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How to leave Google and why

jach.me

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Re: How to leave Google and why

#131

Post by arvindamirtaa »

spacegangster wrote: post #110
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #56

I'd love to leave! As soon as someone comes up with a half decent hosted calendar service that's half as good as Google Calendar. People like to give GCal a lot of shit while comparing it with local apps; there's very few hosted services that are so versatile.

I'm working on https://lightpad.ai , which includes a timeflow calendar. Many features from GCal are missing though. If you can give it a shot and a hit me with a critical review – this could push me in the right direction. I'm set on going towards privacy/transparency/local-first-data.

I'll take a look.

Re: How to leave Google and why

#132

Post by nemothekid »

berlam wrote: post #117
LadyNike wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Within November 2018, another data breach was found within a Google+ API software update. The bug was fixed within a week and there was no evidence that any third party developer compromised the system. Please explain how this is anywhere near the level of FB & CA?

> However, approximately 52.5 million non-public profile fields were exposed to alternative apps that requested access to individuals Google+ ID, and created access to other profiles that had shared information with each other. It's not on the same level as CA but should remind you that even a corporation like Google can have such data breaches, regardless of whether they were gaps or poor design. The investigations…

I don't think it's comparable at all - the CA scandal wasn't something CA got access to via a bug. What CA had been doing, plenty of other companies had already been doing on Facebook's platform to maximize ad spend. CA was just first to apply it to agitprop. So yes, while Google did go back and make sure their APIs were cleaned up they never unofficially offered the functionality in the first place.

Re: How to leave Google and why

#133

Post by lern_too_spel »

freeflight wrote: post #127
lern_too_spel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike iOS, Android lets you choose which contacts app to use and does not require you to log into any accounts at all to use the phone. You seem to be transferring what you know about iOS to Android when that does not transfer at all.

> Android lets you choose which contacts app to use How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app? > does not require you to log into any accounts at all to use the phone That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter. Just like the fact that even without logging into an Google account there's a ton of unique identifies to track just baked into phone h…

> How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app?

100% of the users who don't want to give their contacts to Google. You're right that the Google contacts app provides a far superior experience to the iOS contacts app, so most users who don't care about providing their data will use that if it's the default.

> That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter.

But how will Google get the contact information? The fact remains that iOS requires the user to log into an Apple account. iOS requires users to tell Apple all the apps they run and ties that information to their Apple account. iOS requires that anybody who wants to get their location also send their location to Apple. Android does none of these.

> Yet on my friends Android phone all he had to do was enter my phone number and the same e-mail address I used to register a YouTube account, and Google matched and linked those two together to populate the contact with my YouTube profile picture.

This is called contact merging, which Google's contacts app does far better than iOS's. iOS is a far less usable platform with far more unavoidable privacy invasions.

Re: How to leave Google and why

#135

Post by shrew »

tmarice wrote: post #102
theshrike79 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but I switched to Fastmail. It was the only one that provided large enough storage quotas for my Gmail inbox at a reasonable price. 5€/month for 30GB of storage + domain aliases + native iOS application. Protonmail is SuperSecure and all that, but they only have 5GB of storage and for the 4€/month account, getting it close to 30GB would be 6x that. (The quota was much lower when I evaluated the servic…

I also switched to Fastmail 6 months ago, and I'm content. It's not bad, but the UX is nowhere near Gmail. I didn't understand how useful was automatic email classification (Updates/Promotions/etc.) until I stopped using it.

Not sure if Fastmail's filtering is as extensive as ProtonMail, but it seems there are several common headers that do a fairly good job of sorting emails into types. ProtonMail suggests filtering based on these headers[0].

For updates, I've got a filter based on substrings in the subject like "receipt", "invoice", "latest bill" which does fairly well at catching that transactional type of email.

It definitely takes more time than Google's implementation, but in curating the filters myself I've found I've been left with a cleaner, more organised inbox.

[0] https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/sieve-advanced...

Re: How to leave Google and why

#136

Post by mceachen »

prima-facie wrote: post #124

1. Have your email address on a domain that's under your own control. Whoever controls your email box has control over your entire online persona. 2. Backup data from Google using automated tools like rclone. Rclone can download Google Drive data and Google Photos (albeit with duplicates). 3. Encrypt and backup your data to services like Backblaze, AWS S3, Wasabi, etc.

At least for your photos, you probably want to use Google Takeout. Rclone is wonderful, but Google's photo api strips off GPS tags from all your files.

PhotoStructure will dedupe your Google Takeout, FWIW.

Re: How to leave Google and why

#137

Post by bryan_w »

creato wrote: post #23

It hasn't been even 1 day since a nearly identical thread was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25823645 And I'm pretty sure we're averaging at least a few of these per week.

It's like a template for getting clicks to their site

Re: How to leave Google and why

#138

Post by shrimp_emoji »

ankit_it09 wrote: post #48

Google is so much involved in our life, it is very difficult to just leave google but you can still minimize their activity tracking. This is what I am following from a long time: 1. Already deleted FB and Instagram account. When I came to know different sites also sends your activity data to FB. Deleting Whatsapp is in process and thanks to FB for opening about the privacy policy now many are moving to different cha…

>4. Tried DuckDuckGo for sometime but results are not good as Google

DDG's results have gotten comically bad, unfortunately. xD It used to be unusable for code stuff, but the unusability's getting more generalized. Still, you're just a "g!" away in the search query from Google results.

>8. Planning to move from Android to _____

Usable Linux phones when ;3;

(There's Librem 5 and PinePhone, but...)

Re: How to leave Google and why

#140

Post by theshrike79 »

system16 wrote: post #128
theshrike79 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but I switched to Fastmail. It was the only one that provided large enough storage quotas for my Gmail inbox at a reasonable price. 5€/month for 30GB of storage + domain aliases + native iOS application. Protonmail is SuperSecure and all that, but they only have 5GB of storage and for the 4€/month account, getting it close to 30GB would be 6x that. (The quota was much lower when I evaluated the servic…

I also switched to Fastmail and love it. Is their iOS app really native? It's my only real gripe with the service - I find it has a web/hybrid app feel to it. The components don't feel native, and I find their table row swiping gesture to be a bit flaky.

"Native" as in "not limited to just a web UI". Not sure about the underlying tech stack.
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