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Alternatives to Google Products

restoreprivacy.com

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221–230 of 527 posts

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#221

Post by zavi »

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…

Apple is a US based company. The point of this post is to try and hurt American hegemony in tech and promote European alternatives. Europe desperately needs it given a dangerously old population and increasing irrelevance of its tech industry, with GDPR being yet another populist nail in the coffin. Method of choice is thru soft power - swaying opinions on HN, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#222

Post by grumdan »

nemothekid wrote: post #190
throwaway13456 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>alternatives like Apple I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs. When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it. Given all t…

>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as we…

Even if you don't inspect it personally, there's a greater community of people who don't get their paycheck from Apple who may be looking at the code.

Regarding the Intel comparison, you have no choice but to trust them, but by using Apple products, you are trusting Intel and Apple, which is worse than just trusting Intel.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#223

Post by bennofs »

Tomte wrote: post #216
newscracker wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posteo is very aggressive on privacy, reducing exposure, and keeping information safer. So a shorter webmail session timeout may be related to this. Depending on the use case, if this were the only issue with Posteo, the GP could’ve used Firefox with one of the many tab reload or tab refresh extensions to keep the logged in session alive.

Posteo doesn't allow custom domains (a no go) and lies about why they don't.

What's the real reason they don't allow custom domains in your opinion? Why do you say they are lying?

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#224

Post by zbraniecki »

Hi all,

I'm an engineer working on Firefox Platform (Gecko). In the linked blog post, the author recommends Firefox (thanks!) and links to a "privacy recommendations" for it, which include items such as "resistFingerprinting" settings.

I'd like to remind everyone that turning on this setting has far fetched consequences to how you experience the Web. Your dates, timezones, preferred languages will all be masked which will result in weird experiences.

The option is behind a flag and without UI precisely because it is a pretty complex feature, that we didn't iron out yet, and which should be well understood before being used.

It concerns me to see it being references and recommended without any explanation whatsoever.

Of course I'm likely biased because I'm on the receiving end of bug reports from people who experience the Web in weird languages and with wrong timezones because they followed some tutorial that recommended it. :(

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#225

Post by Tomte »

bennofs wrote: post #223
Tomte wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posteo doesn't allow custom domains (a no go) and lies about why they don't.

What's the real reason they don't allow custom domains in your opinion? Why do you say they are lying?

Their support replied with a mumbo-jumbo of techno-babble why it's not possible.

Of course it's possible.

The reason is clear: lock-in.

People are reluctant to change providers if they lose their mail address.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#226

Post by Sylos »

mvexel wrote: post #18

What does Google Chrome track beyond what you can disable under the Privacy and Security settings, when you're not signed in with a Google account?

1) That's a lot of precursors. Many people want Sync functionality, which Google uses to track your browsing history. And most people don't go through the privacy settings.

2) We don't really know, Chrome is not open-source and it's hard to tell from network traffic, since nowadays pretty much every webpage loads something from a Google server in encrypted form anyways (and with those request, Google could send all kinds of data).

3) For Chromium (which's source code is basis for Google Chrome), this project tries to collect and fix all the privacy-infringing stuff: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

4) There's many ways in which Chrome doesn't actively track you, but infringes on your privacy by just being terrible at protecting it from webpages' tracking. As in millions of lines of code, tens of thousands of design decisions, all made by the biggest tracking company on the planet. No journalist can report about all of these, but it'd be foolish to assume innocence until proven guilty.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#227

Post by blub »

jedberg wrote: post #167

This is all fine and well, but to be honest, I like how Google integrates all the different products. I get a better experience when search is customized to what is in my email, especially when I search for flight info and it tells me about flights I already have booked, or better yet, flights my in-laws are on that they forwarded to me and I'm now tracking to go pick them up. Sometimes the ads it gives me are so rel…

Well, most people are boring and don't rock the boat.

Things can get tricky if they pop up (thorough bad luck or as a consequence of their actions) on the radar of someone that wants to make their life miserable or if they bother someone with power.

Otherwise I assume you're well off financially by now, so getting screwed on insurance should be a non-issue. Discrimination is likewise a non-issue.

In general money helps and being a US citizen, straight, not muslim, healthy, male etc also helps.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#228

Post by nothrabannosir »

Torwald wrote: post #60
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position It's more damaging than that. The bundling of privacy and FOSS advocacy weakens the former. Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS. The potential audience for a privacy pitch is broader. By bundling the two, however, the technical advocacy community limits the appeal of the former to those supporting the latter. This is an issue because the…

> Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS. Few without deep technical knowledge do even know what FOSS is.

Yes, all they know is “this is impossible to install” and “what is a GitHub” and “where do I log in to the cloud?” and “this is the ugliest software I have ever seen in my life”.

Unless we’re talking about hosted FOSS, in which case you get the worst of both worlds.

I run my own mail server so this comes from a place of love: FOSS for server side products for consumers is a joke.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#229

Post by bennofs »

robbrown451 wrote: post #209

So I'm one of those who doesn't care if Google tracks me or sells me as a product. [ * ] Is there actually some real, tangible harm that can come to me from using Google products? Not theoretical stuff, not stuff that is less likely than dying in a plane crash. Something that is actually likely to happen, that will affect me in measurable, negative ways? I'm really trying to come up with something, and I'm really try…

Then you must assume one of:

* No one can get access to Google's data * Those who can get access cannot harm you

In addition to trusting google not to be evil. What are your assumptions that lead you to that conclusion?

Or are you assuming that no matter who has access to your data, there is no one could ever do any harm to you with that data? (That's the 'I have nothing to hide' argument)

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#230

Post by chime »

zbraniecki wrote: post #224

Hi all, I'm an engineer working on Firefox Platform (Gecko). In the linked blog post, the author recommends Firefox (thanks!) and links to a "privacy recommendations" for it, which include items such as "resistFingerprinting" settings. I'd like to remind everyone that turning on this setting has far fetched consequences to how you experience the Web. Your dates, timezones, preferred languages will all be masked which…

Is there a moderate resistFingerprinting setting? I don't mind my date/tz/language being known. There are 150m+ people living in my timezone who use en-US.

I don't want my fonts, plugins, user agent, or detailed HW/graphics features (e.g. canvas/WebGL hash) being known. Those can uniquely identify me according to https://panopticlick.eff.org.

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