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Alternatives to Google Products

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Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#331

Post by gear54rus »

mattkevan wrote: post #153
gear54rus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's telling you about the fact that there's conflict of interest between you and crapple and you tell him an anecdote where some scum of this earth stole money and open source software was involved. Does this really sound like a compelling argument?

Yes. There are bad and good actors on all sides. Just because something is closed source doesn’t make it bad. And just because something is open doesn’t automatically make it good.

It does however increase the chance that it will be bad, because the average snake that produces closed source software is likely to be motivated by greed, so it has the incentive to milk you as hard as it can without turning you away from products (using lies of course, you can't check anything after all, it's closed shit).

But seeing sibling explanation being downvoted into oblivion makes me think no one is interested in discussing this anyway so why waste breath.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#332

Post by mtgx »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #9
lev99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was strange bing was not mentioned, even though it has Mozilla's endorsement of having a better privacy policy than Google[0] and is probably the most popular alternative to search in the United States. This far from a complete list of Google alternatives. [0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing...

As much as I like Microsoft, Bing is awful. Ive used it, and I tried to like it. It can't find anything.

It was also disappointing to hear recently one of their developers say that they mostly just copy what Google is doing to keep up.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#333

Post by blub »

edanm wrote: post #268
blub wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, most people are boring and don't rock the boat. Things can get tricky if they pop up (thorough bad luck or as a consequence of their actions) on the radar of someone that wants to make their life miserable or if they bother someone with power. Otherwise I assume you're well off financially by now, so getting screwed on insurance should be a non-issue. Discrimination is likewise a non-issue. In general money hel…

While all these things help , I still think it's true that for 99.9% of people, nothing really bad will happen because of info that Google collects. I mean, as terrible as "getting on the radar of someone that wants to make [your] life miserable" is, it's a relatively rare occurrence, and I doubt that Google is really making it that much worse (if at all). Disclaimer - would be happy to be proved wrong if you want to…

Disadvantages as a consequence of being spied on by the "googles" of the world are difficult to prove, because of information asymmetry:

* were you denied entry in a country because the agent had a bad day or because of something you wrote on twitter?

* did your insurance rates increase because of a market adjustment, or because of something your car mechanic or car manufacturer shared with the insurer?

* were you denied that job because they found a better candidate or because they found some thought crimes on your social media?

* were you stopped by the police for a random check or because the cameras matched your face to suspicios online purchases?

* did you lose your global entry access because you're a threat to national security or because you accidentally ordered a fake bag on Amazon that you never even received?

* were you passed for promotion because you're not good enough or because your employer found out through LinkedIn that you were looking for another job last year?

In a world increasingly controlled by algorithms and data, you won't even know when you are being harmed.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#335

Post by 4ad »

amelius wrote: post #325
zbraniecki wrote: post #224

Hi all, I'm an engineer working on Firefox Platform (Gecko). In the linked blog post, the author recommends Firefox (thanks!) and links to a "privacy recommendations" for it, which include items such as "resistFingerprinting" settings. I'd like to remind everyone that turning on this setting has far fetched consequences to how you experience the Web. Your dates, timezones, preferred languages will all be masked which…

By the way, what does GDPR say about fingerprinting? Is it legal? (Asking because the EU explicitly made cookies an opt-in technique, but not sure if they considered fingerprinting).

The EU did not make cookies an opt-in technique. The EU made irrelevant cookies opt-in. Cookies that are essential for the functioning of the service do not need a notice. If you require user accounts, you don't need to show a cookie notice. If you implement a shopping cart without user accounts, you also don't need to show a cookie notice.

Unfortunately most websites don't understand this simple idea and show the cookie notice indiscriminately (or, perhaps, they just all use cookies for tracking in which case the notice should be there).

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#336

Post by Xylakant »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #286
some_account wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature is not even part of the UI yet. It's in progress. I really don't understand why technical people would start recommending its use to others on blogs in its current state. All you create is lots of bug reports coming in to Mozilla, forcing them to put resources into responding to users who blindly followed the blog and now their Firefox is "not working" anymore.

>I really don't understand why technical people would start recommending its use to others on blogs in its current state. Because when ordinary users ask "what can I do to protect my privacy?" you have two possible answers: a) "Nothing, you're not smart enough to do this, you're screwed" b) "These things" B has a high learning curve, but telling people about it scares them off. If you care about your friends privacy…

But then the answer is not "These things" and let the FF devs deal with the fallout. The answer would be "This is what you can do and you'll see quite a few odd results. Ask _me_ when you have questions and I'll explain as good as I can.".

I have quite a few of these switches on. First party isolation for example breaks the paypal payment flow on some, but not all, shops. It also breaks quite a few pages that recognize it as an adblocker. I know what to do if that happens, but I would never just recommend enabling that switch.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#337

Post by brongondwana »

fb42 wrote: post #189
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Does Fastmail have decent search that works on mobile? Gmail’s search is just too good. I’m currently using mailbox.org but it’s impossible to search for old emails that are not already downloaded to your phone. The only way is the use web interface and it’s annoying as hell.

Yes, the same search is available in either our app or from any web brower on mobile. We use the Xapian search engine.

It looks much the same either in brower or app. Here's what it looks like on my phone:

https://imgur.com/a/407HN81

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#338

Post by brongondwana »

bthrm wrote: post #62
deadcast wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed fastmail for many years as an alternative to gmail. I've never once had any issues with them and their UI has been very responsive. They also give you a MASSIVE list of domain names to choose from! ^_^

Unfortunately, Fastmail is very expensive.

Unfortunately it costs money to hire people and run servers, and we have to pay for it somehow! Over 1/3 of our staff are first line customer support, and you get through to the engineers actually building and running the product quite quickly if you find an issue that the support team can't help you with directly.

The alternative is trying to monitise the userbase some other way, and we're not interested in that game. We have no advertising, no data sales, and no ethical conundrums or regrets about that choice!

Cheers.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#339

Post by fifnir »

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…

The unavoidable suggested answers in gmail make my skin crawl. I dont want it and i dont want to be reminded that you can read my emails despite my consent for it

I guess it's a good reminder that i need to change services

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#340

Post by icebraining »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #330
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.

> JS usually needs to know it What do you mean by this?

JS is often used to change the position of elements based on the window size. If you give it wrong info, it will break the layout.
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