3 ms·

Thank you, I am aware of the alternatives but it's an uphill battle to fight a monopoly, i.e. I have only Comcast here as Internet option, etc.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
Well, it is somewhat of an uphill battle, sure, but every hill has a top ;-) As for internet, you can always get yourself a VPS and tunnel everything through that, so your monopoly ISP doesn't get to see anything of what you do.
tjr225 8y ago
Not using google is actually a piece of cake. Ther are reasonable competitors for nearly all of their services, except maybe translate and maps. Though I have been looking at OSM a lot lately. I, personally, use an DuckDuckGo, an iPhone and Apple mail. Amazon isn't an issue really- just buy whatever you were going to get on amazon somewhere else - it's pretty rare that I find a noticeable price difference (unless we're talking about the cheap off branded stuff on amazon - but I don't want things like that anyway).
- KAMSPioneer 8y ago
  DeepL is a good alternative to Google Translate, though it is quite a bit more limited in terms of features and languages. I often find DeepL translations to be of higher quality than Google's (for the 2-3 languages I regularly translate between).
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  > Not using google is actually a piece of cake not using google is easy, not losing data for 15+ years and counting is significantly harder. even Apple dropped my photos due term of service change, I had to scramble gigabites off internet into disks and now my collection is an unindexed mess.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    To be fair to Google, they (mostly) make it fairly easy to move out; exporting your Photos with Takeout returns a nice archive where each image is accompanied by a JSON file with metadata. It's not any standard format, as far as I can tell, but should be easy enough to massage into whatever you want.

3 ms·

Thank you, I am aware of the alternatives but it's an uphill battle to fight a monopoly, i.e. I have only Comcast here as Internet option, etc.

by pointillistic 8y ago

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
Well, it is somewhat of an uphill battle, sure, but every hill has a top ;-) As for internet, you can always get yourself a VPS and tunnel everything through that, so your monopoly ISP doesn't get to see anything of what you do.
tjr225 8y ago
Not using google is actually a piece of cake. Ther are reasonable competitors for nearly all of their services, except maybe translate and maps. Though I have been looking at OSM a lot lately. I, personally, use an DuckDuckGo, an iPhone and Apple mail. Amazon isn't an issue really- just buy whatever you were going to get on amazon somewhere else - it's pretty rare that I find a noticeable price difference (unless we're talking about the cheap off branded stuff on amazon - but I don't want things like that anyway).
- KAMSPioneer 8y ago
  DeepL is a good alternative to Google Translate, though it is quite a bit more limited in terms of features and languages. I often find DeepL translations to be of higher quality than Google's (for the 2-3 languages I regularly translate between).
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  > Not using google is actually a piece of cake not using google is easy, not losing data for 15+ years and counting is significantly harder. even Apple dropped my photos due term of service change, I had to scramble gigabites off internet into disks and now my collection is an unindexed mess.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    To be fair to Google, they (mostly) make it fairly easy to move out; exporting your Photos with Takeout returns a nice archive where each image is accompanied by a JSON file with metadata. It's not any standard format, as far as I can tell, but should be easy enough to massage into whatever you want.