How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
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Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#2Great Read!
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#3Author Here: Got gmail back when people were begging for invites and over the years found using their services out of "convenience". Lots of the recent changes have made me start looking for alternatives. I'm not technical, so I may have missed some self-hosted solutions, but I'm open to suggestions on anything I may have missed.
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#4No self-hosted/FOSS alternatives. This is a bit disappointing.
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#5"At least with these options, you’re diversifying the companies you give your data to."
Why is this better than giving it to one company? Won't I just get more ads?
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#6..and not one of these is even close to being feature complete. I could get bare IMAP 20 years ago.
There's a very damn good reason that Google's services are so popular.
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#7No self-hosted/FOSS alternatives. This is a bit disappointing.
I could have sworn I saw an EFF (?) link back in June (post-Snowden) containing a list of FOSS alternatives to a bunch of services (Gmail, Skype, Google Analytics), etc. For some reason I can't find it now, though - hopefully someone else has this saved somewhere.
EDIT Thanks to vezzy-fnord below: https://prism-break.org/en/
They seem to have updated their layout since then, but I'm fairly certain this is the same site that I was referring to.
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#8..and not one of these is even close to being feature complete. I could get bare IMAP 20 years ago. There's a very damn good reason that Google's services are so popular.
I wouldn't use feature-completeness as the goal.
I was a Gmail user since it was released[0], and while it was certainly unique back then, I realized recently that almost none of the features I use nowadays are Google-specific[1].
In fact, the one major annoyance of Google's mail services for me is IMAP! Namely - Google provides an IMAP-like interface, but it isn't quite the same as IMAP, and it has a number of warts that make it not impossible to use, but certainly uncomfortable.
I have seen a number of mail/IMAP clients literally special-case Google's idiosyncrasies into their IMAP handling because of this.
[0] Now it's 2014, and it feels kind of weird to think that I've had my Gmail account for almost 10 years.
[1] Even in 2004, most of what Gmail provided was unique to web-based email, but had been around for a while on desktop mail clients. That, and the 1GB of storage, which felt excessive at the time (how things change!).
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#9Hush Mail – Hushmail is free email service with privacy and no ads. I haven’t used this personally but it’s a good option for the privacy-conscious.
It certainly is.
If you intend on getting fucked over.
Hushmail has a history of complying with arbitrary appeals, and has sent plaintext transcripts of messages many times in the past. Look it up. Jacob Appelbaum also explicitly warned to stay away from them at this year's 30c3 talk on Tor.
As for search engines, don't forget Startpage: https://startpage.com/
Re: How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google
#10..and not one of these is even close to being feature complete. I could get bare IMAP 20 years ago. There's a very damn good reason that Google's services are so popular.
Don't get me wrong - I like(d) lots of google projects. However, the goal with this list was to diversify the different services you're use for different purposes. Like I stated in the post - I know a lot of people who have done something (out of malice or ignorance) and gotten on the wrong side of Google and had whole accounts shut down, eliminated or made inaccessible..
From a business perspective - that's a really bad position to be in. The goal here was to hopefully bring that to light a little & provide alternatives that are "as good as" and sometimes better than the google option.