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Alternatives to Google Products

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Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#141

Post by MrBingley »

trumped wrote: post #108

You probably should install something like LineageOS to replace stock Android and avoid installing any Google apps/services if you want to be Google-free... (use f-droid or Yalp to find apps). Because if you replace all Google products with alternatives but have a Google service running on your phone 24/7, what's the point?

Absolutely. Last year Google was tracking the location of Android devices that used its push messaging service (so basically all of them) even when privacy features were turned on. Installing a Google-free custom rom is the only solution to prevent this. I have been using LineageOS without Gapps for the past month, and it's worked superbly.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#142

Post by patmorgan23 »

mattnewton wrote: post #32
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #30

Recently I started shelling out $25 a month for a G-Suite account. I wish I could have kept my @gmail email address, as I think your own vanity URL looks a little tacky, but oh well. Anyway, for privacy but also security it’s been amazing. DKIM, DMARC, SPF, and S/MIME for mail. All attachments are executed in a special sandbox before moving to your inbox (delays mail a little bit). None of my personal data / content…

I’m not sure what you mean, isn’t your experience using G Suite as a paid service?

I think he wants something in between gsuite and free Gmail. A Gmail+ that lets you keep the @gmail address and take out all the spyware.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#143

Post by DoreenMichele »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #9
lev99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was strange bing was not mentioned, even though it has Mozilla's endorsement of having a better privacy policy than Google[0] and is probably the most popular alternative to search in the United States. This far from a complete list of Google alternatives. [0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing...

As much as I like Microsoft, Bing is awful. Ive used it, and I tried to like it. It can't find anything.

I use Bing a fair amount and I like it.

I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what sorts of things you are trying to find and having trouble with. Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions for how to get more out of your Bing experience.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#144

Post by brightball »

auslander wrote: post #55
taneq wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any clients these days which don't have external content downloading disabled by default?

I know that apple Mail and ProtonMail's are enabled by default. Don't know about others - I don't use them, but I expect it to be same, as defaults are always set for user convenience, not privacy.

Proton’s is definitely not on by default

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#146

Post by Godel_unicode »

bronco21016 wrote: post #90
millstone wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies get hit with multi-million dollar fines for violating their privacy policies. So there's your incentive. I just don't see open source as better protecting privacy. See for example the telemetry in .NET Core or VS Code [1]. Users discover this stuff by watching network traffic, not through code audits. 1: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/16131

Is a multi-million dollar fine enough to matter? Let’s assume Apple violated their privacy policy and was fined $999 million, the highest “multi-million dollar” fine they could be assessed. That’s just barely more than 1% of their market cap. Fines are definitely incentive to do right but the fine must be felt. I’m not aware of any cases where the tech giants have been levied a fine that really hits them hard.

The fine you're proposing would cause a much larger hit to market cap than you're suggesting. Consider, Apple made ~20 billion in profit last quarter, your hypothetical fine would be a precipitous hit to profit margin which, when reported on the quarterly earnings call, would cause an abrupt downturn in share price. Consider the 13% hair cut earlier this year when the market thought Apple was going to miss. Then there's the existential panic of "does this mean Apple is in for more such fines?".

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#147

Post by nickpsecurity »

cosmojg wrote: post #17
nemothekid wrote: post #2

I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple. For example, the "best" calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I'm not a fan of hooktube either - it just…

It's not that "privacy-focused" tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code. This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

That's provably false when you get to the bottom of what makes proprietary software trustworthy: it has to be verified by qualified people who you trust after being designed and built with enough rigor to not have accidental flaws. That's regardless of whether it's proprietary or FLOSS. I went into detail here:

https://pastebin.com/EZQWbwCB

In fact, the first systems that resisted strong pentesting by NSA were proprietary, shared- or closed-source systems. They shredded everything else. Two are below with another designed like that. The first, safe, kind-of-secure machine that I know of was Burroughs B5000 whose CPU did things like stop overflows, protect pointers, and check function arguments. It was immune to common, root causes of many failures or attacks. OS in a type-safe, high-level language (ALGOL variant). It was a proprietary system whose source was shared with customers. Linux systems still don't have as much code-level security in average case as that proprietary software from 1961. The virtualization solutions in FLOSS still aren't produced as securely as VAX VMM or the separation kernels that followed in 2000's with VMM's layered on top.

http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse443-s12/docs/ch6.pdf

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Karger-et-al-A... (See Layering and Assurance sections especially. Compare to QA practices of favorite FLOSS VM.)

http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec04/tech/wips/wips/04... (Nizza uses FLOSS components. This document is just great at describing the architecture they and the proprietary vendors were using with separation kernels. The proprietary offerings contained a lot of problems FLOSS didn't with their 4-12kloc kernels having less code to screw up. User-mode drivers can boost reliability a bit, too.)

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#149

Post by auslander »

IncRnd wrote: post #145
auslander wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usind default settings or manually?

Neither. It's an option in the preferences.

Is that option enabled in default installation of firefox? Sorry, I must have specified that in Safari ITP is enabled by default, and this is important for non-tech people.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#150

Post by mattkevan »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #138
bartread wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code. I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position. A relatively small proportion of the general population has the skills to meaningfully look at the code, never mind the time. Moreover, even for someone who is capable, such an exercise quickly becomes non-trivial on an unfamiliar codebase for an app of any complexity. In many cases…

While I generally agree with you about the soundness of the FOSS==privacy argument, I think you're misstating it subtly. The claim isn't necessarily that the privacy sensitive user specifically will be able to audit the source but rather that someone somewhere will have done, and will have written about problems they uncovered. See also many eyes making all bugs shallow.

Not always. Heartbleed was present in OpenSSL for two years before anyone noticed.

Many eyes make all bugs shallow, but if there aren’t enough eyes with the skills or the time then problems will remain deep, even for important software like this.

Perhaps everyone thought everyone else had done the work?

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