Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alternatives to Google Products

restoreprivacy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 527 posts

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#441

Post by bozalosht »

superflyguy wrote: post #349
blub wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disadvantages as a consequence of being spied on by the "googles" of the world are difficult to prove , because of information asymmetry: * were you denied entry in a country because the agent had a bad day or because of something you wrote on twitter? * did your insurance rates increase because of a market adjustment, or because of something your car mechanic or car manufacturer shared with the insurer? * were you d…

Am I really the only person who creates and uses new accounts for every online site/service every few months? Different email addresses (on my own domain) too or mailinator for the sign ups, using tor on occasion in case they want to note the country/IP I'm signing up from.

I've noticed that lot of websites nowadays don't allow mailinator. What do you use then?

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#442

Post by bozalosht »

blub wrote: post #324
robbrown451 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant, I suppose, because you are unwilling or unable to list a single tangible potential harm. Home invasion? Please explain how Google tracking me is going to help a home invader. Or are you talking about me posting stuff on Facebook? Because that's a very, very different thing.

My goal when commenting is to counterbalance overly pro-surveilance comments, not become somebody's privacy coach and patiently explain to them all the bad things that could happen. That takes a lot of effort and offers me zero benefit - even in real life, people that I've known for years can be stubborn and they dig in when confronted with arguments. I'm more concerned about the effects of mass corporate surveilance…

> My goal when commenting is to counterbalance overly pro-surveilance comments

And yet answering his question directly instead of avoiding it with a strange remark (home invasion, wtf?) would done a much better job at that.

I've heard the Brave New World speech many times and I buy into the concept... but I'd also like to be educated on reality. Spouting the former when someone asks for the latter is just annoying.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#443

Post by bozalosht »

FourthProtocol wrote: post #304
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…

In the 1930's (and before) people in Germany were asked (as they are today) to specify their religion in certian dealings with their government. Nobody thought anything of it. And then the Nazis came to power, and there was no ability to undelete anything.

So basically if shit hits the fan then we're even more fucked than we would have been had we not used Googles and Facebooks?

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#444

Post by BeetleB »

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.

>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.

Quite a few of the things listed in the article are not open source (some of the map stuff, as an example). Last I checked (several years ago), we only have DuckDuckGo's word for it.

I think the idea is not that these are all trustworthy services, but that no single company has all the data on you.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#445

Post by ska »

amelius wrote: post #303
shawn wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those can uniquely identify me So does your resolution. And that's hard to mask because JS usually needs to know it. If you're not using the browser fullscreen, chances are that you're using a unique innerWidth+innerHeight. As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.

If fingerprinting uses a hash based on a number of input criteria, then you only need to perturb one of those inputs to make the entire hash unusable. Perhaps Firefox is perturbing the other inputs (?) such that screen resolution doesn't matter much. (Just guessing and looking for a positive angle here).

It's hard to imagine any non-toy implementation of fingerprinting doing anything that naive, really.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#446

Post by BrandoElFollito »

I considered many of these alternatives (I am a Google fanboy but wanted to host a few things myself, notably Seafile) but never found any alternative to Docs and their multiuser concurrent edition capabilities. I think this is a know-how particularly difficult to reproduce.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#447

Post by pieterr »

Skunkleton wrote: post #428
oldcynic wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches, all I want a browser to do is lie and obfuscate. So I'll gladly take the sledgehammer boolean of resistFingerprinting for now. I've yet to come across an extension that does something like this so I'm presuming it's not possible via extensions? Are Mozilla working to make this more granular and let me whitelis…

> After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches... I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. I remember thinking that it seemed totally insane. But in light of the reality of 2018, I am coming around. The way I see it, I can keep tweaking privacy settings in a browser, or opting out of collection, or…

> I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back.

One of these you mean?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515

[2] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#448

Post by Theodores »

Skunkleton wrote: post #428
oldcynic wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches, all I want a browser to do is lie and obfuscate. So I'll gladly take the sledgehammer boolean of resistFingerprinting for now. I've yet to come across an extension that does something like this so I'm presuming it's not possible via extensions? Are Mozilla working to make this more granular and let me whitelis…

> After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches... I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. I remember thinking that it seemed totally insane. But in light of the reality of 2018, I am coming around. The way I see it, I can keep tweaking privacy settings in a browser, or opting out of collection, or…

The irony is that everyone knows a bit too much about RMS and exactly how he behaves online or in interviews. His efforts at privacy have backfired.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#449

Post by systoll »

IncRnd wrote: post #380
systoll wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention. I never said that it did... I wrote that firefox has had the ability to block cookies automatically for years, which it has had. My response was not a comparison between the browsers but a statement of one particular feature that was mentioned. I simply said that what had been stated by the gp was also available in Firefox.

When you wrote 'like that', I assumed that you meant 'like that'.

> I simply said that what had been stated by the gp was also available in Firefox.

Given that the gp referred to ITP... no, it's not.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#450

Post by helb »

uxp100 wrote: post #366
everdrive wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't huge swaths of people have the same resolution, though? Yes, I understand other things come into play here (OS, Browser, available plugins, etc) but I am skeptical that people are really building UUIDs based on someone's screen resolution. Or, if they are, that such IDs are meaningfully accurate.

Not if the browser is not full screen, this is resolution/size of browser window.

Nope, you can get the screen size, too:

    > window.outerWidth
    1168
    > screen.width
    1920
Post reply on HN