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Alternatives to Google Products

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Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#251

Post by majewsky »

grumdan wrote: post #214
scarface74 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did he do that without completely rearchitecting how iOS works? Do you have any citations?

I'm not saying that this is what happened and I don't know the background of this story, but it would have been easy (technically speaking) to just push an update to Chinese users that will extract their private key and send it back to Apple without any significant changes.

AFAIK the Secure Enclave chip is specifically designed to make this impossible. There is no planned method to extract the private key from it. ("Planned method" meaning anything that's not an exploit or an electron microscope.)

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#253

Post by therealmarv »

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…

I like this comment. It's not beeing ignorant about privacy but I also value my free time a lot more than searching and dealing with all sorts of Google alternatives. I think that security and uptime at Google are outstanding and better than all sorts of alternatives which can shut down any time. And in comparison to Facebook Google is not selling your single soul or your direct private information to outside advertisement companies. It's not like Google never thought about privacy... they have deep thoughts about it and how they still can make money with you.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#254

Post by shawn »

halflings wrote: post #249

> All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market. Google has what I think are the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing his…

Google has what I think is the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing history, but enable personalized ads).

I don't think this stops Google from collecting your viewing history. If it did, Youtube recommendations wouldn't work at all, because they would know nothing about what I like or don't like. But I'm pretty sure recommendations work regardless of your settings -- meaning you're being tracked.

I happen to like the recommendations, so I don't mind this. But it's a hard problem.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#255

Post by eklavyaa »

Thanks for list but I am always worried about what if the new ,safe,better privacy provider is bought by Google or ? Referring the recent history we have seen many good products just bought up and they changed their business model e.g WhatsUp

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#257

Post by chrischen »

anonu wrote: post #51
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…

I don't disagree that Apple looks really good nowadays from a privacy perspective. They treat their customers with respect and don't sell their data.... until they do. How can you trust a single point of failure to "do no evil"?

Well as Mark Zuckerberg put it during the congressional hearing—and this is a paraphrase—"we do not and have never sold data."

Which is true. They don't sell the data because they directly monetize it. Same with Google. Google didn't just start doing that one day, that's been their business model since they started doing ads. Apple's business model is selling users devices, which they would jeopardize if they tried to also sell their users' data.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#258

Post by halflings »

ccozan wrote: post #69

Again, like I or others mentioned before. If you don't want to be the product, you just have to pay the equivalent of a beer in month [0]. You need a own domain, but who doesn't these days? [0] https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

Worth mentioning that even in Gmail, emails are no longer used for advertisement. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#259

Post by Tomte »

bennofs wrote: post #235
Tomte wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The FAQ ( https://posteo.de/en/site/faq ) says the do it because a domain has personay identifying information in WHOIS and they would need to store it. I think for .de domains, you are required to have your personal address in WHOIS if you are not a company.

That's a new claim, and it's also obvious bullshit.

First, I may be okay with it. And why would Posteo store WHOIS data? Unless they want to be a domain reseller, which is not what I asked them about.

Second, there are other TLDs.

I still insist that they do it because of lock-in and that they lie about it.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#260

Post by majewsky »

systoll wrote: post #169
IncRnd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has been able to clear cookies like that for years without any extensions.

Firefox has an option to block all third party cookies in the manner similar to Safari 1-10's default behaviour. And like everything else, it lets you clear all cookies at once, or manually look through the cookies to clear them. It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.

What about the tracking prevention that Private Mode has had since FF 42 or so?
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