Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life • Hacker News Board

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#571

Post by flanbiscuit » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

Personally I'm not looking to stop using their services completely but I am trying to make sure they can't cripple my life by locking me out of my Google account. The chance is low because I haven't personally released anything on any of their platforms or don't depend on any service of theirs for my livelihood, I'm just your normal passive Google user.

My plan:

- use a custom domain for my email (actually done this already)

- switch to Fastmail instead of Gmail

- update all services I have signed up for

- remove any important docs off of Google drive and either switch to sync.com (they have E2E encryption) or use syncthing

- I've already started using syncthing to sync my keepassxc DB between all my devices

- start monthly backups of the rest of my Google drive but still continue to use it (this includes all my Google Photos as well) onto a local NAS (which I have yet to buy, suggestions welcome)

- I've already switched to FireFox on both desktop and Android as my main browser but I still use Chrome as well, just more for work

I still plan on using Google products but I just want to make sure if they go away or if their algorithm mistakingly decides one day that I've violated something and locks me out without recourse that I'm not totally screwed.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#572

Post by Maximus9000 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

jonny_wonny wrote: post #560

Maximus9000 wrote: post #548

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. 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.

> 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.

That's debatable. CA either bent the rules or broke the rules to get a lot of that info. In many cases, CA was able to get not just the target's info, but all of their friends info too. Facebook was either incompetent or complicit in allowing this to happen.

> Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.

What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#573

Post by gonehome » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

agarzenm wrote: post #534

gonehome wrote: post #17

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…

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?

I give an answer for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733

In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law).

You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#574

Post by freediver » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

I genuinly wonder - what does go through the heads of those 100,000 very smart people that work at Google, many of them reading this forum, when they read a thread like this? Do they think 'oh it is HN again', do they discard this as irrelevant noise, do they know something that all the people posting here don't, do they still strongly believe in their mission, or do they get a gut-wrenching feeling that one day it may be all over? If you work at Google, please throw in your 2c.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#575

Post by dt3ft » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

I read a story where someone lost access to their google account and had to go through living hell to get the access back. Reaching a human for support was outright impossible.

Privacy was not that big a deal for me, but if I had lost access to my email for any reason, I would have had zero rights to demand what is mine - because nothing is really mine, as I have never paid for the service, so I was never a customer to begin with.

I moved off gmail last year after using it since 2004 (I remember getting an invite and using the service even before it was launched).

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#576

Post by saalweachter » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

volongoto wrote: post #486

Crash0v3rid3 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No longer their motto? Can you please provide a source? "Why is this piece of "misinformation" being spread so much? What do you think?" Because of multiple articles spreading this misinformation a few years back, for example: "Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct" - https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do... Then the article literally mentions at the end that it's still…

What sort of a source do you need? Is Google's current slogan/motto still "Don't be evil"?

What is their current motto, out of curiosity?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#577

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

dt3ft wrote: post #575

I read a story where someone lost access to their google account and had to go through living hell to get the access back. Reaching a human for support was outright impossible. Privacy was not that big a deal for me, but if I had lost access to my email for any reason, I would have had zero rights to demand what is mine - because nothing is really mine, as I have never paid for the service, so I was never a customer…

[deleted]

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#578

Post by vstuart » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #492

switch11 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

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…

Agreed on self-hosted search. I wrote a post in Feb. 2020 describing localhost installation of searX, which I've using since then as my interface to web searches. At times I revert to Google, e.g. for image searches, but I do that logged out of my Google accounts.

Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux: https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#579

Post by pvorb » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

sheeshkebab wrote: post #543

therealmarv wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

financed mostly by Google

Did you find one that isn’t paid mostly by google?

Edge used to be an alternative on Windows at least, but now it's also based on Chromium. :-( I'd always prefer Firefox, but if you want to avoid Google money, you're basically up to Microsoft or Apple. The latter tying you to a hardware monopoly.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#580

Post by stingrae » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #574

I genuinly wonder - what does go through the heads of those 100,000 very smart people that work at Google, many of them reading this forum, when they read a thread like this? Do they think 'oh it is HN again', do they discard this as irrelevant noise, do they know something that all the people posting here don't, do they still strongly believe in their mission, or do they get a gut-wrenching feeling that one day it m…

I used to work there a couple years ago and honestly this seems a bit silly. People are at Google are pretty product focused.

Sure you can go and use the items on this list. But I don't think they will be better. Google has spent a lot of time and money to make a set of best in industry tools and people use them as a result.