12 ms·

De-Googling My Life

143 points by nbrempel 7y ago

Aromasin 7y ago
> For the most part, I'm now Google free. I don't despise Google as a company but I believe that their core business model is incompatible with privacy. I like that closing line. It's something I can relate with. I appreciate Google's products, use a Pixel 3 which is a sin I probably shouldn't admit on HN, and I'd love to use their whole ecosystem - Google suite, the Chromebook, Google Home etc - for all my tech needs. The issue is, Google in my eyes is a data analytics company first and foremost. No matter how much I like the design and functionality of their products, if I want to maintain even a small semblance of privacy I can't in good faith support them. Only problem I have now is that their phone is too damn good to ditch...
- kiran-rao 7y ago
  Have you found any inconveniences in day to day life? Google provides so much information in everyday life (weather, restaurant reviews, calendar, who was the president in 1936, etc) that I would be significantly slower living my life.
  - everdrive 7y ago
    The weather problem has been a surprising one. It seems that most weather websites are really terrible. All I ever want to know is the hourly temperature, and hourly precipitation. Google does this easily with a query against "weather [zipcode]". Other services do technically provide this information, but it always seems to be obfuscated, or otherwise hard to obtain. [edit] Here is a very amateurish graphic depicting the difference. https://imgur.com/SofeKKN https://imgur.com/SofeKKN
    - tsomctl 7y ago
      Check out www.weather.gov. There should be a link for the 3 day history on the forecast page of your location.
    - NikkiA 7y ago
      ddg'ing wundergound [zipcode] seems to be about perfect for me: https://i.imgur.com/NfXUOf4.png https://i.imgur.com/NfXUOf4.png
    - keawade 7y ago
      I'm not sure what the problem is as DDG does that as well. I just tried searching "weather [zipcode]" on DDG and the first result is a card with current weather info for that zipcode from DarkSky. The feature is very similar to Google's weather card.
    - PenguinCoder 7y ago
      https://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/ and enter your zipcode into the search box on the left. Book mark the resulting page. Simple, no frills, accurate information.
    - asdff 7y ago
      You can bookmark that weather.gov page and once you start glancing at it regularly you know what to look for quickly. For instance the Google precip graph and the green graph towards the bottom are the exact same, google's is just cuter. You can also turn on and off graph elements and bookmark that version of the page if you didn't care about sky cover or whatever. For mobile I use darksky. Gives you hourly precip chance as well as a detailed look at the hour ahead (specifically, the intensity of the rain not whether or not it will happen), but importantly it will push a notification if it's going to rain in x minutes. There are a couple other handy features, and since it's paid it's free of ads. Pretty nice if you bike or walk regularly for commuting. It's scary accurate in my experience; if it says it's going to rain in 8 minutes and stop 13 minutes later, that's exactly what's going to happen.
      - everdrive 7y ago
        I'll check out darksky. And, I concede all your points about bookmarking after turning off all the configs. I just wish the pretty, simple, and easy to retrieve version were more common.
  - Aromasin 7y ago
    Not anything significant to be honest. There are alternative applications and hardware for almost everything nowadays. Convincing people that we need devices all running in the same ecosystem was one of the lasting legacy's of Steve Jobs that I realised wasn't really true in reality. For searches I occasionally might have to check Google for a niche search term, but Duck.com returns the right thing for 95% of my queries. In terms of hardware, a Pixel phone, Fire tablet, Surface Book laptop, and Windows desktop fulfil all my needs, with only important docs synched with Dropbox and the rest stored on a couple of flash drives I have on me 24/7. For home automation I made my own using a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of ESP8266's, which does basically everything that big brand alternatives do and more (I can water my plants from my bed!) For software I use Outlook for emails and calendar, OpenOffice for word processing, Prezi for presentations, and admittedly mainly Google Sheets for that kind of data handling, as it's good for collaborating which is the only thing I ever use it for. Trip Advisor is great for reviews. BBC weather is all I use for checking that. Nothing is slower I've found. I just had to experiment with what worked for me, and get the right 'flow' of using them, which I suppose took a few weeks to iron out. The great thing is that doing it this way means I can adapt to my needs, not be forced into using a suite that might not cater to them. It also means most importantly that, for the most part, I don't get snooped on!
  - addicted 7y ago
    Honestly, I wonder if that slight delay in finding out who was President in 1963 would have a material negative impact on my life. I suspect not. At the same time, I have a feeling that slowness may have an actual measurable positive impact on my life. A lot of what I do now is frankly pointless and jt may help me focus on more useful things.
  - godshatter 7y ago
    If Google shut down operations tomorrow, do you really think you would be unable to find information on the weather, restaurant reviews, use a calendar, or find out who the president was in 1936? Other than the calendar, it's not like they actually keep this information anywhere. Just links to it. I'm guessing that three years or so later you'd be hard-pressed to remember why you thought Google was the only choice for this.
  - jjulius 7y ago
    >... I would be significantly slower living my life. Is that a bad thing?
- harry8 7y ago
  phone is basically a choice between google (any android phone unless you jailbreak and de-goog it, which is a PITA) and apple. Who is less offensive surveilling you? Can you really predict that will still be true in 5 years?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Dumb phone is a valid choice. And it works just fine, there is absolutely nothing that a smart phone offers that I can not do without, and not having a continuous distraction makes me a lot more productive than I would be otherwise. It's bad enough with the web and 'always on' internet, to have that in my pocket would completely kill my productivity.
    - janlaureys 7y ago
      I appreciate the sentiment but my phone now does so many things that I would really miss if I'd have to get rid of it. GPS and navigation, Mobile Banking, IM because nobody sends text messages anymore, Calendar and quick web searches and a decent camera I'll always carry.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        - GPS and navigation I look at a map before I leave when on foot and in the car I have a navigator. - Mobile Banking Nothing that can't wait until I'm behind a desk. - IM because nobody sends text messages anymore Nobody sends me IM messages because I never used it in the first place. - Calendar Could be useful, once every month or so, but on the whole it is easy enough to do this stuff once I'm back behind my desk, worst case the other side has access and they can send me an invite. This really only comes up when someone on the phone wants to book some kind of appointment when I'm on the road, and in that case I'm actually really happy I am not going to be tempted to look at my phone, it is annoying enough that people expect your phone to be answered at all hours. - quick web searches I do a ton of those, but not when I'm out of the office or meeting people, I've had a case come up once or twice but usually I just make a mental note to check up on something. - a decent camera I'll always carry That's a good one, another one which would work for me would be to have something good to read wherever I go. But those two can be solved quite easily: my dumb phone has a reasonably good camera and there's always a book in my bag.
- aclsid 7y ago
  Buy Chinese brands like Oppo, Meizu or Xiaomi (mix 3 is awesome). If you get the one with the Chinese rom Google has been removed to an extent that is not possible by end users or are least without switching ROMs which is generally a PIA. The issue then becomes installing something like ApkPure as a replacement for Google play unless you enjoy your Firefox in Chinese. TouchPal is a terrific keyboard as well if you manage to get rid of their ads.
- jsgo 7y ago
  I'm pretty much in the Apple/Microsoft camp, but I've went with Amazon on the Echo side of things because their offering is more reliable (and more devices support it). What I am getting at is that a lot of us probably make a concession here or there but as long as you're happy/comfortable with it, go for it. The last vestige of Google I voluntarily find myself with is Gmail, but I have a strong feeling once Apple comes with these burner email forwarder things, I'm probably going to switch to Proton or something similar.
- m463 7y ago
  google is an identification service.
harry8 7y ago
If you use email, google basically have it. A big enough proportion of your mail counter-parties use google that running your own mail-server doesn't buy you much. The gesture is a good one and everyone should do it until google are just another tech company, I guess. But doing it now doesn't really de-google your email, sadly.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  Though there are some other benefits to changing your own email provider even if Google still has copies of all your email. The big one is that Google has no support, and if you ever have a problem your only recourse is knowing someone who works there and can get your issue in front of an actual person. Other email providers (especially ones where you pay them money for the service) have actual support employees. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146
- treerock 7y ago
  I was wondering about this. The majority of my emails are between myself and a business, currently letting google track my purchases, holidays, event booking etc by reading the responses I get. If I stopped using gmail, how would they track that kind of stuff? Few businesses are going to be using consumer level gmail.
NikkiA 7y ago
There have actually been times recently where I've had what I consider 'iffy' results from DDG for very domain-specific queries, but when I've double checked with !g, the DDG results were far more on-topic, and google was giving much much worse results. That said, google's image results are still significantly better than DDG or Bing, but that's such a small part of my queries that it's pretty much a non-issue.
ibdf 7y ago
Why are people so paranoid about privacy? We want better services, well those services need to know what you like. It's just a bunch of computers trying to figure out what's trending and what you need. There's no human driven analytics team out there reading and sifting through your e-mails trying to figure out who you are. I much rather be concerned about security than privacy.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Every violation of privacy is an additional security risk. Also, there is a partly human-driven surveillance state.
- jm4 7y ago
  I think, with regards to Google, it's all about their business model. Allowing a company to collect data for the sole purpose of personalizing the products you bought from them and recommending content is not an unreasonable choice. Google offers personalized services as a vehicle for data collection to fuel a business model where they sell targeted access to you to their other group of customers.
- frenchman99 7y ago
  Not everyone considers a "better service" to be a service that is more efficient. For a lot of people, privacy is more valuable than being handed a personalized ad for a product I didn't know I wanted. It's not "just a bunch of computers". It's potentially putting a lot of leverage in the same hands. Here are 3 examples. As a woman, it's nearly impossible to get a job when you're pregnant, so it's better not to let anyone know during the job search. If you have HIV and people find out, they freak out thinking you'll infect them right away. If you're chronically sick, do you want insurance companies to know that ? No you don't, because the price of the insurance policy will "magically" be higher for you. Privacy has it good sides.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  If a company violates your privacy and they are hacked then you have a double problem. So your focus on security is correct but security only really matters when companies have your data in the first place. And given the general state of security the very best way to ensure that your data does not end up in the wrong hands is by not giving it out in the first place, hence privacy ends up - for practical reasons - trumping security. Not a week goes by without a major hack of some sort hitting the media, a much larger amount goes unreported. And even if the data isn't hacked it could easily be lifted using some legal instrument.
nerdjon 7y ago
I have mostly removed Google from my life. I still have a few stragglers (like Single Sign on stuff that for many sites are a pain in the ass to change) but it has been nice. However my biggest annoyance is still the amount of data that Google can find out about me where I have no control over it. - Emails to anyone using a Google service (I use iCloud) - Texting anyone using Android (I have a similar frustration with Facebook and anyone that shares their contacts with them) (This is one of the key reasons I love iMessage and I always have caution when I see a green bubble.) And similar data sharing I have absolutely no way to give consent for yet they still have, because someone else gave consent for me. My hope is that Google cannot manage to link that data back to me somehow, but I am sure they can. But it doesn't change that they have that data.
- gloflo 7y ago
  You are similarly sharing data on your contacts with Apple.
  - ballenf 7y ago
    Comments like yours imply that no one cannot exist on the internet without sharing stuff with some company, so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. Of course it matters. And of course one should remain vigilant to monitor the company of choice for changes in strategy or the like that might affect privacy claims. I don’t inherently trust Apple more than Google, but I do trust (begrudgingly) that Apple’s current business model aligns their interests on privacy better with mine.
    - beat 7y ago
      There's where the rubber hits the road, for me. Want total privacy? Stay off the internet. Way back in the dark ages of 1996 or so, I went to a very early web security conference. At that point, it wasn't really a profession. It was junior devs like me, schoolteachers, all sorts of people who had the job of "web security" cast upon them. And we all commiserated about getting the same marching orders... our bosses wanted absolute and total security, with absolute and totally unfettered access to the internet, and without spending any money at all. The consumer privacy discussion today reminds me so much of that era. Everyone wants unfettered access to the internet, without paying for it, and without anyone selling your data.
neverminder 7y ago
I have this hypothesis that technically minded people (like us) are completely unprofitable to Google when it comes to ads. I've never clicked on any ad or anything even remotely close to an ad ever unless it was accidental, I've ran adblockers on all my devices since I can remember. So I guess it's a bit ironic that people who are least profitable for Google are the most concerned about being tracked by it. I should mention however that I do buy their hardware products (phones, laptops) and pay for Gmail accounts for my own domain names, but that's just because they make good quality stuff which to me personally has nothing to do with ads.
- diehunde 7y ago
  Might be true but I wouldn't take the risk. It's not only about ads when they have access to your emails, location history and track what do you do on the internet.
  - neverminder 7y ago
    I'm completely aware of the risks, so I try to keep my stuff they can keep track off as mundane as possible. Unfortunately when it comes to emails someone will always have access to them. My plan is eventually to get something like that Purism phone for more personal stuff. There are no perfect solutions.
- Mc_Big_G 7y ago
  You don't have to click on an ad to be tracked. Also, you don't find it even a little concerning that Google reads all your email?
  - neverminder 7y ago
    If not Google then who? Fastmail? Protonmail? Someone will always read our emails, I just don't see a way around it. We kinda live in a world based on trust, maybe someday that will change, but probably not any time soon.
  - mda 7y ago
diehunde 7y ago
Replacing the maps app and YouTube are the hardest for me. I haven't found anything that compares to those services. And I think Waze is also owned by Google?
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  Yes, Google bought Waze in 2013.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Try NewPipe on the F-Droid repository. Has options to dl both audio or video, and supports playback with the screen off.
- zuron7 7y ago
  OpenStreetMaps is getting there. Heavily depends on the quality of maps in your area. For Youtube, you could use something like invidio.us or newpipe, which shows you only the channels that you have subscribed to.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    OpenStreetMap actually seems quite excellent from a quick check. I've only glanced at it every now and then during the last few years (I used to contribute a bit back in around 2012) but now it actually seems awfully attractive compared to Google's/Apple's offerings - with all the annotations/coloring it actually looks like a real map!
    - spurgu 7y ago
      With Google Maps I find myself switching between map/satellite annoyingly often. With OSM I don't feel the need at all, from a quick test at least.
  - pro_zac 7y ago
    Are there any good YouTube alternative front ends for Apple TV? I found a Plex plugin that might do the trick. Haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/kolsys/YouTubeTV.bundle https://github.com/kolsys/YouTubeTV.bundle
vonnik 7y ago
With email, the deeper problem is that you can't force everyone you correspond with to leave Gmail. So your private correspondence will continue to be scanned to feed the ad-surveillance machine regardless. This is a problem common to leaving any standard protocol, especially a messaging protocol.
- timbit42 7y ago
  With Tutanota, encrypted emails sent outside of Tutanota are sent as links which the user clicks to read and reply to your email, keeping your messages off Gmail or any other insecure email server.
raphinou 7y ago
I am curious to know what is the monetary total cost of the switch. Anyone having done the switch able to share numbers?
- nerdjon 7y ago
  I have been using iOS for about 9 years now so I won't take that into it. At certain points I had some expenses that I had to pay for (like MobileMe instead of Gmail). But now I don't pay for anything that I could not stop paying and would loose much. I pay for 2TB of iCloud storage for $9.99 a month (USD), but I could drop that and continue to use iCloud for Calendar, email and etc. (However you would pay google for this space anyways, but for only a TB) I pay $10 a month for Apple News, but it is also a decent free service instead of google news. I don't pay for Apple maps. I don't see there being much, if any, monetary cost of transitioning unless you include the cost of moving from Android to iOS (which assuming you were going to upgrade your phone anyways may not need to be counted). It isn't like Apple devices are that much more expensive than similar premium tier smartphones.
MentallyRetired 7y ago
I wrote a very similar article back in 2007. Nice to see how the process has aged. This was the number 1 article on CenterNetworks until it's founder passed away a few years ago. (RIP Allen Stern) https://web.archive.org/web/20070508104636/http://www.centernetworks.com/my-life-without-google https://web.archive.org/web/20070508104636/http://www.center...
bbatha 7y ago
I've been doing the same but I haven't quiet been able to find good replacements for gmail and hangouts. Anyone have any recommendations? For gmail I'd like real imap and custom domain support. FastMail is the obvious choice, but I can't in good conscious trust an Australian company with my secrets.[0] Hangouts: I'd like cross platform with a web client if possible. I would like optional chat history sync. And I'd like on by default encryption. Signal is great, but its treatment of chat history is too paranoid to be useful for everyday conversations. Whatsapp is also a strong contender, but I'd also prefer to stay off facebook services. edit: for a hangouts replacement, I'm not looking for video/audio chats I'm looking for a direct messaging focused service that can serve as an SMS replacement along the lines of iMesseges, whatsapp or signal. And yes I know about XMPP I was a heavy user a decade ago, but I'd prefer not to replace a dying service with a dying protocol. 0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/australia-passes-new-law-to-thwart-strong-encryption/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/australia-passes...
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The hubbub about the article there is FUD, particularly when it comes to FastMail. Since FastMail isn't an end-to-end encrypted service (Gmail isn't either), laws about thwarting encryption are entirely irrelevant: Both must respond to a legal government order for your information. Google responds to many tens of thousands of these requests yearly: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?t=table https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?t=t... If you are not Australian, the likelihood of getting your data subpoena'd from an Australian company is pretty low. If you're in the US, it's far more likely for your Gmail data to be successfully subpoena'd. Unless you belong to a fairly narrow set of people, the risk of government access to your data is relatively low. Meanwhile, the threat of advertiser access to your data is high for everyone: Don't trust an ad company with your data, even if they currently say they won't use it for ads.
  - bbatha 7y ago
    I'm not trying to compare gmail and fastmail. I'm trying get off gmail, and that is the top priority. However, changing email providers is relatively disruptive and I'd prefer to choose one that can last me 5-10 years. Fastmail was that choice but uncertainty about Australian encryption laws throws a wrench into that equation. My concern with encryption law is not necessarily that FastMail will respond to warrants (though total non-compliance in a non-5 eyes country would be ideal), its how frequently and do they need to otherwise compromise the security of the product in order to do so. FastMail seems to think that the new laws will impact them negatively.[0] FastMail's response to these claims has not been exactly confidence inspiring as the Australian government could compel the company to comply not just individual coders.[1] The real question I'm asking is, is fastmail my only real alternative to gmail? 0: https://reclaimthenet.org/fastmail-australian-encryption-law/ https://reclaimthenet.org/fastmail-australian-encryption-law... 1: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabill-australia/ https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi...
wwweston 7y ago
Anyone know of a good replacement for Voice? It's funny, because it seems that Google doesn't care about it much, but it's the stickiest of all their products for me. It's been incredibly convenient to have a combination of a phone # alias (under which I've changed phone service at least a dozen times) and cloud-stored web-accessible messaging history and send/receive interface. Easy setup, mobile-device independent.
t0astbread 7y ago
Is FastMail really a good choice for privacy? I mean yeah, their feature set is awesome, they support (and develop! [1]) open standards and they sound pretty genuine. But they're based in Australia and given recent events ([2], [3]) I'm not sure if I would like to place my data in that country. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113646 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303
- nbrempel 7y ago
  Fair point
  - mfer 7y ago
    While IANAL, I'm not sure keeping email in a US company causes it to have privacy. For example, law enforcement in the US can subpoena email contents older than 180 days. No warrant required. Google's transparency report shows they've shared a lot of data. Google's support site has details on the process. Both Google and Fastmail have access to email. The encryption circumvention doesn't matter to Fastmail because they already complied with law enforcement just like Google does. I'd be curious if someone has details or an argument different from this.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I just responded to another comment about the FUD about Australian privacy concerns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166077 tl;dr: The law passed doesn't affect FastMail at all, and your data is at least as private with FastMail as it is with Gmail, which also responds to lawful government requests for your data.
  - t0astbread 7y ago
    Yes, I understand that. And I know that I might be spreading FUD here (which I wanna avoid). However I'm concerned that the Australian government (given their recent authoritarian actions) might be a little too quick to request my data from FastMail.
deleted 7y ago
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3xblah 7y ago
"Side note: recently duck.com was acquired by DuckDuckGo. I hope there is a plan for them to rebrand as simply "Duck" because if I recommend the search engine to someone who is not as embedded in the internet as I am (nerd), they often won't use the service based on the name alone." Who previously controlled duck.com? It wasn't Google, was it?
- jahewson 7y ago
  It’s true, I had never heard of the children’s game of Duck, Duck, Goose until I moved to the US and had kids, so a lot of people probably see that name and think “WTF?”.
Youden 7y ago
I've substantially de-Googled but there's still the huge issue of mobile operating systems. If I choose iOS, I get a device that respects my privacy and gives me some degree of control over what apps on my device can do (e.g. GPS permissions are much more useful) but I can't install what I like on my device and I can't globally block ads and trackers. If I choose Android with Google's apps preinstalled, I give up OS-level privacy and control but I can install what I like, including a device-wide, whitelist-based firewall, with which I can restrict ads and trackers. If I choose Android without Google's apps, I get a much greater amount of privacy and control over my device but I can't use common applications like my local public transit app.
Slippery_John 7y ago
I've almost entirely de-Googled, with the one straggler being YouTube. There just aren't viable competitors. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of the ads while still paying for usage (combined with all the tracker blocking I can reasonably do), but man that $12/month is crazy. I don't care about youtube music, youtube gaming, or any of their other "value"-add junk so it's an increasingly hard pill to swallow. I just want an ad-free plan. $8/month was much more tolerable in that respect. Hell, why doesn't Google offer a Google-wide tracking / ads opt-out plan? With their reach they could probably set up a plan wherein sites with google ads get a kickback of a subscription in exchange for not displaying ads. I'd be willing to bet Google would make more money off of me if they did that. The other product I gave up recently was Fi. It was a hard thing to give up because if you can use it then it's really the best service out there for most. What ended up kicking me there was the paltry phone support (only token support for iOS, which I switched to, and only a handful of android devices). When I found out I could get a T-mobile plan through work that offers all of the functionality I want (though some things are gimped in comparison) for a price that, while high, was at least tolerable.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  I don't care about seeing disclosed, paid ads so much as seeing YouTube's garbage recommendations algorithm. If they offered a paid program to entirely disable the recommendations section and get back a proper chronologic playlist of my subscriptions I'd be sorely tempted to pay for that. (I hate YouTube's Autoplay and disable it on every device.) As it stands it is probably a lot healthier for me not to pay for YouTube Premium: the more obnoxious they try to make the ad breaks (and they have), the more it becomes a continual reminder I should not use YouTube and should encourage the people I follow to explore other less-user-hostile platforms for sharing their video content.
qqn 7y ago
I'm surprised this post is so popular. I wish s/he'd mentioned other alternatives like Tutanota/ProtonMail, Startpage, or Matomo (formerly Piwik) analytics. I also wish there was mention about how no one is truly Google-free until their contact is no longer in a friend's Gmail address book (and even then)...
boh 7y ago
Does paying for Google (G Suite) count as de-Googling to some extent? Supposedly I own any data within the Suite core services (which ironically doesn't include search, so DDG for that).

143 points by nbrempel 7y ago

> For the most part, I'm now Google free. I don't despise Google as a company but I believe that their core business model is incompatible with privacy. I like that closing line. It's something I can relate with. I appreciate Google's products, use a Pixel 3 which is a sin I probably shouldn't admit on HN, and I'd love to use their whole ecosystem - Google suite, the Chromebook, Google Home etc - for all my tech needs. The issue is, Google in my eyes is a data analytics company first and foremost. No matter how much I like the design and functionality of their products, if I want to maintain even a small semblance of privacy I can't in good faith support them. Only problem I have now is that their phone is too damn good to ditch...

kiran-rao 7y ago
Have you found any inconveniences in day to day life? Google provides so much information in everyday life (weather, restaurant reviews, calendar, who was the president in 1936, etc) that I would be significantly slower living my life.
- everdrive 7y ago
  The weather problem has been a surprising one. It seems that most weather websites are really terrible. All I ever want to know is the hourly temperature, and hourly precipitation. Google does this easily with a query against "weather [zipcode]". Other services do technically provide this information, but it always seems to be obfuscated, or otherwise hard to obtain. [edit] Here is a very amateurish graphic depicting the difference. https://imgur.com/SofeKKN https://imgur.com/SofeKKN
  - tsomctl 7y ago
    Check out www.weather.gov. There should be a link for the 3 day history on the forecast page of your location.
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    ddg'ing wundergound [zipcode] seems to be about perfect for me: https://i.imgur.com/NfXUOf4.png https://i.imgur.com/NfXUOf4.png
  - keawade 7y ago
    I'm not sure what the problem is as DDG does that as well. I just tried searching "weather [zipcode]" on DDG and the first result is a card with current weather info for that zipcode from DarkSky. The feature is very similar to Google's weather card.
  - PenguinCoder 7y ago
    https://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/ and enter your zipcode into the search box on the left. Book mark the resulting page. Simple, no frills, accurate information.
  - asdff 7y ago
    You can bookmark that weather.gov page and once you start glancing at it regularly you know what to look for quickly. For instance the Google precip graph and the green graph towards the bottom are the exact same, google's is just cuter. You can also turn on and off graph elements and bookmark that version of the page if you didn't care about sky cover or whatever. For mobile I use darksky. Gives you hourly precip chance as well as a detailed look at the hour ahead (specifically, the intensity of the rain not whether or not it will happen), but importantly it will push a notification if it's going to rain in x minutes. There are a couple other handy features, and since it's paid it's free of ads. Pretty nice if you bike or walk regularly for commuting. It's scary accurate in my experience; if it says it's going to rain in 8 minutes and stop 13 minutes later, that's exactly what's going to happen.
    - everdrive 7y ago
      I'll check out darksky. And, I concede all your points about bookmarking after turning off all the configs. I just wish the pretty, simple, and easy to retrieve version were more common.
- Aromasin 7y ago
  Not anything significant to be honest. There are alternative applications and hardware for almost everything nowadays. Convincing people that we need devices all running in the same ecosystem was one of the lasting legacy's of Steve Jobs that I realised wasn't really true in reality. For searches I occasionally might have to check Google for a niche search term, but Duck.com returns the right thing for 95% of my queries. In terms of hardware, a Pixel phone, Fire tablet, Surface Book laptop, and Windows desktop fulfil all my needs, with only important docs synched with Dropbox and the rest stored on a couple of flash drives I have on me 24/7. For home automation I made my own using a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of ESP8266's, which does basically everything that big brand alternatives do and more (I can water my plants from my bed!) For software I use Outlook for emails and calendar, OpenOffice for word processing, Prezi for presentations, and admittedly mainly Google Sheets for that kind of data handling, as it's good for collaborating which is the only thing I ever use it for. Trip Advisor is great for reviews. BBC weather is all I use for checking that. Nothing is slower I've found. I just had to experiment with what worked for me, and get the right 'flow' of using them, which I suppose took a few weeks to iron out. The great thing is that doing it this way means I can adapt to my needs, not be forced into using a suite that might not cater to them. It also means most importantly that, for the most part, I don't get snooped on!
- addicted 7y ago
  Honestly, I wonder if that slight delay in finding out who was President in 1963 would have a material negative impact on my life. I suspect not. At the same time, I have a feeling that slowness may have an actual measurable positive impact on my life. A lot of what I do now is frankly pointless and jt may help me focus on more useful things.
- godshatter 7y ago
  If Google shut down operations tomorrow, do you really think you would be unable to find information on the weather, restaurant reviews, use a calendar, or find out who the president was in 1936? Other than the calendar, it's not like they actually keep this information anywhere. Just links to it. I'm guessing that three years or so later you'd be hard-pressed to remember why you thought Google was the only choice for this.
- jjulius 7y ago
  >... I would be significantly slower living my life. Is that a bad thing?
harry8 7y ago
phone is basically a choice between google (any android phone unless you jailbreak and de-goog it, which is a PITA) and apple. Who is less offensive surveilling you? Can you really predict that will still be true in 5 years?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Dumb phone is a valid choice. And it works just fine, there is absolutely nothing that a smart phone offers that I can not do without, and not having a continuous distraction makes me a lot more productive than I would be otherwise. It's bad enough with the web and 'always on' internet, to have that in my pocket would completely kill my productivity.
  - janlaureys 7y ago
    I appreciate the sentiment but my phone now does so many things that I would really miss if I'd have to get rid of it. GPS and navigation, Mobile Banking, IM because nobody sends text messages anymore, Calendar and quick web searches and a decent camera I'll always carry.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      - GPS and navigation I look at a map before I leave when on foot and in the car I have a navigator. - Mobile Banking Nothing that can't wait until I'm behind a desk. - IM because nobody sends text messages anymore Nobody sends me IM messages because I never used it in the first place. - Calendar Could be useful, once every month or so, but on the whole it is easy enough to do this stuff once I'm back behind my desk, worst case the other side has access and they can send me an invite. This really only comes up when someone on the phone wants to book some kind of appointment when I'm on the road, and in that case I'm actually really happy I am not going to be tempted to look at my phone, it is annoying enough that people expect your phone to be answered at all hours. - quick web searches I do a ton of those, but not when I'm out of the office or meeting people, I've had a case come up once or twice but usually I just make a mental note to check up on something. - a decent camera I'll always carry That's a good one, another one which would work for me would be to have something good to read wherever I go. But those two can be solved quite easily: my dumb phone has a reasonably good camera and there's always a book in my bag.
aclsid 7y ago
Buy Chinese brands like Oppo, Meizu or Xiaomi (mix 3 is awesome). If you get the one with the Chinese rom Google has been removed to an extent that is not possible by end users or are least without switching ROMs which is generally a PIA. The issue then becomes installing something like ApkPure as a replacement for Google play unless you enjoy your Firefox in Chinese. TouchPal is a terrific keyboard as well if you manage to get rid of their ads.
jsgo 7y ago
I'm pretty much in the Apple/Microsoft camp, but I've went with Amazon on the Echo side of things because their offering is more reliable (and more devices support it). What I am getting at is that a lot of us probably make a concession here or there but as long as you're happy/comfortable with it, go for it. The last vestige of Google I voluntarily find myself with is Gmail, but I have a strong feeling once Apple comes with these burner email forwarder things, I'm probably going to switch to Proton or something similar.
m463 7y ago
google is an identification service.

harry8 7y ago

If you use email, google basically have it. A big enough proportion of your mail counter-parties use google that running your own mail-server doesn't buy you much. The gesture is a good one and everyone should do it until google are just another tech company, I guess. But doing it now doesn't really de-google your email, sadly.

wlesieutre 7y ago
Though there are some other benefits to changing your own email provider even if Google still has copies of all your email. The big one is that Google has no support, and if you ever have a problem your only recourse is knowing someone who works there and can get your issue in front of an actual person. Other email providers (especially ones where you pay them money for the service) have actual support employees. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146
treerock 7y ago
I was wondering about this. The majority of my emails are between myself and a business, currently letting google track my purchases, holidays, event booking etc by reading the responses I get. If I stopped using gmail, how would they track that kind of stuff? Few businesses are going to be using consumer level gmail.

NikkiA 7y ago

There have actually been times recently where I've had what I consider 'iffy' results from DDG for very domain-specific queries, but when I've double checked with !g, the DDG results were far more on-topic, and google was giving much much worse results. That said, google's image results are still significantly better than DDG or Bing, but that's such a small part of my queries that it's pretty much a non-issue.

ibdf 7y ago

Why are people so paranoid about privacy? We want better services, well those services need to know what you like. It's just a bunch of computers trying to figure out what's trending and what you need. There's no human driven analytics team out there reading and sifting through your e-mails trying to figure out who you are. I much rather be concerned about security than privacy.

ilikehurdles 7y ago
Every violation of privacy is an additional security risk. Also, there is a partly human-driven surveillance state.
jm4 7y ago
I think, with regards to Google, it's all about their business model. Allowing a company to collect data for the sole purpose of personalizing the products you bought from them and recommending content is not an unreasonable choice. Google offers personalized services as a vehicle for data collection to fuel a business model where they sell targeted access to you to their other group of customers.
frenchman99 7y ago
Not everyone considers a "better service" to be a service that is more efficient. For a lot of people, privacy is more valuable than being handed a personalized ad for a product I didn't know I wanted. It's not "just a bunch of computers". It's potentially putting a lot of leverage in the same hands. Here are 3 examples. As a woman, it's nearly impossible to get a job when you're pregnant, so it's better not to let anyone know during the job search. If you have HIV and people find out, they freak out thinking you'll infect them right away. If you're chronically sick, do you want insurance companies to know that ? No you don't, because the price of the insurance policy will "magically" be higher for you. Privacy has it good sides.
jacquesm 7y ago
If a company violates your privacy and they are hacked then you have a double problem. So your focus on security is correct but security only really matters when companies have your data in the first place. And given the general state of security the very best way to ensure that your data does not end up in the wrong hands is by not giving it out in the first place, hence privacy ends up - for practical reasons - trumping security. Not a week goes by without a major hack of some sort hitting the media, a much larger amount goes unreported. And even if the data isn't hacked it could easily be lifted using some legal instrument.

nerdjon 7y ago

I have mostly removed Google from my life. I still have a few stragglers (like Single Sign on stuff that for many sites are a pain in the ass to change) but it has been nice. However my biggest annoyance is still the amount of data that Google can find out about me where I have no control over it. - Emails to anyone using a Google service (I use iCloud) - Texting anyone using Android (I have a similar frustration with Facebook and anyone that shares their contacts with them) (This is one of the key reasons I love iMessage and I always have caution when I see a green bubble.) And similar data sharing I have absolutely no way to give consent for yet they still have, because someone else gave consent for me. My hope is that Google cannot manage to link that data back to me somehow, but I am sure they can. But it doesn't change that they have that data.

gloflo 7y ago
You are similarly sharing data on your contacts with Apple.
- ballenf 7y ago
  Comments like yours imply that no one cannot exist on the internet without sharing stuff with some company, so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. Of course it matters. And of course one should remain vigilant to monitor the company of choice for changes in strategy or the like that might affect privacy claims. I don’t inherently trust Apple more than Google, but I do trust (begrudgingly) that Apple’s current business model aligns their interests on privacy better with mine.
  - beat 7y ago
    There's where the rubber hits the road, for me. Want total privacy? Stay off the internet. Way back in the dark ages of 1996 or so, I went to a very early web security conference. At that point, it wasn't really a profession. It was junior devs like me, schoolteachers, all sorts of people who had the job of "web security" cast upon them. And we all commiserated about getting the same marching orders... our bosses wanted absolute and total security, with absolute and totally unfettered access to the internet, and without spending any money at all. The consumer privacy discussion today reminds me so much of that era. Everyone wants unfettered access to the internet, without paying for it, and without anyone selling your data.

neverminder 7y ago

I have this hypothesis that technically minded people (like us) are completely unprofitable to Google when it comes to ads. I've never clicked on any ad or anything even remotely close to an ad ever unless it was accidental, I've ran adblockers on all my devices since I can remember. So I guess it's a bit ironic that people who are least profitable for Google are the most concerned about being tracked by it. I should mention however that I do buy their hardware products (phones, laptops) and pay for Gmail accounts for my own domain names, but that's just because they make good quality stuff which to me personally has nothing to do with ads.

diehunde 7y ago
Might be true but I wouldn't take the risk. It's not only about ads when they have access to your emails, location history and track what do you do on the internet.
- neverminder 7y ago
  I'm completely aware of the risks, so I try to keep my stuff they can keep track off as mundane as possible. Unfortunately when it comes to emails someone will always have access to them. My plan is eventually to get something like that Purism phone for more personal stuff. There are no perfect solutions.
Mc_Big_G 7y ago
You don't have to click on an ad to be tracked. Also, you don't find it even a little concerning that Google reads all your email?
- neverminder 7y ago
  If not Google then who? Fastmail? Protonmail? Someone will always read our emails, I just don't see a way around it. We kinda live in a world based on trust, maybe someday that will change, but probably not any time soon.
- mda 7y ago

diehunde 7y ago

Replacing the maps app and YouTube are the hardest for me. I haven't found anything that compares to those services. And I think Waze is also owned by Google?

rockinghigh 7y ago
Yes, Google bought Waze in 2013.
rchaud 7y ago
Try NewPipe on the F-Droid repository. Has options to dl both audio or video, and supports playback with the screen off.
zuron7 7y ago
OpenStreetMaps is getting there. Heavily depends on the quality of maps in your area. For Youtube, you could use something like invidio.us or newpipe, which shows you only the channels that you have subscribed to.
- spurgu 7y ago
  OpenStreetMap actually seems quite excellent from a quick check. I've only glanced at it every now and then during the last few years (I used to contribute a bit back in around 2012) but now it actually seems awfully attractive compared to Google's/Apple's offerings - with all the annotations/coloring it actually looks like a real map!
  - spurgu 7y ago
    With Google Maps I find myself switching between map/satellite annoyingly often. With OSM I don't feel the need at all, from a quick test at least.
- pro_zac 7y ago
  Are there any good YouTube alternative front ends for Apple TV? I found a Plex plugin that might do the trick. Haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/kolsys/YouTubeTV.bundle https://github.com/kolsys/YouTubeTV.bundle

vonnik 7y ago

With email, the deeper problem is that you can't force everyone you correspond with to leave Gmail. So your private correspondence will continue to be scanned to feed the ad-surveillance machine regardless. This is a problem common to leaving any standard protocol, especially a messaging protocol.

timbit42 7y ago
With Tutanota, encrypted emails sent outside of Tutanota are sent as links which the user clicks to read and reply to your email, keeping your messages off Gmail or any other insecure email server.

raphinou 7y ago

I am curious to know what is the monetary total cost of the switch. Anyone having done the switch able to share numbers?

nerdjon 7y ago
I have been using iOS for about 9 years now so I won't take that into it. At certain points I had some expenses that I had to pay for (like MobileMe instead of Gmail). But now I don't pay for anything that I could not stop paying and would loose much. I pay for 2TB of iCloud storage for $9.99 a month (USD), but I could drop that and continue to use iCloud for Calendar, email and etc. (However you would pay google for this space anyways, but for only a TB) I pay $10 a month for Apple News, but it is also a decent free service instead of google news. I don't pay for Apple maps. I don't see there being much, if any, monetary cost of transitioning unless you include the cost of moving from Android to iOS (which assuming you were going to upgrade your phone anyways may not need to be counted). It isn't like Apple devices are that much more expensive than similar premium tier smartphones.

MentallyRetired 7y ago

I wrote a very similar article back in 2007. Nice to see how the process has aged. This was the number 1 article on CenterNetworks until it's founder passed away a few years ago. (RIP Allen Stern) https://web.archive.org/web/20070508104636/http://www.centernetworks.com/my-life-without-google https://web.archive.org/web/20070508104636/http://www.center...

bbatha 7y ago

I've been doing the same but I haven't quiet been able to find good replacements for gmail and hangouts. Anyone have any recommendations? For gmail I'd like real imap and custom domain support. FastMail is the obvious choice, but I can't in good conscious trust an Australian company with my secrets.[0] Hangouts: I'd like cross platform with a web client if possible. I would like optional chat history sync. And I'd like on by default encryption. Signal is great, but its treatment of chat history is too paranoid to be useful for everyday conversations. Whatsapp is also a strong contender, but I'd also prefer to stay off facebook services. edit: for a hangouts replacement, I'm not looking for video/audio chats I'm looking for a direct messaging focused service that can serve as an SMS replacement along the lines of iMesseges, whatsapp or signal. And yes I know about XMPP I was a heavy user a decade ago, but I'd prefer not to replace a dying service with a dying protocol. 0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/australia-passes-new-law-to-thwart-strong-encryption/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/australia-passes...

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The hubbub about the article there is FUD, particularly when it comes to FastMail. Since FastMail isn't an end-to-end encrypted service (Gmail isn't either), laws about thwarting encryption are entirely irrelevant: Both must respond to a legal government order for your information. Google responds to many tens of thousands of these requests yearly: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?t=table https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?t=t... If you are not Australian, the likelihood of getting your data subpoena'd from an Australian company is pretty low. If you're in the US, it's far more likely for your Gmail data to be successfully subpoena'd. Unless you belong to a fairly narrow set of people, the risk of government access to your data is relatively low. Meanwhile, the threat of advertiser access to your data is high for everyone: Don't trust an ad company with your data, even if they currently say they won't use it for ads.
- bbatha 7y ago
  I'm not trying to compare gmail and fastmail. I'm trying get off gmail, and that is the top priority. However, changing email providers is relatively disruptive and I'd prefer to choose one that can last me 5-10 years. Fastmail was that choice but uncertainty about Australian encryption laws throws a wrench into that equation. My concern with encryption law is not necessarily that FastMail will respond to warrants (though total non-compliance in a non-5 eyes country would be ideal), its how frequently and do they need to otherwise compromise the security of the product in order to do so. FastMail seems to think that the new laws will impact them negatively.[0] FastMail's response to these claims has not been exactly confidence inspiring as the Australian government could compel the company to comply not just individual coders.[1] The real question I'm asking is, is fastmail my only real alternative to gmail? 0: https://reclaimthenet.org/fastmail-australian-encryption-law/ https://reclaimthenet.org/fastmail-australian-encryption-law... 1: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabill-australia/ https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi...

wwweston 7y ago

Anyone know of a good replacement for Voice? It's funny, because it seems that Google doesn't care about it much, but it's the stickiest of all their products for me. It's been incredibly convenient to have a combination of a phone # alias (under which I've changed phone service at least a dozen times) and cloud-stored web-accessible messaging history and send/receive interface. Easy setup, mobile-device independent.

t0astbread 7y ago

Is FastMail really a good choice for privacy? I mean yeah, their feature set is awesome, they support (and develop! [1]) open standards and they sound pretty genuine. But they're based in Australia and given recent events ([2], [3]) I'm not sure if I would like to place my data in that country. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113646 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303

nbrempel 7y ago
Fair point
- mfer 7y ago
  While IANAL, I'm not sure keeping email in a US company causes it to have privacy. For example, law enforcement in the US can subpoena email contents older than 180 days. No warrant required. Google's transparency report shows they've shared a lot of data. Google's support site has details on the process. Both Google and Fastmail have access to email. The encryption circumvention doesn't matter to Fastmail because they already complied with law enforcement just like Google does. I'd be curious if someone has details or an argument different from this.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I just responded to another comment about the FUD about Australian privacy concerns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166077 tl;dr: The law passed doesn't affect FastMail at all, and your data is at least as private with FastMail as it is with Gmail, which also responds to lawful government requests for your data.
- t0astbread 7y ago
  Yes, I understand that. And I know that I might be spreading FUD here (which I wanna avoid). However I'm concerned that the Australian government (given their recent authoritarian actions) might be a little too quick to request my data from FastMail.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

3xblah 7y ago

"Side note: recently duck.com was acquired by DuckDuckGo. I hope there is a plan for them to rebrand as simply "Duck" because if I recommend the search engine to someone who is not as embedded in the internet as I am (nerd), they often won't use the service based on the name alone." Who previously controlled duck.com? It wasn't Google, was it?

jahewson 7y ago
It’s true, I had never heard of the children’s game of Duck, Duck, Goose until I moved to the US and had kids, so a lot of people probably see that name and think “WTF?”.

Youden 7y ago

I've substantially de-Googled but there's still the huge issue of mobile operating systems. If I choose iOS, I get a device that respects my privacy and gives me some degree of control over what apps on my device can do (e.g. GPS permissions are much more useful) but I can't install what I like on my device and I can't globally block ads and trackers. If I choose Android with Google's apps preinstalled, I give up OS-level privacy and control but I can install what I like, including a device-wide, whitelist-based firewall, with which I can restrict ads and trackers. If I choose Android without Google's apps, I get a much greater amount of privacy and control over my device but I can't use common applications like my local public transit app.

Slippery_John 7y ago

I've almost entirely de-Googled, with the one straggler being YouTube. There just aren't viable competitors. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of the ads while still paying for usage (combined with all the tracker blocking I can reasonably do), but man that $12/month is crazy. I don't care about youtube music, youtube gaming, or any of their other "value"-add junk so it's an increasingly hard pill to swallow. I just want an ad-free plan. $8/month was much more tolerable in that respect. Hell, why doesn't Google offer a Google-wide tracking / ads opt-out plan? With their reach they could probably set up a plan wherein sites with google ads get a kickback of a subscription in exchange for not displaying ads. I'd be willing to bet Google would make more money off of me if they did that. The other product I gave up recently was Fi. It was a hard thing to give up because if you can use it then it's really the best service out there for most. What ended up kicking me there was the paltry phone support (only token support for iOS, which I switched to, and only a handful of android devices). When I found out I could get a T-mobile plan through work that offers all of the functionality I want (though some things are gimped in comparison) for a price that, while high, was at least tolerable.

WorldMaker 7y ago
I don't care about seeing disclosed, paid ads so much as seeing YouTube's garbage recommendations algorithm. If they offered a paid program to entirely disable the recommendations section and get back a proper chronologic playlist of my subscriptions I'd be sorely tempted to pay for that. (I hate YouTube's Autoplay and disable it on every device.) As it stands it is probably a lot healthier for me not to pay for YouTube Premium: the more obnoxious they try to make the ad breaks (and they have), the more it becomes a continual reminder I should not use YouTube and should encourage the people I follow to explore other less-user-hostile platforms for sharing their video content.

qqn 7y ago

I'm surprised this post is so popular. I wish s/he'd mentioned other alternatives like Tutanota/ProtonMail, Startpage, or Matomo (formerly Piwik) analytics. I also wish there was mention about how no one is truly Google-free until their contact is no longer in a friend's Gmail address book (and even then)...

boh 7y ago

Does paying for Google (G Suite) count as de-Googling to some extent? Supposedly I own any data within the Suite core services (which ironically doesn't include search, so DDG for that).