I 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…
> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I would include Maps to this list. Outside of the US (and presumably China although I do not have experience here), Google Maps has no real competitors.
Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
561–570 of 665 posts
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#562I've got almost 12TB stored in my Google Drive so that alone makes it basically impossible to switch. There's no other provider I'd trust with that much data for the price (G Suite). As much as I'd love to switch, it's just not worth the headache IMO.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> selfhosting surely is the superior solution. You go on to partly refute this, but not strongly enough. Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security. Unless you spend all of your time managing your personal storage solution, self-hosting will be far inferior in these respects, and probably also in cost if a true accounting of time is included.
Not so. Availability: Raspberry Pi plus USB battery pack is more available than the Internet, since when my home power's down my Internet connection goes. Durability: Have you ever heard of a Raspberry Pi dying? Security: sudo apt install unattended-upgrades echo "0 4 * * * reboot" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab And all the functionality's available through Nextcloud. It's easier to set up than a Facebook account, and ea…
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#564I use duckduckgo for search, I have the DuckDuckGo privacy extensions installed in Chrome, along with EFF Privacy Badger. I'm not that worried about Google. I did de-facebook myself. IMHO Facebook is far more invasive, far more harmful than Google.
Why not just use Firefox?
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
No, Facebook shouldn't have collected the data in the first place, because leaks are inevitable. It's not Facebook's incompetence to blame, no matter how much you try spinning it that way.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
financed mostly by Google
Did you find one that isn’t paid mostly by google?
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#568I would be happy to pay Google a monthly fee for all their services. Mainly just so I feel like a customer instead of a product and to give me the peace of mind that if something goes wrong I can talk to a person that can help me. At the moment I'm looking out for whatever service provider will let me have the equivalent of email, drive, calendar, docs and sheets all in one place. Does anyone know of any that might h…
Try iCloud.com
I think you can only sign up from an Apple device but otherwise it's all free (except for extra storage) and doesn't spread your data around.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#569Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#570Am I the only one left in the world who actually likes Google and has a positive opinion of them? I remember switching from AltaVista to Google and thinking they're much better. I remember a friend forwarding me an invitation to join GMail on its first beta day and how impressed I was with the 2.2 GB storage. I remember switching to Google Chrome when I read about its beta release on Slashdot. It was much faster than…
Off the top of my head, I distinctly remember GMail beta being on april fools day in 2004ish, and it was exactly 1 gb of storage