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De-Googling: My Progress

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111–120 of 348 posts

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#111

Interesting! Your first concern and reason for De-Googling was privacy, so I'd say moving to iPhone, iCloud, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and the like doesn't help you much. I also think you forgot video-conferencing/video chat. I'd go for Zoom, but there's a bunch of alternatives. Most have their drawbacks. Lastly, move to Europe where we have GDPR. I actually can not read some news articles that are hosted in the U…

What privacy issues do you think the iPhone has?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#112
I'm surprised by not seeing more comments against the OP moving from Google to move almost everything to Apple & Facebook. I've also started a similar process but haven't managed to ditch Google completely yet, mainly for convenience. Because my concern was mainly privacy, I started by adding a pi-hole in the home network and that allowed me to block an infinite number of tracking codes and ads. This improved the overall internet experience for everyone. I've also attached a HDD to the raspberry pi and created a network drive. With the help of a good script the backups are automatic and silent.

For messaging, Telegram FTW, but can't seem to convince a lot of my friends to move over.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#113
post #51
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc…

Been avoiding internet ads and tracking for 15 years now. I feel like the unibomber. Facebook and google probably still have a good fingerprint on me, though, due to iOS not letting you use good ad blockers. Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings,…

> iOS not letting you use good ad blockers

I use 'Adblock Fast'. Seems fine, but I admit I have nothing to compare it to.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#114
Fastmail is really nice alternative, not just for the email but because it comes with a calendar and contacts.

You can sync contacts via CardDav and your calendar via CalDav.

Even better, if you have a work Google account like I do, you can import your calendar as an overlay on Fastmail's calendar using OAuth2.

If you'd like your calendar without the pesky forced management profiles, it's a neat workaround while still remaining relatively secure. It also doesn't break when your arbitrary forced password rotation kicks in every 90 days ;)

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#115
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worcester has a higher population than England's Worcester, and as such probably has more backlinks to pages related to it. That is global. Expecting global results to be regionalized is silly; just use regionalized results.

That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it. I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.

No, it isn't. Non-localized search should ignore the geographical origin of the query, by definition.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#116
I've made similar progress too:

Replaced Chrome browser with Firefox

Replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo

Replaced Gmail with ProtonMail

Replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap

Replaced Hangouts with Telegram

Replaced Google for news with Feedly

Replaced Google Translate with DeepL

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#118
If everyone did this, google wouldn't exist, a lot of the open source google software wouldn't exist. Isn't the main point of de-googling, is that everyone does it. Because you can be influenced indirectly even if you do de-google, and that the benefits of de-googling should emerge with popularity. I'm sure some people are de-googling because of personal privacy, but most people aren't targets so this doesn't matter. One of the benefits I can see is that it reduces the quality to the users, and the value to the large companies. That way, data/ power is not consolidated, and we have privacy by segregation.

In summary, I don't see the purpose of de-googling as an individual. And if de-google collectively, we're all worse off. And yet I de-googled last year.

PS: I use Brave, Android, flutter & duck.com, which only exists to its quality today because of Google.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#119

Interesting! Your first concern and reason for De-Googling was privacy, so I'd say moving to iPhone, iCloud, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and the like doesn't help you much. I also think you forgot video-conferencing/video chat. I'd go for Zoom, but there's a bunch of alternatives. Most have their drawbacks. Lastly, move to Europe where we have GDPR. I actually can not read some news articles that are hosted in the U…

What privacy issues do you think the iPhone has?

Perhaps most of the apps that you install from the store, which are just as riddled with analytics and tracking as their Android counterparts.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#120
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that’s better too, I like how it’s possible to switch countries easily to get local results or choose global results. Some non technical searches are more difficult though.

DDG’s definition of “global” is essentially “American” though. Presenting results exclusively for Worcester, MA, when I search for “Worcester” from a UK IP address (near Worcester, Worcestershire) isn’t being global, it’s being dumb. It comes up every time DDG is discussed on HN and I don’t understand why they don’t fix it. It’s the main thing that keeps me using Bing on my phone.

When I do it from the UK, with localisation on I get a whole page of links on the UK Worcester, with it off the hits are mostly the US one, but the Wikipedia page like is still UK.

YMMV, of course, but this search works fine for me.

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