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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#281

Post by leephillips »

yachtman wrote: post #181

Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

On my xubuntu laptop, I observe the opposite. Firefox leaks memory until I need to restart it, several times a day. However, Chrome reliably releases memory, and I never need to restart it.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#282

Post by ocdtrekkie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #276
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say one of the ones that horrified me the most shortly after I transitioned off of Gmail was Smart Reply. To my knowledge, nobody was able to confirm at the time that even paid G Suite accounts were immune to being used as training data. (If you have insight on this, let me know!) I definitely don't want my email used to train Google's AI models, which might unpredictably cough up sensitive data since machine l…

I do know the answer. It's probably in the privacy policy for gsuite somewhere, but that's a long document. I'm unsure if I can share it though. What sensitive information are you concerned about coughing up? While I haven't actually looked closely at how smart reply works, it isn't just a simple lstm on text, it tracks contextual info like recipient names, so "hey " on the first line will autocomple to "Hey Todd and…

I feel like the fact that you are unsure if you can share how users' private data is used is extremely informative about Google's privacy stance.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#283

Post by q92z8oeif »

lucb1e wrote: post #166
q92z8oeif wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used DDG for several years now as the default on all my devices, i can say that since December the results are completely useless. Not sure what happened. I had never to use "!g" before. Now it is required for 1/3 of my regular searches, and "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches.

> "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field. Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for the…

i naively like the ! shortbuts on DDG because i like to think they use this as data to improve their results.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#284

Post by louthy »

I started degoogling when they killed Inbox. I would have happily paid for that, it was the first time I’d ever been able to maintain ‘inbox zero’.

So, I’ve switched browsers (Edge), switched search engine (DDG), but I don’t know an email system that’s as good as Inbox was, so I can drop gmail?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#285

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #282
joshuamorton wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do know the answer. It's probably in the privacy policy for gsuite somewhere, but that's a long document. I'm unsure if I can share it though. What sensitive information are you concerned about coughing up? While I haven't actually looked closely at how smart reply works, it isn't just a simple lstm on text, it tracks contextual info like recipient names, so "hey " on the first line will autocomple to "Hey Todd and…

I feel like the fact that you are unsure if you can share how users' private data is used is extremely informative about Google's privacy stance.

Not really. It's informative of the policies on sharing confidential information, yes.

But it has nothing to do with what the actual policy on customer data is. My guess is that you'd be pleasantly surprised be the policy. I just can't find it documented publicly anywhere, so I don't know that I can share the actual policies. There are people who's job it is to share such things, they're like account managers and support people and they have guidance on the way the things they can say. My guidance is more like "don't unless it's clearly public".

Put another way, the training on data handling is longer than the training on corporate communication. So if I'm this careful with my communication, imagine the ridiculous lengths I go to with user data safety.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#286

Post by lucb1e »

newscracker wrote: post #249
lucb1e wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder the same. The reason I use Telegram is because it's the only thing I can convince a significant enough number of friends and family to move over to because of the superior user experience and non-Facebook, not because it's the most privacy-friendly solution out there. If I could choose a platform, it would probably be Wire, but the UX is pretty bad and I don't see my mom using that.

I thought Wire seems to suffer from the “Electron curse” (of being sluggish) on desktop. Then I realized that the app is slow on all platforms, including mobile. Any chat that has more than a few images brings the client to a crawl when scrolling. The company behind Wire also focuses on paying users (the solution targeted for teams and companies). So getting support is close to futile.

The business support is also not what one might hope for. The couple Euros we pay per month per user is not enough to get a few minutes of a developer's time so it's very similar to not having any support.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#287

Post by montebicyclelo »

pkamb wrote: post #275
yachtman wrote: post #181

Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

I would absolutely switch to Safari or Firefox except for the fact that I find Chrome's tab system to be so good. Chrome tabs load and appear instantly. As you add more tabs they shrink down to a tiny but still usable favicon size. As you close tabs they resize well and with nice little UX behavior like the next close button always appearing directly under your mouse. They close and re-open instantly. When you press…

I've been using Tree Style Tab [1] in Firefox for a while now. IMO it's much better than standard tabs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

(To anyone who plans to try it, you may need to edit userChrome.css to turn off the top tabs; there's guides on this. I also recommend tweaking TST's settings, imposing a limit on nesting, and preventing auto switching tabs )

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#288

Post by lucb1e »

q92z8oeif wrote: post #283
lucb1e wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field. Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for the…

i naively like the ! shortbuts on DDG because i like to think they use this as data to improve their results.

That's an angle I hadn't thought of, that it might contribute to DDG's attack on Google by supplying them more data, particularly the queries one goes to Google for. Good point.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#289

Post by TheArcane »

lucb1e wrote: post #173
markosaric wrote: post #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

+1 for Deepl. Google Translate's quality is very close to Deepl and for a long time I couldn't tell which is better, but I recently discovered that Deepl does German brainfuck sentences correctly and Google and Microsoft Translate both mess it up. (In German you can say "the ball has the dog" and by conjugating "the" correctly ("der ball" and "den hund", iirc, or the other way around, I can never remember) it can mea…

Is there a reliable DeepL based addon for Firefox?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#290

Post by ridgewell »

harha wrote: post #8

I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical: - there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me) - not as SEOed (still not great though) - the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads - on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omni…

DuckDuckGo is just Bing, with the optionality of geolocation by country.
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