131–140 of 182 posts
This reminds me of people trying to cut out plastics from there life. This is hard because plastic is cheap, convinient, useful and it's embedded in every product in modern life.... Just like Google
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…
Another great thing is I'm no longer worried of suddenly losing access to my mail account, because an algorithm deems me not worthy for using a "wrong" browser, setting etc. and we all know that you can't talk to real people at Google so the account will be lost forever.
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 is a company based out of Australia using data centers in the U.S. The Five Eyes concern is why it may not be listed in privacy focused sites. To use your own domain, I’d recommend other services that are a lot cheaper than Fastmail, focused on privacy and are not in the Five Eyes (but may be in Fourteen Eyes). Check out mailbox.org, runbox.com and lastly, Migadu for a fixed price for unlimited mailboxes/sto…
Is there something like Google Drive / Dropbox that allows you to use cloud storage with local encryption, that has nice OS integration on desktop and mobile?
I haven't used it so I can't speak to its niceness.
Well, this long list is certainly a nice reminder that Google is going to be a permanent part of most peoples' lives for ... forever. Seriously. Google can use this as marketing for why people love Google so much.
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I'd be more concerned about being blackmailed by Russian intelligence services.
To what end? Seems like a lot of work for a tiny return relative to the size of their Government.
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That means you have to buy into another walled garden though.
Not GP but I'm a happy Apple products/services customer. Rightly or wrongly, I feel like I purchase products and services from Apple, rather than the data from my usage of their products being their core product or service. If something abhorrent from Apple comes to the forefront then I'll happily switch back to self-build + Linux + self-hosted services, but for the time being I'm content. On the flip side, I've done…
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…
Siri can control your smart home and doesn’t phone home (any more). You can hook it up with a raspberry pi to control just about anything, including generic zigbee devices.
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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.
Are you talking about the inferred bit from other sources like phone location history? My experience may have been different because I paid Google for extra storage so that I could store the original versions of all my photos (For those that don't use Google Photos, Google offers "unlimited" lossily compressed photo storage but counts original quality photos against your drive quota.)
The json data is what they display in the UI, not a verbatim copy of the metadata, but the photos have the original metadata embedded in them.
Is there something like Google Drive / Dropbox that allows you to use cloud storage with local encryption, that has nice OS integration on desktop and mobile?
Make sure to set STNOUPGRADE=1 in the environment though to disable the RCE that it gives the developers.