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Alternatives to Google Products

restoreprivacy.com

391–400 of 527 posts

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can't imagine that's 'usual'; most sites will do absolute positioning in css, if at all. As you suggest, trying to layout pixel-by-pixel designs is notoriously awkward and best avoided.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#392

We are facing two issues: 1. Privacy against advertisers 2. Privacy against security agencies. From my perspective, first issue, is more important than second one. I think Apple does pretty decent job regarding first issue. MS holds second position. Google/FB hold the worst position. So even though Apple/MS are closed source, I think our privacy will improve considerably just by installing an ad-blocker and sticking…

Something I'm pondering..

If advertisers can't reach me then why should I be concerned what they collect about me?

I do not see any ads, I use gmail and gcal. Genuine question - I understand I'm still 'the product' as far as they're concerned but it's a broken loop if they don't get my eyeballs. Help me understand anything I'm missing.

I'm currently not motivated enough to move out of google products.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#393
post #62

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.

$30/year is expensive?

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#394

We are facing two issues: 1. Privacy against advertisers 2. Privacy against security agencies. From my perspective, first issue, is more important than second one. I think Apple does pretty decent job regarding first issue. MS holds second position. Google/FB hold the worst position. So even though Apple/MS are closed source, I think our privacy will improve considerably just by installing an ad-blocker and sticking…

Where exactly does Amazon fit in your picture?

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#395
It's always funny to me to see alternatives to YouTube. The creators I like are on YouTube and rarely anywhere else. So while if I wanted to start vlogging, I might choose Vimeo, I'm tied into going to YT to see the content I want.

It's like saying "for an alternative to NBC, try CBS". OK fine but Cheers airs on NBC, now what.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#396

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…

You are seeing a problem where there is none. Etar is just a fork of Google Calendar, and you can find it in Play Store / F-Droid (which is linked from the mentioned GitHub page).

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#397
post #323

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…

If Firefox really cared more about privacy than about its money flow they would have disabled 3rd party cookies by default instead of explicitly hiding¹ that setting. Apple can do it. There's no reason why Firefox can't. And if there is a reason, it should have been dealt with years ago. -- ¹ i just noticed that in Firefox 60, the setting is no longer as hidden as it used to be. Good!

Most casual users would be quite upset if cookies stopped working. "Why does this site not stay logged in"? Etc.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#398
post #368
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.

Assuming there's 4k possibilities for width and 2k for height, that's 8 millions possibilities right here. Compared to ~2 billions of people accessing the internet, the odds of having a unique one seems really really low.

Of course keeping in mind that a good number of those will rarely be seen. (e.g. anything less than 100px)

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#399
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.

Your resolution alone will not likely uniquely identify you. The idea is to eliminate many of the data points that make it easy to track you across IPs. Resolution is very common if you're browsing with a maximized window so it's not in the same league as these others that quickly diverge amongst users.

No, not alone. But if you're not masking your IP address, it probably will.

Weirdly, I tried to measure how unique my window.innerWidth/Height was, but panopticlick no longer seems to measure this. It only uses my full screen resolution, which of course is much less unique than canvas dimensions.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't imagine that's 'usual'; most sites will do absolute positioning in css, if at all. As you suggest, trying to layout pixel-by-pixel designs is notoriously awkward and best avoided.

You could still do fingerprinting for resolution based on media queries in CSS.
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