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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#301

Post by jabirali »

maps7 wrote: post #131
actuator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even after using DDG for the last 5-6 years, I find myself always using !g with it. So much that, it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily. Sure, if I just care about US specific results and I am doing an exact term search or maybe StackOverflow result is my target, DDG comes close but Google gets context of things much better. I keep finding much better search results that had more c…

> it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily. Same. I sometimes even type '!g' into Google itself by mistake

I ended up with the same muscle memory. That’s why I eventually just switched to StartPage.com instead, which is basically a Google proxy.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#302

Post by bryan_w »

anonymousab wrote: post #280
nickelpro wrote: post #61

Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…

>Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? Someone tries to access your account from a random place, or maybe an old camera video you uploaded to youtube gets flagged erroneously by some contentid or appropriate content automation, and an automated system locks your account permanently, with you forever losing access to your e…

Why wouldn't you backup your data periodically? You would if you self hosted, it's the same for online services

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#303

Post by neilv »

That's what I'd consider way too many extensions. For one reason, browser extensions with user bases sometimes get sold to malware/spyware companies, so even if they started out as good for you, they can become very bad for you, without you knowing. (There's a few browser extensions I'd be surprised if ever got sold, like uBlock Origin, but I don't know as much about most of the rest of them.)

Another thign to be aware of is that unusual combinations of filtering and other privacy-seeking behavior on the Web is usually detectable, and can permit you to be fingerprinted better than if you'd been using more common combinations. Though presumably most parties don't care enough to put the work into detecting that, I'd guess some subsets of users probably are targeted for at least experiments in this regard, such as Tor users. (I have this "problem" myself now, since I've been building a training/familiarization set of 10K+ Web request filtering rules, which I dogfood with uBlock Origin in Tor Browser, and the set is pretty unique to me. If I cared more about my immediate personal privacy, rather than on ongoing understanding of practical Web privacy&security, I wouldn't do all that counterproductive work, but would instead pick some popular stock stuff to run.)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#304

Post by Scarbutt »

dredmorbius wrote: post #285
Scarbutt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't firefox been defunded and likely to no have a future?

No. "Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal worth mega-millions" Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year. https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156813

Yes. That doesn't mean that money will go to Firefox.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#305

Post by njacobs5074 »

pydry wrote: post #184
strangescript wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Everyone is tracking you online, but for some reason we only care about it when its companies that make good products that we like to use. Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? Meanwhile, I had an ad in my gmail yesterday for Google F…

>People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if…

If the fascists deem you undesirable, they won’t need your email history.

If history is any kind of guide, your neighbors are more likely to identify you to the new regime.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#306

Post by y2bd »

y2bd wrote: post #231
itzael wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail supports regex and wildcards off the top of my head, as I have them set up with my own personal domain. My financial accounts for example are in the format of “bank+xxxxx@domain.tld”

Do you know if they’re required to use the +alias format? I’ve been burnt in the past by bad contact forms silently stripping out special characters out of email addresses.

Verified for myself that it does, thanks! Given how popular FM is I don't know why I missed this prior.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#307

Post by mceachen »

jabirali wrote: post #271
jszymborski wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also try SyncThing, which works in a similar manner, but it's FOSS and you can host your own tracker.

While I like Syncthing and used it for a couple of years, my experience is that Resilio is way faster for syncing large numbers of files (e.g. Git repos or large photo collections). Resilio also appears to be more easily reachable behind routers and corporate firewalls that for some reason block Syncthing. For those with an iPhone, that platform is also supported by Resilio but not Syncthing.

This is my experience as well.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#308

Post by hu3 »

Razengan wrote: post #261
hu3 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus Apple makes devices that harm the environment by being hard to repair by design. edit: It's a well known, documented fact that Apple hardware is hostile towards the environment. Your downvote wont change that.

> It's a well known, documented fact that Apple hardware is hostile towards the environment. Source? Apple is 100% green in some areas and they have good EPA ratings. https://www.apple.com/environment/

I like that your source is from Apple. Is that a joke?

Took me 5 seconds on first Google page to confirm what is common sense:

"Apple's horrid repair policies are forcing shops to destroy stacks of MacBook Pros"

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/apples-repair-policies-are-...

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#309

Post by millimeterman »

bb88 wrote: post #268
kevingrahl wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an analogy I like to use for people who don’t care about privacy; Its similar to not caring about free speech just because you have nothing to say. It’s not just about you the regular joe who is of no particular interest to companies/governments but about those people who absolutely need it. You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this ca…

> You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree. Right, so, has Google done this? Asking because from what I remember the answer has been largely no, but I remember FB selling data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016.

Even this commonly parroted "fact" isn't true. Cambridge Analytica exploited a Facebook misfeature that let them scrape a frankly ridiculous amount of data from users who took their quiz thing. Certainly Facebook shouldn't have allowed random apps access to this user data, but straight up selling data would be an act of immense incompetence on Facebook's part. Their whole business is keeping the data to themselves and selling access to targeted advertising based on that data.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#310

Post by kingaillas »

scarface74 wrote: post #244
submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

I’m paranoid about my photos. I have them backed up to: - iCloud - iCloud syncs to my Windows PC - Backblaze backs up my Windows PC - Google Drive - One Drive

Similar thing with my photos. All other files can be replaced, what I can't do is re-travel to various locations and re-take the photos I have!
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