Google Chrome —> Brave
Google Search —> you.com
Gmail —> ProtonMail
Google Docs —> Notion
Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#42When these things come up I always wonder, why do we believe what these services promise? For example, Duckduckgo is listed here and pretty much everywhere else as the best search engine for privacy, because they have a stated no-log policy. But there are no audits, and as far as I know we have no independent confirmation of this at all. I find it odd because when it comes to VPNs, there are independent audits and ot…
I don't "believe" any of them. My use of other services rather than staying on The Google reservation is because it's always better to not put all your eggs in one basket; The Google can clobber your entire digital life out of nowhere and with little to no recourse. Although you know for a fact that Google has all your data and records everything you do, at least there's a chance with other smaller services that they…
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Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#43When these things come up I always wonder, why do we believe what these services promise? For example, Duckduckgo is listed here and pretty much everywhere else as the best search engine for privacy, because they have a stated no-log policy. But there are no audits, and as far as I know we have no independent confirmation of this at all. I find it odd because when it comes to VPNs, there are independent audits and ot…
DDG says explicitly: "We also save searches" in their https://duckduckgo.com/privacy policy Some queries will always be "personally identifiable" such as your name, ssn, telephone number or an IP address lookup or an address or GPS coordinates, etc.
Bingo.
Someone might hear ‘no tracking’ and think ‘privacy’, and they might be right in making the connection, but DDG never promises not to save some details about your searches. They just don’t serve up ads which are based on your browsing habits.
I still use them because this makes their operation way less perverted than Google’s in my opinion. That, and having (IMO) better search results which aren’t SEO’d to death, make it stand apart from Google Search in my view.
Over a number of years I have switched over from Google-everything to having a number of different accounts for different services, including paid email and domain registration. I wonder how a paid search engine would go in this world? - for now there are excellent search engines like DDG which are free, but I wonder how much a subscription for ad-free searching would cost?
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#44I'm looking for a self-hosted service to host family photos that allows easy uploading (something that non-techies can use). We are currently using Nextcloud, but the auto uploads often result in conflicts and Nextcloud in general runs very slowly on our small server. Any ideas?
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#45Nice. I was looking for an Email alternative based in a "non-eyes" country, but couldn't find anything except ProtonMail, which is fine from the privacy standpoint, but doesn't provide many features that one would expect from an Email provider.
What are you missing ? Been using protonmail for a few years and it has the same features as my old provider (wasn’t gmail).
Main one is searching. I tried it and was unable to search inside message content, only message subjects.
Last time I checked, IMAP protocol was not available, which requires installing on ProtonMail app.
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you missing ? Been using protonmail for a few years and it has the same features as my old provider (wasn’t gmail).
Main one is searching. I tried it and was unable to search inside message content, only message subjects. Last time I checked, IMAP protocol was not available, which requires installing on ProtonMail app.
In order to stay encrypted only subjects can be searched. With the bridge app, you can use imap through a desktop applications. I use thunderbird which also lets you search message content.
I’ve never seen this as an issue.
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#47I'm looking for a self-hosted service to host family photos that allows easy uploading (something that non-techies can use). We are currently using Nextcloud, but the auto uploads often result in conflicts and Nextcloud in general runs very slowly on our small server. Any ideas?
Hi, one of the founders of StoryArk (https://storyark.eu) here. Our product can be used as a Google Photos alternative, but our goal is more to be a journal of your life, which you can share with your friends and family.
It's not self-hosted, but it might be of interest to you nevertheless.
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Main one is searching. I tried it and was unable to search inside message content, only message subjects. Last time I checked, IMAP protocol was not available, which requires installing on ProtonMail app.
In order to stay encrypted only subjects can be searched. With the bridge app, you can use imap through a desktop applications. I use thunderbird which also lets you search message content. I’ve never seen this as an issue.
I understand that, you can't search something in web app if web app stores data in an encrypted format.
It's a classical security vs. convenience tradeoff.
I barely use desktop clients for email, except for backup. It's either web app or mobile app, and here Protonmail doesn't work for me.
My use case would be a trusted non-megacorp in non-eyes country with standard security. Something like for example Fastmail based in Switzerland.
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#49I'm looking for a self-hosted service to host family photos that allows easy uploading (something that non-techies can use). We are currently using Nextcloud, but the auto uploads often result in conflicts and Nextcloud in general runs very slowly on our small server. Any ideas?
Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure.
I initially wrote it to organize the boxes and boxes of old hard drives from the last 25 years of photos and videos that my family and I have taken.
PhotoStructure libraries are uniquely cross-platform and cross-machine, so you can import on your old windows box, sweep all the non-bitrotted files onto an external drive, take the drive to your Mac, run it there, and get a single, comprehensive directory with all your stuff. If you have a NAS, it's even easier: PhotoStructure supports libraries stored on remote filesystems, and it also runs in docker.
Currently I delegate the uploading task to external applications, like syncthing or Resilio Sync. Making everything automatic works well for my family, but may not be what you're looking for.
Note that I've open-sourced several components of PhotoStructure, but the application itself is commercial software. There are free and paid plans available.
Re: Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links
#50Nice! We have made a Google Analytics alternative (getinsights.io) which is not linked there. Servers are still in the US unfortunately, although none of the data from the analytics is sent there. I'll create a PR to add it as an alternative if that's okay.
> Insights doesn't use any cookies, so there is no need to put a banner. Doesn't sending requests from users PC to your 3rd party server require consent as it sends the IP address of the visitor?
Does it? I would assume that means every single online interaction needs a consent banner, since sending a request over TCP includes, by it's nature, your IP address. I never dug too deep into GDPR or the like, since my own websites are all for personal use, and I'm not in charge of any of that stuff for work.
I kinda assumed that demanding consent before sending a user's IP would be technically impossible, given that you have to send it as part of the first request, before even being able to ask for permission? Ok, time to research this.