Cutting Google out of your life (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#41

Post by iudqnolq » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #12

burgerzzz wrote: post #6

I've stopped using every Google product but Google search, and unfortunately Google Captcha, which I absolutely abhor. I downloaded Google Photos a few days ago to try and export some old photos and it refuses to let you view your old photos until you have give access to your current photos. That really typifies my experience with Google.

Have you tried using Google Takeout? I have not but it claims it can export all of your photos/videos/etc. and is probably the sanctioned way to do this. The iOS app needs photos access because it is less a Google Photos client and more an alternative Photos app with Google Photos syncing/integration. I think it would not be ideal to use it if all you want is to export data. (Disclaimer: I currently work for Google.)

I exported all my Google photos with takeout recently. After around 70 hours I got a dump of 59 50GiB tgz files (format and size was my choice). I decided to have them sent to drive so I could sync them to a computer. It was a pretty pleasant experience, they even export metadata as json.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#42

Post by ignoramous » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #25

burgerzzz wrote: post #6

I've stopped using every Google product but Google search, and unfortunately Google Captcha, which I absolutely abhor. I downloaded Google Photos a few days ago to try and export some old photos and it refuses to let you view your old photos until you have give access to your current photos. That really typifies my experience with Google.

> Google Captcha This one's scary from an infrastructure perspective. Way too many websites depend on Recaptcha, and an outage would be somewhat painful. There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.

> There aren't tons of competitors,

Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent solution, even if only for the traffic it fronts. They kind of have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such an offering.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#43

Post by elagost » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

dempedempe wrote: post #29

I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also rememb…

Fastmail is great, but as this list is supposed to be "privacy focused", Fastmail (company from Australia) is not a good alternative. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#44

Post by weystrom » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

jeena wrote: post #16

I almost successfully cut Google out with one exception, YouTube, I don't seem to be able to find what I get there anywhere else. Fun anecdote: Google is very smart, because I've been a paying customer of YouTube for a long time they gave me a Google Nest Mini for Christmas free of charge. And it fills another niche which I can't really find a meaningful alternative for: Speech to text hardware/software which can be…

RSS of my subscriptions into a youtube-dl script works well enough for me. You could also just watch YouTube with mpv.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#45

Post by chopin » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

mikedilger wrote: post #40

ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha. Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.

I try to avoid services which use ReCaptcha as much as I can.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#46

Post by ironarm » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

Does anyone have suggestions on polyfills/fallbacks for google CDN scripts? I'd like to straight up block all of Google in my host file, but it breaks about 90% of sites at the moment.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#47

Post by jtw » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

seiferteric wrote: post #28

I am going down this road atm. I just signed up for fastmail, but I don't see it on this list, does anyone have any comparisons with the others listed? My main concern was being able to use my own domain.

Fastmail has really superb custom domain functionality. Highly recommended.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#48

Post by booi » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

chopin wrote: post #45

mikedilger wrote: post #40

ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha. Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.

I try to avoid services which use ReCaptcha as much as I can.

What do you replace it with?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#49

Post by reaperducer » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

dempedempe wrote: post #29

I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also rememb…

I resisted switching to Fastmail for a long time because I believed Google's spam filtering was best-in-class.

The reality is, for my accounts, I get more spam in gmail than in FastMail.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#50

Post by newscracker » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

ironarm wrote: post #46

Does anyone have suggestions on polyfills/fallbacks for google CDN scripts? I'd like to straight up block all of Google in my host file, but it breaks about 90% of sites at the moment.

There’s a browser extension called Decentraleyes [1] that hosts popular scripts locally and avoids the need to connect to any CDN, not just Google, for those.

[1]: https://decentraleyes.org