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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

#551
post #213
post #39

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I will never, ever install Fuchsia if I can help it. Replacing one Google Spyware OS with another doesn't solve anything.

I will keep using Google products for as long as they keep being great. Life's too short for extreme measures. You gotta pick your fights. What I did stop using was anything Apple related and that fight was easy to pick. Their repair-hostile-by-design hardware actually harm the environment. Plus it proved trivial to replace their crap with superior tech.

Your brazen fanboying for Google is really painful to watch.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hu3

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.

Yes, may as well go straight to DDG, which is pretty much Bing anyway, as shown here: searchenginemap.com

thank you for the se map reference, was looking for something like this

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#553
post #385

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I would be screwed if google deactivated my mail account. So many accounts linked.

There's never been a better time to get your own domain and take back control before it happens.

I bought a proton mail account ... but that probably presents the same problem. someday proton mail decides to shut down users. less likely I guess.

what's the least pain way to have your own domain fronting an email service provided by someone else?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! I just realized that for "business" accounts Fastmail is $5/mo and GSuite is $7/mo which is what I'm currently paying. Drop-in replacement for same/less cost & better privacy while supporting a slightly better cause? I'm switching tomorrow.

GSuite is not just gmail - it also includes docs, sheets, slides, meet etc.

Those things are free, the drive space is the real bonus

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#555
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a textbook false dichotomy. You're basically saying there are two choices 1) use whatever is convenient with absolutely no regard for privacy or 2) don't use computers at all and put on a tinfoil hat. > Where do you draw the line? Clearly they've drawn it to exclude Google, what's the problem with that?

There's obviously no inherent problem, but their reasoning is all theoretical and there's no reason not to expand it further based on their own logic. If you don't trust Google, why would you trust any of the other major players online like AWS, Azure, Cloudflare etc? Without those the internet basically doesn't work and you'd be better off not even bothering, thus meaning option 2 is the end result of the privacy mi…

> and there's no reason not to expand it further based on their own logic

And this is a textbook slippery slope argument. Also the clear difference between Google and the examples you've provided is the revenue model. The primary way Google makes money is selling user data to advertisers. next to social media sites, they're the most obvious targets for privacy-minded people.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#556

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Even more so when you know that Edge uses Chromium under the hood, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise.

I don't think Microsoft left any Google tracking, and Chromium is an open source project

The problem I have is not the tracking, but Google’s dominance of the browser market. They can (and do) push through efforts that mostly benefit Google, and their ability to keep everyone inside the Google ecosystem.

In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud is the only one with servers in China, so it is objectively the worst privacy-wise.

You misunderstand the situation. Chinese users, in China, connect to iCloud servers in China. They are not used for anyone outside China.

You misunderstand. Chinese users in China connect to Dropbox and Google Drive servers outside of China, where nothing is available to the Chinese government. Non-Chinese users in China connect to Chinese iCloud proxies in China, which handle data that has already been decrypted using the storage key, which remains outside of China, so anything the user accesses is available to the Chinese government. Chinese users in China have their iCloud data stored in China, where it is all accessible to the Chinese government at any time. Aside from that, there is no meaningful difference in privacy among the services.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#558
This is a really useful resource overall.

Some of these alternatives, however, offer low content moderation compared to their corresponding Google products.

I see no disclaimer, for example, that bitchute is known for harboring conspiracy theories, often after they are banned from youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute

It is worrying to see it presented as an "alternative" to youtube without this disclaimer.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#560

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. Cambridge Analytica?

That had nothing to do with tracking. Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used. Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
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