
izacus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it paid for them them to sell out their Chinese customers. There they didn't think for a second.

I have no more trust in the American government to not spy on its citizens than the Chinese government. If iCloud data is encrypted and only the user has the private key. It's just as secure as being on American servers.

Note that only some of your iCloud data is end-to-end encrypted: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht202303. The rest is also encrypted, but Apple does have the key and can likely be legally compelled to share it with authorities.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#314

Post by 4684499 »

antpls wrote: post #297
MVf4l wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please ask BEFORE you collect. 2. You can't expect every user to know they are logged, or how it's affecting the user, or know how to disable/delete it, can you? 3. How can I verify that you did delete the data about me instead of just hiding from me for viewing it? Alphabet is not belong to public sector. So the simple answer is I can't. If you want me to trust you, don't use opt-out as default. 4. I'm sure you c…

> 6. Aggregated data collection and use without permissions adds potential risks to the society. (Cambridge Analytica) Everything adds "potential risks". When you talk about risk, you have to give estimates of both the frequency and the criticity, and then compare to the potential benefits. Only then you have all the pieces to take an informed decision, according to your preferences.

How do you define benefits? Sacrifice one's privacy without his permission to make ten of others' life easier, would you call it beneficial? If so, let's rob the wealthy to aid the poor.

They can reduce the risks to a certain level if users were told how they are going to use the data and why before using it. Are they going to do that? No, because that increases the cost, which means less profit, which means shareholders won't agree.

So there comes law.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#315

Post by brownbat »

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?

Heartbleed was found though.

Thinking out loud here, what's the best counterfactual on HB?

I can imagine a ClosedSSL that gets hammered in a blackhat presentation. I can imagine ClosedSSL getting fixed, eventually.

It's just hard for me to imagine that happening faster because people like Neel couldn't read the code.

Maybe the counterfactual is that ClosedSSL is also well funded and cares deeply about security, so it finds HB internally.

But openness doesn't preclude funding. And closed source doesn't grant you an automatic security focus.

So rich ClosedSSL vs poor OpenSSL isn't an apples to apples comparison.

All things held equal, openness provides one extra possible avenue to find and catch bugs, and so such projects will tend to have more caught on average.

What does HB teach us then? Just that some bugs are hard.

Now, to be fair, if "openness" is just used as a substitute for internal security audits, a way to shrug and farm out that work and blame to passers-by, then that would be obviously terrible.

That probably happens more than we'd like to admit, but I still don't think it's the typical reason people open their code.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#316

Post by TheCabin »

robbrown451 wrote: post #288
TheCabin wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let’s think about some side effects of having lots of potentially sensitive data nicely stored at one location: * Propaganda: Because you understand what people need to hear, it’s a perfect tool to influence opinion. Of course, this doesn’t happen in your country (it never does). A recent popular example is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Thankfully this evil cooperation does not exist any more (by changing it…

I don't see how any of this applies to Google. Are you saying that dictators can steal my data from Google? I'd think they'd have an easier time breaking into my house and stealing my computer. By a factor of maybe a thousand.

You don't see how "Reinforcement of monopolies" applies? You don't see how "Self-censorship" applies? The Cambridge Analytica scandal was involving facebook -- do you think they are really far apart from each other? The point "Reinforcement of dictatorships" would apply as soon as the government of the US would be in a less healthy state.

The overall point is the following: Google might provide nice services for you as and individual, but there are larger-scale societal implications, which we should consider and weigh in as well.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#317

Post by Tepix »

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…

If you don't know why you should care about privacy, there's no one who can explain it as eloquently as Edward Snowden. Read https://www.businessinsider.de/edward-snowden-privacy-argume... or - preferably - whatch the video at http://hooktube.com/watch?v=WRzm7wrk_FA

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#318

Post by amelius »

I want universities back in their role of defining and creating the basic services we need on the internet. Corporations have shown they can't handle it. A few large open source organizations like Mozilla are now doing the work of universities, but they don't have the financial backing of governments, so it's a miracle they even exist.

Corporations can go back to their role of creating hardware. They have no business looking at our data.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#319

Post by duggan »

amelius wrote: post #303
shawn wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

True, but that's assuming inputs go to a hash rather than something more robust like a probability function.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#320

Post by brongondwana »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #72
tehabe wrote: post #46

The worst thing, the absolute worst thing is, you know all that but you have gotten so used to the way Google services work, that you simply have a hard time to switch. E.g. thank to Gmail I rarely use an email application on my computer and use webmail. When I tried out Posteo it was extremely annoying that it logged me out every few minutes and I couldn't get my email. They said this couldn't be changed. Google rea…

I haven’t found a replacement for Gmail yet. I’ve tried fastmail and ProtonMail but both have limitations. From a search engine perspective I’ve switched to DuckDuckGo and I’m impressed with how good it has gotten. With maps I’ve tried various solutions including mapquest, Microsoft, and Apple but nothing comes close to Google Maps.

I second those asking what limitations you ran into (specifically with FastMail, since I have more chance of being able to fix those than the limitations with Protonmail - though I'd love to know both!)

If it's "costs money", we're not planning to change that! We (FastMail) are proudly a paid-only service.

Post reply on HN