I work as an Android app developer.
Is there any significant disadvantages if I wipe Android off my phone and install LineageOS instead?
Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
531–540 of 665 posts
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#532If only Google were my 10th biggest problem. Try to get Exxon, Shell, et al out of your life who aren't violating abstract principles but are literally killing the planet. Then let me get unethically farmed or raised foods out of my life (which, thanks to the US preoccupation with corn and the nitrogen it requires, are frequently overlapping with petroleum). Then let me get Oracle and Microsoft out of my life. Then l…
Buying a Tesla or something similar shouldn't be enough to very Exxon/Shell out of your life? Or you mean more abstractly? (E.g. the people transporting your food, mail, et al)
I think they mean plastics
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you're not fucked either way. In fact, if you're white, middle class, etc. you're probably better off than most and will be given the most leeway. If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an ele…
Or they go after the people who have tried to hide themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.
I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that.
When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable.
My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages.
It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc.
It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another.
What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails.
When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#534I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…
I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned?
Have you considered this in your threat model?
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Voice also works if you have internet access, but not mobile network connectivity, and it works while overseas to provide a fully-functional US phone number (you do have to use a standard paid US mobile number to set it up, but do not need to retain it afterward).
> you do have to use a standard paid US mobile number to set it up, but do not need to retain it afterward If someone else registers Google voice with that number, you're going to have a hard time. It'll be removed from your account, and you can't use Google voice without a US phone number.
Don't know if it is still the case, but for $25 one time fee (much less than one month of average phone bill) you could port your number into Google Voice, and keep it forever, at least until Google shutters Google Voice (which they likely won't, because it's such an incredible spying device).
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#536Earlier 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…
Do you think a fascist government could actually come to power if they had to exploit the 15 largest tech companies? We're in an oligopoly, the 15 tech companies have far more power than any president.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also another alternative for search... Use search agregator ( https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ) and do the search on all those sites (and more) at once. I am self hosting it and it works great. One more search engine to try is qwant.com. For phone just use microg lineage ( https://lineage.microg.org/ ) and use aurora store instead of play store ( https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/ ) for apps…
LineageOS tends to disable a lot of security baked into android, so itmight not be a good recommendation. According to Daniel Micay: "It significantly weakens the SELinux policies, rolls back mitigations for device porting / compatibility, disables verified boot, lacks proper update security including rollback protection, adds substantial attack surface like FFmpeg alongside libstagefright, etc. They merge in huge am…
Half of those "security" features are at best useless and at worst more DRM features anyways. And yes, the firmware update mechanisms in android are abysmal in general, but that this is slightly better in google phones doesn't mean that it is good anywhere. For the most part, lineageOS is on par with any random android vendor there. No better and no worse. For software updates, it is generally far better.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It may be because they don't have a profile on me, but they have years of data on him..." That might be true, but I'm not sure. Outside of local searching I am skeptical of the benefits of filter bubbling. I think it is just as likely that you and your brother have different opinions of relevance (even if you were both returned the same exact results unrelated to past activity), and the relevance decisions Google ma…
You can use a pejorative if you want, but context is quality. Context-free searching is dumb and the results are bad. An example: if I search for "2020 Honda Insight EX" on Google, I see some mixed bag of stuff about my car. If I then search for "tires" -- no other terms, just tires -- Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car. There are important inputs to my search result t…
>Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car
That's actually a really interesting example. The tire sizes for a 2020 Honda Insight EX are either 215/55/16 or 215/50/17 [0].
So taken at face value, the filter bubbling was either incorrect or Google was just returning results for a very common tire size in this case.
I agree that context is important, but Google doesn't return results blindly when they are not able to do personalization. They already know the results that millions (billions?) of other people who have searched for tires have clicked and found relevant.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)
I loathe Google Docs for the horrible UX. Dropbox was great (modulo security/privacy) but they are increasingly moving away from what made it great (a simple file system abstraction). My absolute favorite today is Keybase (it includes cloud file storage too) which is the only of my options that I actually trust to be private.
Keybase recently sold itself to Zoom in what looks like an acqui-hire:
https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announces-goa...
The blog post only talks about integrating Keybase's team - no mention of their product.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#540I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…
I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned? Have you considered this in your threat model?
Not OP (but another Fastmail customer) - but there's a difference between caring about the use of your personal data from a eaves-dropping/tapping/threat perspective vs having your personal data used to make you the product. Fastmail is a paid service that provides an excellent service/product where the email you send/receive isn't monetised or incorporated into a revenue/ad machine.