We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
Google still runs a good chunk of my life and some of it I know I could use some of the great alternatives that others have mentioned but some of it I’m not really sure about.
Namely:
Maps
Messenger (web browser access to my texts)
Contact sync and backup
Google voice
And all the various services that let my phone operate…For Maps there’s an alternative on FDroid called GMaps WV which is actually just the Google Maps website wrapped in a tiny webview app. It can’t spy on you if you run it that way.
Or you can install Hermit and add Google Maps as one of its sandboxed light apps.
If you’re interested in things that aren’t Google Maps you can look at OSMAnd, a great app with tons of features and my go-to app when traveling because you can download offline maps and info about local stores, restaurants, attractions etc.
On the lightweight side there’s Map Marker which can use map tiles from a dozen different map services, and you can place markers on the map and group them in collections.
I degoogled by switching to an iPhone 😅 DuckDuckGo is my default search engine.
That is a sacrifice I’m not willing to make. Yikes!
I’d argue that Apple is the lesser evil when it comes to privacy 😁
I deleted my google drive content so they can’t arbitrarily decide something I wrote is worth banning my account over or use it to train their AIs, I made a backup, obviously.
Even though my content is safe, deleting it off of Google’s servers felt like drowning my own children in a bathtub
Basically degoogled except YouTube because content creators are on that platform. Also occasionally needs to use Google search because DDG sometimes doesn’t work.
I try not to use anything google with exception of a few YouTube videos, but I don’t have an account, I also have most of their tracking/ad sites blocked on my network (Apple too), if that blocks a site / video from working then I don’t use that site.
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Deleting the old email account that fast is a bit risky. I still have my old yahoo account after switching to posteo two years ago and still sometimes get mails to it.
i can see on your profile that you’re 17, you’re awesome for taking these things seriously so young. it gets a chuckle sometimes when people see no google apps on my phone, or a different search engine when i look something up. if you hear any laughs, just know you’re on the right side of history :p
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idk if you’re familiar with the ‘reddit hack’ when making searches online. basically, you add ‘reddit’ to the end of your search and you’ll get a list of reddit posts discussing the thing you’re looking for.
i want a ‘lemmy hack’ to replace this, ending a search with ‘site:beehaw.org’ or ‘site:lemmy.world’.
this only works if people ask questions for people to answer, so please make posts if you have any questions during your privacy journey. you’ll be building the foundations for lemmy to fill the void reddit once did :)
I have started to degoogle bits and pieces. I self-host the majority of the services I need and really enjoyed the journey so far since I learned so much. I am approaching the stage in my life where I have less time to spend on personal hobbies so I fear this path may not be sustainable. In my opinions here are the pros and cons.
Pros:
- Full control of my data
- Pick the ideal tool from the open source community
- Learning experience
- Engagement with community
Cons:
- Technical knowledge needed to setup and maintain self-hosted tools
- Self-hosted environments have security risks (best to put everything behind VPN)
- Disparate tools don’t connect together (requires additional automation configuration)
- Additional costs for services including and not limited to: domain name, email, backup storage, self-host server hardware, VPN, and donations to devs
- Higher personal downtime due to lacking features, server and service maintenance
- Time sink to learn, research, general devops of tools, maintenance of server
Key services to name a few:
- File storage - Nextcloud
- File sync - Syncthing
- Office - Nextcloud + Collabora
- Email - Mailfence
- Photos - Photoprism
So far there are more negatives than positives, but the positives still outweigh negatives. I do have to say degoogling is getting easier than before.
The only thing I still hold onto my account for is YouTube. I pay for mailbox.org which covers email, calendar and cloud stuff. Their website could be better but the service is quality and their privacy policy is tight. When I was on android I used a bunch of custom roms with microg. My favourite ended up being calyxos but they all had a little jank here or there. I dearly miss NewPipe for android as a replacement for the official youtube app.
Edit: I also pay for Kagi for search. The price is a bit steep but I have found it justifiable in terms of the value I get from it. Whoogle and Searx are good options too
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What are you using for syncing and viewing your photos? I ended up with a mailbox.org account, because I really want my contacts to be synced to the OS on my phone. So right now I just upload them to my cloud drive there, but I need to at least automate it. I might end up using the OX Drive app that mailbox.org recommends, or I might end up using syncthing to sync locally, and then push them up to the mailbox.org drive using webdav.
I’m just using Simple Gallery on my phone for now, not sure where I’ll end up on my laptop once I finish switching off the Apple ecosystem back to a Thinkpad running Linux. I’ve been looking at Piwigo and PhotoPrism a bit, but haven’t given them a try yet. PhotoPrism has webdav support, so it’s especially intriguing.
On the other hand, I might switch to Proton Mail in 10-20 years when they implement the promised contact sync to the OS. Or even better, if Tutanota does it. But I guess if I use webdav, it leaves me pretty open to spin up a server somewhere for photos and other files. I’ve already been thinking about getting a Baikal server going for VJOURNAL support, to run jtxtasks, not that Baikal supports webdav…
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Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.
Nobody has mentioned a translator alternative so I would recommend DeepL, though what they collect for data I don’t entirely know so go with caution
Fastmail is fantastic from a user experience perspective, though depending on your privacy demands it may not pass the test.
Long time Fastmail user here. Where is it failing with respect to privacy?
If swipe typing is your thing, take a look at anysoft keyboard (but be prepared to do a lot of menu diving!)
You can use a privacy-respecting mail service and use any mail app you want with it. K9 Mail app is pretty well regarded, and there’s no shortage of decent mail services, some suggestions:
For Mail i reccommend proton. They also offer cloud, calendar, VPN and recently a password Manager. You can also use their simplelogin Service which Provides alias Mails. These can be used so that you dont have to give your real mail Adress to online Services and so on.
FlorisBoard keyboard is the one to watch as the Gboard killer. v0.40 will finally bring word suggestions and inline autocorrect. In all other respects, it’s more customizable than Gboard and can be configured to match the exact size/layout.
For email, K-9 Mail (soon to be Thunderbird Mobile) has made a lot of progress in modernizing its UI this year now that Mozilla has partnered up with the main dev, cketti.
As far as my PCs, I use a subscription service for email (
fastmail.com). I’m still using the Chrome browser, but at some point I may have to go to Firefox for the sake of my uBlock Origin extension which I rely on heavily. Functionality of that extension on Chrome may be reduced at some point by the forced migration to Google’s new extension platform (Manifest V3).I have to have a Google account for my Android phone. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get away from that. I mean you have two choices with phones, Android or iOS. I’m not going anywhere near Apple so Android is it. I’ve audited all my privacy settings in my Google account to minimize personal data, whether they actually honor those settings or not, who knows.
Graphene os is a privacy based android operating system. They run containerized google instances, and severely restrict their view.
If you buy/finance your phone through your carrier, you’re almost guaranteed to have a locked down bootloader. Also, and I’m unable to find the article at the moment, but apparently larger banks are forcing google to inhibit users’ ability to root their phones in the name of security.
I typically get unlocked phones because of that. I hadn’t heard about the banks, but they are typically ok as long as they are unlocked and paid for upfront.
It’s not so much any of that, I think it had to do with fears of people unlocking services that carriers can charge fees for (ie mobile hotspot). Banks were worried about people somehow hacking their systems or compromising security. It all had to do with SafetyNet hardware attestation, and that Google was under increased pressure from the finance industry to guarantee software security (and in the process make rooting devices or using unauthorized ROMs damn near impossible), but I still can’t for the life of me find the article.
You dont need a google account to run an android phone. Look in to Fdroid and Aurora store. You can disable, although not remove, a lot of the google services too. It’s not perfect de googleing as they still track you through hidden built in services like the one that the phone uses to check it’s online.
Currently the only Google services I use are accessed through open-source third-party implementations - in particular, Aurora Store, NewPipe, and SmartTubeNext! That said, nowadays I only use YouTube regularly and sometimes access their play store’s servers on the rare occasion that I actually need to install/update a proprietary application.
So um…how do I show the lemmyverse that this is a really important post without the shiny meaningless gold coin?
idk. Try writing a poem?
Yes. But remember to share!
Upvote i guess ❤️🍓
Interact, share. Be positive.
I have slowly but surely moved everything important off google. My main email is a proton mail now, and I changed my pixel for a oneplus :).
I’ve wanted to do this too for about a year but I see no benefit since most addresses I correspond with are unencrypted. One-way encryption is negligibly any better - unless I’m seriously misunderstanding Proton.
I’d switch to @iCloud.com but that just feels goofy.
It’s more about the ethics of the company hosting than any encryption benefits for me personally. Self-hosting would be ideal but email is a bit too important for me to do that personally, so I use proton as a compromise.
this, but also proton-to-proton emails are end-to-end encrypted by default. see here for more info. supporting security-by-default is super important to me.
your email is quite literally an advert. almost every time someone sees my emails end in @tuta.io or @aleeas.com, they ask me about it. when all emails use a google or a microsoft domain it reinforces this oligarchy.
I’m still in the Google android stuff just because of convenience but I have ditched Chrome and Google search. Eventually I would like to do more.
