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How to leave Google and why
41–50 of 146 posts
Re: How to leave Google and why
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you end up using for email?
I'm using my own instance of mail-in-a-box, of course this is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, because you basically become your own admin. But personally I enjoy doing that, and the maintenance required is really minimal. If you are looking for cloud/managed alternatives you can have a look at the list here https://degoogle.jmoore.dev/
i am interested in mailinabox. i think next month i am going to take the plunge but i need a webmail. my question, how much of a vps server do you need to set one up? 1Gb ram for miab+roundcube?
any better foss webmail like roundcube or squirrelmail?
also, have you looked into oracle always free ? would that work?
Re: How to leave Google and why
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 2005's rang, they want their phones back. My Sony Ericsson 500i was my edgy love of my teenage college years. Every provider had their own phone with their own firmware. Android appeared and nearly-all of them got in to bed with Google. And so here we are, living in a world of a million different sized rectangles; all running Android. > Honestly, we need a optimised non-custom rom alternative to smartphone operat…
Symbian was not it. Meego was it. Nokia messed up by not actually sharing it properly like the Android Alliance or whatever it was called did. Nokia went under and Android is everywhere :-(
I still have a running specimen of N9 in my drawer. They killed own future when they stopped Meego development.
Re: How to leave Google and why
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you end up using for email?
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…
Big +1 on fastmail.
However, the big upside is that I have my own domain now, so if I need to migrate to something else (be it self-hosted or another provider) I can easily do so without losing all my contacts.
Re: How to leave Google and why
#45How many times do you google something? 100 times per day? 200? I'm certainly in that neighborhood on most days. If the search results are even just slightly worse, say costing a second more to scan, or - worse - you spend time visiting irrelevant results before finding what you are after, that's an enormous time sink. Throwing out any other google service but search is easy. Yet there is basically nothing that googl…
I 'google' stuff on DuckDuckGo about that many times a day maybe, yeah. Have done for years, it wasn't an issue when I switched and it isn't an issue now.
Re: How to leave Google and why
#46How many times do you google something? 100 times per day? 200? I'm certainly in that neighborhood on most days. If the search results are even just slightly worse, say costing a second more to scan, or - worse - you spend time visiting irrelevant results before finding what you are after, that's an enormous time sink. Throwing out any other google service but search is easy. Yet there is basically nothing that googl…
I use Duckduckgo for most searches, and when it doesn't cut it, I add !sp at the end of the search - this will instruct Duckduckgo to redirect me to that same search on Startpage. Startpage uses Google results without passing your own personal data on to Google (or at least that's what they claim). It's like a proxied version of Google search.
I would use DDG if they added a "!g" button at the bottom of their first results page.
Re: How to leave Google and why
#47From the title, I initially thought that the author was a Google employee, and explained how to leave Google (is it that difficult?) :D
> is it that difficult?
That sweet paycheck tho.
Re: How to leave Google and why
#48Google 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 channel.
2. Not using Chrome browser. Using Brave/Edge which are using the same chromium engines and are very Fast. Also I use Firefox for its container tabs feature. Personal stuff in Firefox tabs and rest on Brave.
3. I am using VPN, browser extension are also available, I keep my gmail account in a separate browser container tabs.
4. Tried DuckDuckGo for sometime but results are not good as Google, so I am using google search in separate tab where my account is not logged in.
5. Same with youtube, opening in different tab and without logging in.
6. Turned off timeline history in google maps.
7. Stopped using Google Home.
8. Planning to move from Android to _____ whichever is much safer. This is where I think doing all above won't make any sense as long as I am using Android. Believe I am using my phone in a restricted mode. :d
After doing all this, I still think they can track my activity. Haha... But I am trying to make it little difficult to connect the dots.
P.S: I do like Google as a developers company.
Re: How to leave Google and why
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Duckduckgo for most searches, and when it doesn't cut it, I add !sp at the end of the search - this will instruct Duckduckgo to redirect me to that same search on Startpage. Startpage uses Google results without passing your own personal data on to Google (or at least that's what they claim). It's like a proxied version of Google search.
I would use DDG if they added a "!g" button at the bottom of their first results page.
Nice idea for a browser extension, actually. HN, make it happen, I'd happily use it! (I'm too lazy or busy too do it myself)
Re: How to leave Google and why
#50How to leave Google as a developer, the easy way: 1. Any time Google deprecates a service/library you're using or breaks it with backwards-incompatible changes, move to a non-Google equivalent. 2. Don't adopt any new Google services/libraries. And viola, before you know it you'll be Google free.
That sounds nice but this approach is unlikely to ever get me off Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, and Chrome and those are also the ones that likely give them the most info about me.
It might work for some of those:
Maps - They massively hiked API prices a couple years ago, literally by orders of magnitude (a kind of breaking change?). They've also broken a bunch of user-facing features and made it slower; it seems a common complaint here that maps now is a worse product than it was 5 years ago.
Search - They seem to have gone all-in on AI, and I've seen a lot of people complaining here that it's now harder to find things than it used to be. Precise queries also no longer work (searching for an exact phrase), a kind of breaking change. They also do a lot more human curation than the competitors, which some would consider a breaking change compared to the past. Even their automated, user-profiling-based curation is a breaking change to how Google originally worked.
Android - If you don't upgrade your Android phone, but do upgrade your OS, you'll find it gets slower and slower, as newer versions consume more and more resources. This is a kind of breaking change, if you don't want to buy a new phone.