this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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You don't have to look at reducing your Google use as a monumental effort. You can slowly transfer, minimise the number of services you use.
Simple - Switch your default search provider to Duck Duck Go.
Easy - Switch to Firefox
Mid - export your documents from Google Drive
Complex - Transfer your primary email to another provider.
I never understood why anyone left Firefox...it's great
Back when RAM wasn't in the gigabytes for everyone, it just started bloating tabs and usage like crazy. Chrome handled it better and faster
Things have flipped, where Chromium is super bloated
I loved it around 20 years ago, but somewhere towards the mid-to-late 00’s it got bloated and slow. It was like that probably until recently if i’m being honest. I heard it’s maybe better now but i’m not sure.
They really started trying to catch up to chrome several years ago and have succeeded recently.
It got better years ago. I stopped using it around the late 00's myself because it was consuming all of my RAM. But I started using it again about 5 years ago and it's better than chrome now.
Edited typos
I may have to give it another try then!
I bailed from Firefox for about a year after they added the godawful Firefox button (4.0 maybe?); then I got fed up with Chrome and by that point there was an extension to remove the Firefox button
What's the Firefox button? I don't use any extension to remove it, but I also don't see any button tied to FF itself that I need to remove.
Oh it's long dead now; this is what it looked like back then though
I used it up to the early 2000's and it just seemed to slow down. I recently did a series of synthetic benchmarks on all the browsers and Firefox was the slowest of the batch. It's still the only browser left not built on chromium I think. Opera GX was the fastest in terms of benchmarking.
Ahh that’s unfortunate. I remember sometime within the past couple years or so, people were talking about some “big new update” for FF that supposedly made it better. I tried it, and it was very slow, offputtingly so. So i take everything with a grain of salt now.
I never switched away and can say it's even better now, especially with Unlock origins.
Because it never used to update plugins, and left my PC open to infection one time. Probably due to Java or one of the Macromedia ones.
Plus if one tab died, the who browser exploded with it. Chrome didn't do that.
Plugins are dead now, so I came back.
I actually think switch email wasn't too bad (just take it slow!). It's Google Drive I actually don't have a good replacement for.
That and Google Photos.
Suggestions welcome.
Nextcloud can be self hosted very cheaply, or you can find some hosted instances. There are applications that can encrypt cloud storage for some services. I would recommend just getting a NAS or a VPS and running nextcloud on it.
You don't need to take it slow. I moved from Gmail to a private email that I manage about 5 years ago. I just put email auto reply on my Gmail saying that I've changed my email due to an onslaught of corporate spam. Spammers won't get the new one because they're using auto responders, but actual people will get the auto reply and start using your new email address. You can change your email associated with accounts as you log in, or you can just keep those on Google so that the accounts don't start spamming you on your new email too. The only drawback is that your account won't be in some big data database and some sign up processes that use services like Informatica might reject your email as invalid since they don't have a record of it. When that happens just use your Gmail and then update it later.
There's proton drive...which i hasn't actually used. It looks like google drive, and there's a photo option, but so far I've only used the proton mail part.
It's pretty decent. They just released a Windows PDrive client, but Proton Drive is usable from pretty much any browser. I use it for keeping additional backups of a few things.
Pretty much any other cloud, OneDrive can do all that docs stuff if you need it.
Pro solution: buy a NAS, many of them do have online office suites (like, for example, Synology), and stop depending on the cloud in the first place.
I switched to Onedrive recently and it went pretty smoothly for me. Feels like trading ones evil for another, though.
Proton all the way. E-mail, calendar, contacts, Proton Drive, and VPN if you want it. You can use a custom domain for your e-mail address, as well. Photos are another story, though.
Impossible: get a smartphone that is neither Google nor useless.
Good suggestions. I just set Firefox to use DDG as my default search... something I've been slowly working my way through also, is replacing all the default-google apps on my phone with FOSS alternatives. It's involving a bit of trial and error, as of course free software that doesn't monetize the user often doesn't provide the polished experience you get from a google app. Many of them are perfectly fine though.
I'd recommend also that everyone installs DuckDuckGo browser app on their phone, as it blocks trackers in all your other apps even when you're not browsing. Pixel 7a has a truly disturbing amount of tracking requests, not sure if other phones are as bad.
If you have a Pixel then install GrapheneOS. Zero trackers or bloat, and better security
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm currently using Nova (I can almost hear you groaning haha), AFAICT the DDG app is blocking any trackers in that.
Does GrapheneOS match Nova in features? Tbh the main one that I use Nova for is to take control of the home screen (removing the stupid google widgets that take up 1/3rd of screen), and letting me customize the amount of apps per row / column
You mean Nova Launcher? That's an app you can use as a home screen (I'm using it right now actually.) GrapheneOS is a completely different OS that replaces the stock Android on your phone. If your phone is OEM unlocked you can install it very easily: https://grapheneos.org/install/web
You can block apps from accessing the internet completely in GrapheneOS. I have Nova Launcher blocked right now since it collects data, though without access to the Internet it can't send that data anywhere. You can also block sensor access, useful for preventing apps from getting other data. In general a very big upgrade over stock android.
Oh I see, GOS is a rom? I'm really nervous about putting a custom rom on my phone, last time I tried that it permanently broke all the NFC on my samsung galaxy
You don't have to do any rooting to install it, unlike how you would with Samsung phones in the past. You can't install GrapheneOS on a phone that doesn't already allow OEM unlocking and it only works with Pixel phones, but the process is simple and extremely low risk. You just plug the phone into your computer and use the web tool in your browser.
If you ever want to return to the normal Android, Google has a similar tool that allows you to easily reinstall the original OS.
Thanks for the explanation! It seems I've been irrationally afraid of installing new OS's after previous experience.
What's a good Gmail alternative that has a relatively professional name? I have a hotmail account from way back still, but the name "hotmail.com" has always sounded silly to me. I guess there's Outlook but idk if they're the best option.
Get your own domain. You'll actually have to pay for mail by then, but considering it's one of the services many people rely on a shitton it's not that bad to pay $10 towards it. It will also mean you can switch providers at any time without much hassle.
That's really not an option for me right now financially since I need to keep costs down as much as possible. But I'll keep that in mind for the future.
for good privacy-focused email services, Tutanota and Proton Mail are the more popular ones.
Thanks, I'll check those ones out!
Tutanota or ProtonMail are popular options in the privacy community.
If you're really worried about the domain, getting your own is only like 10 bucks a year.
I have about 4 bucks to my name atm.
https://www.gmx.com Isn't bad but I haven't really used it that much.
I've always had an aversion to corporate anything so I'm already part way there. Use DDG half the time, Firefox user since it was called Firebird!. I really just need to drop Gmail and use DDG or others full time. I'm finding parting with gmail difficult and scary though as over a decade of history and old friends that may know that address as my only contact.
You don't have to delete your Gmail account right away. Keep it around to search the history if you need to. You can set up an auto-forward rule in Gmail to forward all email to your new address, then you can reply from your new address. You can take it a step further and include a please note my email address has changed in your signature. Just like moving away from Google, moving away from Gmail can be done in baby steps.
Email has a special header for this called "Reply-To" which is respected by pretty much every client. When anyone replies to your mail they won't even realize it's to another address than they received the mail from.
Also you don't need to keep it for search history. Download all your mail with imap to some proper mail client and you can move it to a new provider if you really want to.
Yeah this is what I did over a couple of years. Move things over slowly as much as you be bothered... do the accounts and people you use the most first. Eventually you'll only have junk going to your Google address and you'll be happy to see it go.
Some (most?) email providers will have tools to help you move from Gmail and keep contacts etc.
It's like 20 bux a month for your own web hosting...it's idiot proof with a little bit of effort and I only get advertising spam I signed up for and forgot to uncheck. But that all goes to bills@mydomain.com so I don't have to see them
So what email providers are good alternatives?
Proton Mail and Tutanota always rank high on lists of privacy friendly email providers.
DuckDuckGo results still suck and are not even remotely comparable to Google‘s. The best alternative imo is Qwant, which uses bing and I think also it’s own index.
If the DuckDuckGo result for your search doesn't yield anything then just append it with
g!and it'll take you straight to the Google results.It's a useful trick but very rarely do I find I need it. Only really when researching a very specific error.
I only wish I could default DDG to not show results from certain sites I simply don't care about. Maybe it's possible and I just haven't found how to do it, but that's the one thing that would really elevate my experience