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Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

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Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#111

> News > r/news - Includes both USA and International. > r/worldnews - International news. Typically excludes news specific to the USA. > Most country/state/provine subreddit's act as local news hubs as well. Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.

> Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please. Have you used them? These are mainstream subreddits, and the stories aggregated there aren't substantially different than the stories linked to to the similar Google News categories.

As someone not from a NATO country, the discussions on r/worldnews have been pretty disappointing about anything outside of NATO. The news stories upvoted there suffer from similar problems.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#113

> News > r/news - Includes both USA and International. > r/worldnews - International news. Typically excludes news specific to the USA. > Most country/state/provine subreddit's act as local news hubs as well. Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.

Yep, just saw this [0] yesterday. A "powermod" posted a misleading title and nobody removed it. Yikes is definitely the correct response.

I'm not saying it's better or worse than Google News but people should know the place's bias and bring a healthy dose of salt and actually read the articles. I'm only viewing it as a list of things that happened.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ek3ean/undermini...

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#118
Personally, I feel safer knowing that all my embarrassing personal data is at Google, along with everyone else’s, rather than somewhere else.

I’m confident that Google can’t do anything genuinely shitty with my data without also pissing off millions of people more powerful than myself.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#119
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience with several different accounts, the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files. I try to infer, interpolate, and recover what I safely can during PhotoStructure imports of Takeout archives, but mostly it made me want to dig deeper into my storage closet to try to find the hard drives that had the actual, original files on them.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#120

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 also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293 Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts. Re: Zoho: As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't…

In response to your linked (unsourced) post:

> This is not correct as far as Proton is concerned and easily verifiable. ProtonVPN is 100% owned by Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland) which also develops ProtonMail and is not affiliated or owned by any other company.

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