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Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

365 points by yarapavan 7y ago

coder1001 7y ago
Is the goal to stop being watched or not having your info being sold as a product to others? The title seems to imply the second while talking about the first?!
- colordrops 7y ago
  Why not both?
  - coder1001 7y ago
    Pretty sure you would have to cut more than Google to stop both?
- Lammy 7y ago
  One implies the other. How can they sell access to your eyeballs without surveilling you to study your likes/dislikes/habits/etc?
- avocado4 7y ago
  The goal is ridding world of American influence. There's nothing wrong with using the Gooogle products, your data is not being sold or abused in any way. It's a geopolitical effort first and foremost.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    No, I would bet a good portion (possibly the majority) of this tool's users are Americans trying to take control of who has their personal information and data.
- megous 7y ago
  I'm glad for anyone who refuses to use products of these megacorps, as those are the people that keep alternatives alive and that's a check on power of comapnies like Google or Microsoft.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
burgerzzz 7y ago
I've stopped using every Google product but Google search, and unfortunately Google Captcha, which I absolutely abhor. I downloaded Google Photos a few days ago to try and export some old photos and it refuses to let you view your old photos until you have give access to your current photos. That really typifies my experience with Google.
- 0xEFF 7y ago
  If you’re on iOS how would the app download a photo without write access to photos?
  - burgerzzz 7y ago
    To be clear, the first requirement after opening the app is access to your Photos. I didn't even get far enough to view the old photos, let alone an attempt at an export.
- Daniel_sk 7y ago
  Also there is no easy way to export all your photos. I learned this the hard way when I decided to move my photos to iCloud. There used to be an option in Drive to link your Google Photos albums and download them, but they removed it. You can request your data from Google and then download a large ZIP, but I had numerous issues with it and it broke the Live photos from iPhone. In the end I had to manually select ~100-200 photos in the iOS Google Photos app and click Download and then do this for all photos (it will not let you select all at once, there is a limit). And then I enabled iCloud to back up the downloaded photos.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Probably an issue with them choosing the most general route. They most likely think most people using Takeout want photos they can open and move to other storage/photo services, so putting the converted png/jpg provides more compatibility than the 'heic' photos that are only supported by iCloud and a handful of other services.
  - 7y ago
Spearchucker 7y ago
There are a whole lot of products and services in that list I haven't heard of so will be checking those out. Notable about the list is the absence of anything from Microsoft. I cannot (will not, truth be told) do without Office and Exchange. Are all the items in that list free? Finally, I hope to see affordable and credible, non - Apple alternatives to Android some time. Still on Windows Phone which to this day has a better UI and UX than Android. But no WhatsApp does suck pretty hard. Anyway I'm Google free too but always looking for better alternatives, so thank you for this list.
- newscracker 7y ago
  If you’re not collaborating with others who won’t change their habits and your needs aren’t very complex, then LibreOffice is a relatively good enough alternative to MS Office. It’s difficult to recommend anything without knowing why you prefer MS Exchange, but there should be options depending on your needs.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  No, not all products in this list are free: neither as in beer nor as in freedom. Which is fine by me: moving from something like Google Analytics to any other closed-source paid product is probably an improvement for every visitor.
- sjy 7y ago
  I’d also recommend giving LibreOffice another try if it’s been a few years. I wasn’t at all interested in switching as of 2014, but Microsoft Office has become a lot more annoying with its slow new UI and constant advertising for cloud services, and in the meantime LibreOffice has enjoyed some incremental improvements. Plus, with so many people using G Suite and mobile OSes, it’s no longer much of a disadvantage to be unable to render an Office document with pixel-perfect accuracy.
jeena 7y ago
I almost successfully cut Google out with one exception, YouTube, I don't seem to be able to find what I get there anywhere else. Fun anecdote: Google is very smart, because I've been a paying customer of YouTube for a long time they gave me a Google Nest Mini for Christmas free of charge. And it fills another niche which I can't really find a meaningful alternative for: Speech to text hardware/software which can be connected to my smart home (which is cloud free until now). They really do press the right buttons because I'm thinking of connecting this thing to my home. And then they can listen to everything I'm doing, which is not cool, but then I already have the device and so on ...
- Cilvic 7y ago
  Maybe look into Jarvis an open source stt and home automation
- cycloptic 7y ago
  I will only access youtube in ways that limit its tracking and anti-features. That means always using Tor and Youtube-dl/Invidious/Newpipe. Never use the official frontend or any of the official apps.
  - IAmGraydon 7y ago
    Then you may have noticed that you can’t access Google through Tor. They intentionally send you to a captcha you can never solve.
    - cycloptic 7y ago
      No, I've never noticed that. I don't try to access google or youtube directly through Tor. I just use those programs.
      - lucb1e 7y ago
        Wait, you can get around IP bans (Google certainly has a CAPTCHA on anyone trying to access Search from a Tor exit node IP address) by using a different client? Like, the check is client-side? That seems odd.
hardlianotion 7y ago
Looked at the site. Not sure I understand what flagging the services as 5-eyes, etc. is supposed to mean. Perhaps - sponsored by 5-eyes (that seems to miss the point) - prevents spying by 5-eyes? This seems strange also. Clarifications welcomed.
- extra88 7y ago
  “The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
  - hardlianotion 7y ago
    Thanks. I should have made clear that I had read up the definitions.
- godelski 7y ago
  The idea is that if you operate a server in -eyes territories then your data is not secure. I'm not sure I buy this argument though. We've seen companies just not hold onto data, be served, and release "sorry we got nothing". AFAIK you don't have to create backdoors for the NSA. Canaries are legal. You don't have to store data. So listing if a service is from a -eyes country misses the point really. Point being if the service is secure and follows best practices or not. Something isn't secure because it is located in Switzerland. Or am I missing something?
  - newscracker 7y ago
    What you missed in your reply is the fact that your view is completely U.S. centric. Australia legally requires companies to build backdoors and not disclose them if mandated by the government. Lookup the Assistance and Access Bill from more than a year ago and the concerns around it.
    - godelski 7y ago
gitgud 7y ago
This reminds me of people trying to cut out plastics from there life. This is hard because plastic is cheap, convinient, useful and it's embedded in every product in modern life.... Just like Google
- jlarocco 7y ago
  I don't see the problem. There's still privacy benefits to be had by cutting Google out of your life 90% of the time, or even 75% or 50% of the time. I've largely cut out Google, but still occassionally use YouTube, Maps (usually through a 3rd party), and very rarely search. For me, StreetView and the huge library on YouTube are just too useful to completely give up, and, unfortunately, I don't know of any alternatives making headway in those areas.
  - maximente 7y ago
    yeah, the original comment's comparison seems disingenuous as it just lists various generic positive things and completely ignores any negatives. television would also seemingly fit the bill. there are obvious downsides to plastics, google and TV. that excising it completely is extremely difficult if not impossible in the modern world does not diminish the positive effects of reducing consumption.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Bing Maps has a street view equivalent that covers most cities, at least in the US somewhere close to a margin of error difference to Google in terms of cities covered. In fewer cities and increasingly hard to find in the interface (because a lot of it is growing out of date, and it is in general more rare than Street View), Bing Maps also has a really cool best of both worlds "Bird's Eye view" taken from helicopters in daylight at a particular distance and an isometric-esque angle chosen to provide a strong amount of detail. I've found that be extremely useful for picking up a neighborhood-worth of landmarks in a glance for navigating a space by foot or car. It really is a shame Microsoft/Bing stopped advertising it so heavily as a competitive advantage and have let its prominence in the UI disappear to the point where finding it is a labyrinthine task, but unlike the mythical minotaur, I know it still exists (for now). I don't know what to do about YouTube. I keep hoping that they've made the non-Premium experience so bad that enough of the people I follow might move to better platforms, but so far network effects win again.
seiferteric 7y ago
I am going down this road atm. I just signed up for fastmail, but I don't see it on this list, does anyone have any comparisons with the others listed? My main concern was being able to use my own domain.
- jlarocco 7y ago
  I've been using Fastmail for several years now and love it. I can't directly answer your question about a comparison, though. I know I looked at several alternatives before signing up, but I don't remember exactly why I chose it over the others.
- dempedempe 7y ago
  Just commented on this myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964531. I can't recommend Fastmail enough. If you really wanna save money, Zoho allows you one free email alias. They seem like a pretty cool company too, but Fastmail is more mature and so simple, easy-to-use, and feature-rich. I signed up for a three year subscription with them instead.
- dempedempe 7y ago
  Also, setting up an email alias for my custom domain was a complete breeze. They give you instructions on how to do it and explain each step. I think they offer a 1 month free trial. Try it out.
- jtw 7y ago
  Fastmail has really superb custom domain functionality. Highly recommended.
- newscracker 7y ago
  Fastmail is a company based out of Australia using data centers in the U.S. The Five Eyes concern is why it may not be listed in privacy focused sites. To use your own domain, I’d recommend other services that are a lot cheaper than Fastmail, focused on privacy and are not in the Five Eyes (but may be in Fourteen Eyes). Check out mailbox.org, runbox.com and lastly, Migadu for a fixed price for unlimited mailboxes/storage (prices are based on outgoing mails sent per day).
dempedempe 7y ago
I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties (and work in the same office) to a shady European data collection agency. Can't find the link atm.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  > I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293 Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts. Re: Zoho: As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't 5 eyes or 9 eyes, it has some of the most restrictive laws in terms of Internet freedom and is a surveillance state. Ref: https://internetfreedom.in/ https://internetfreedom.in/
  - foob4r 7y ago
    In response to your linked (unsourced) post: > This is not correct as far as Proton is concerned and easily verifiable. ProtonVPN is 100% owned by Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland) which also develops ProtonMail and is not affiliated or owned by any other company.
  - throw434324 7y ago
    > Internet freedom and is a surveillance state. I think these terms as understood by Americans becomes quite meaningless for people of a country that is victim of a civil war led by both the Islamists and the Left-Loonies (see the latest staged "false-flag" operations at Delhi's universities).
- elagost 7y ago
mikedilger 7y ago
ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha. Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.
- chopin 7y ago
  I try to avoid services which use ReCaptcha as much as I can.
  - booi 7y ago
    What do you replace it with?
    - mhasbini 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I was part of hCaptcha team. https://hcaptcha.com/ https://hcaptcha.com/ is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA. It's privacy focused (supports privacy pass), and is fair: webmasters get a cut for each captcha that is solved correctly (they can choose to directly donate it to a charity of their choice), hCaptcha get a cut for running the service and a customer will get their images/data labeled.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      In a lot of projects lately where I've seen ReCaptcha used or requested I've replaced it with YAGNI [You Aren't Going to Need It]. It's a "what's your threat model?" question for Bots. Do you have the scale that human moderators are infeasible? (Not do you "wish to have". YAGNI suggests add it when you have that scale, not before.) Do you need that form to be publicly accessible? Are you requiring multi-factor authentication already? Can you or should you? Can you use a spam filter? (Are you sure your process isn't already going through half a dozen email spam filters anyway?) Do the simple tricks not work for your use case? (CSRF tokens, "honeypot fields", form name/ID obfuscation, dumb simple weird rotating required fields like "2 + 2 =?")
ironarm 7y ago
Does anyone have suggestions on polyfills/fallbacks for google CDN scripts? I'd like to straight up block all of Google in my host file, but it breaks about 90% of sites at the moment.
- newscracker 7y ago
  There’s a browser extension called Decentraleyes [1] that hosts popular scripts locally and avoids the need to connect to any CDN, not just Google, for those. [1]: https://decentraleyes.org https://decentraleyes.org
ugotjelly 7y ago
Question. Why?
- lucb1e 7y ago
  I think that's a bit out of scope for the discussion about this list. A very short summary might be that a lot of people see Alphabet/Google as having gotten too big (various monopoly issues) and their business is largely based on advertisement that involves lots of tracking. Especially the combination of the two makes it bad. (You probably already knew this and I'm not actually sure if I should be spending time giving a serious answer to a two-word comment.) Anyway, I think this thread should be about the list and not about the mystery of why anyone would not want to use Google products.
amelius 7y ago
Is there a websearch benchmark which actually shows objectively how good all these alternative search engines such as DDG are? How do we know which one is better, and how much worse we are off by using alternatives?
- dmoy 7y ago
  There are benchmarks, but they're probably closely guarded secrets of the various search teams out there. So not very useful public benchmarks, no.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Perhaps you are right, but still difficult to believe that nobody at a university or in open-source built something like this. It's the thing I would start with if I wanted to design a search engine.
    - dmoy 7y ago
      Defining such a benchmark and making it public would be incredibly difficult, because as soon as you do, it becomes too easy to game. Think of the worst possible SEO hacks out there, except from the perspective of the engine itself.
- inimino 7y ago
  There is no such thing as one right answer from a search engine. Use them both, get used to how they work, and see what works for you.
hkai 7y ago
Regrettably one worrying trend I'm seeing is people hearing that Google and Facebook do despicable things, and switching to an alternative like Wechat, which is arguably infinitely worse. Perhaps when discussing Google or Facebook, we should put that in context and mention that they are some of the world's most transparent major tech companies.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Why trust a monopolist that makes its money using tracking when you can use the alternatives from the list?
iamaelephant 7y ago
> News > r/news - Includes both USA and International. > r/worldnews - International news. Typically excludes news specific to the USA. > Most country/state/provine subreddit's act as local news hubs as well. Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.
- aleister_777 7y ago
  Yup, once I saw that I noped on out of this nonsensical framework. Someone is missing many clues about who is tracking what for whom...
- CharlesW 7y ago
  > Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please. Have you used them? These are mainstream subreddits, and the stories aggregated there aren't substantially different than the stories linked to to the similar Google News categories.
  - wobbly_bush 7y ago
    As someone not from a NATO country, the discussions on r/worldnews have been pretty disappointing about anything outside of NATO. The news stories upvoted there suffer from similar problems.
- squaresmile 7y ago
  Yep, just saw this [0] yesterday. A "powermod" posted a misleading title and nobody removed it. Yikes is definitely the correct response. I'm not saying it's better or worse than Google News but people should know the place's bias and bring a healthy dose of salt and actually read the articles. I'm only viewing it as a list of things that happened. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ek3ean/undermining_white_houses_public_line_us_officials/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ek3ean/undermini...
Maximus9000 7y ago
Is the browser extension "https everywhere" still useful? I find modern firefox versions will default you to https automatically now. (for what it's worth, doesn't chrome do this now too?)
- pzmarzly 7y ago
  No major browser redirects to HTTPS when the site is not on HSTS preload list AFAIK. I don’t have a PC with me, but at least Firefox for iOS doesn’t. But I've been using HTTPS everywhere for a while now, and still once in a while manage to find sites that have a correctly configured SSL certificate, but only serve the default "Apache has been installed" screen over the HTTPS, while serving the full site only over the HTTP. I guess if the behavior you described was the default in any browser, those sites would have got fixed already. The extension is still worth running, though, as some sites I visit have a perfectly fine HTTPS version, but don’t redirect to it (some even serve HSTS header there).
dpcan 7y ago
Well, this long list is certainly a nice reminder that Google is going to be a permanent part of most peoples' lives for ... forever. Seriously. Google can use this as marketing for why people love Google so much.
- stOneskull 7y ago
  It does seem so much easier than a hundred different services.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  It's definitely the reason I'm a shareholder.
rajhereiny 7y ago
Thank you! is there a way for us use a safe and secure bank transaction ... i'd love to see a bank who does not sell our data to a insurance firm or an analytics firm.
GlenTheMachine 7y ago
Still no replacement for Google Voice. Which is my one indispensable app.
- darynaop 7y ago
  Have you checked out OpenPhone (www.openphone.co)? We've been building a simple and reliable phone for professionals though are used for personal communications as well since our pricing is very affordable at $10/mo per user or number. We've just recently launched our web app in beta (launching officially soon) so we're now at feature parity with GV and beyond since we've really invested time into creating a fast and modern service that works seamlessly. Would love your thoughts!
  - GlenTheMachine 7y ago
    Can it dial me at multiple numbers? My primary use for Voice is that I can give people a single number that, when they dial it, will call my cell, my home, and my office numbers. I have never found another service that foes that, and it isn’t clear to me from your web site whether yours does either.
crystaln 7y ago
Is there something like Google Drive / Dropbox that allows you to use cloud storage with local encryption, that has nice OS integration on desktop and mobile?
- TheRealNGenius 7y ago
  I use iCloud
  - crystaln 7y ago
    Interesting. Is there a good read on iCloud's general document security? My sense is that while Apple is great about iMessage and this stuff in general, they probably haven't implemented the same level of privacy for all of iCloud. That would be very challenging.
- jbc1 7y ago
  Cryptomator allows you to use local encryption with Google Drive or Dropbox as the cloud storage provider. I haven't used it so I can't speak to its niceness.
- sneak 7y ago
  Syncthing. Run an extra instance on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 512gb sd card plugged in in a closet somewhere for the always-on node. Make sure to set STNOUPGRADE=1 in the environment though to disable the RCE that it gives the developers.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  The ones I've found which claim good encryption out of the box are https://www.pcloud.com/ https://www.pcloud.com/ and https://tresorit.com/ https://tresorit.com/
wishinghand 7y ago
Somewhat related, here's a site for switching to open source solutions: https://switching.software/ https://switching.software/
larnmar 7y ago
Personally, I feel safer knowing that all my embarrassing personal data is at Google, along with everyone else’s, rather than somewhere else. I’m confident that Google can’t do anything genuinely shitty with my data without also pissing off millions of people more powerful than myself.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
prince707 7y ago
It's surprising to see LineageOS listed in the repository. It relies on several Google services, even if you are not using Google Play services, and doesn't even include microG. For instance it is using: - google servers for connectivity check - google server for ipV4/ipV6 check - google NTP servers - google DNS servers - google search engine by default and all the default apps like calendar etc. are fully oriented against google services. I think LineageOS should definitely be considered from removal, though it's a nice project and a great playground for ROM hackers.
- megaraid999 7y ago
  Couldn't agree more...
kureikain 7y ago
I used Youtube Red for video without ads and google one membership which give me 1TB for evertyhing: photos, docs, drive for up to 5 people. I'm very happy with it. But I read so many stories about people getting banned by google. Recently someone got ban because they used Apple Card. I'm a bit worry about getting block by google photos as well. Anyone know something that cheap as google photo? Basically it gives everyone in family 1TB
- DavideNL 7y ago
  It's cheap because you're paying with your privacy. If you don't want to pay with your privacy you'll have to pay with money... choose between the 2, it's that simple.
wewegogo 7y ago
How about having your cake and eating it too by using google for the free storage but encrypting everything that sits on their servers: https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
amai 7y ago
See also https://nomoregoogle.com/ https://nomoregoogle.com/ .
luord 7y ago
My very first step to get rid of Google would be finding a stock android phone with an update schedule as good as the pixel. So far I'm yet to find a convincing candidate, but if someone here can recommend one such phone, that doesn't require my bothering with rooting, and that is expected to be maintained, I'd really appreciate it. Well, I guess I can get an iPhone if I ever get really serious about ditching Google, but for now I don't hate them enough to move on from Android.
gwenzek 7y ago
There is also the Framasoft effort: https://framasoft.org/en/#dio https://framasoft.org/en/#dio

365 points by yarapavan 7y ago

Is the goal to stop being watched or not having your info being sold as a product to others? The title seems to imply the second while talking about the first?!

colordrops 7y ago
Why not both?
- coder1001 7y ago
  Pretty sure you would have to cut more than Google to stop both?
Lammy 7y ago
One implies the other. How can they sell access to your eyeballs without surveilling you to study your likes/dislikes/habits/etc?
avocado4 7y ago
The goal is ridding world of American influence. There's nothing wrong with using the Gooogle products, your data is not being sold or abused in any way. It's a geopolitical effort first and foremost.
- judge2020 7y ago
  No, I would bet a good portion (possibly the majority) of this tool's users are Americans trying to take control of who has their personal information and data.
megous 7y ago
I'm glad for anyone who refuses to use products of these megacorps, as those are the people that keep alternatives alive and that's a check on power of comapnies like Google or Microsoft.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

burgerzzz 7y ago

I've stopped using every Google product but Google search, and unfortunately Google Captcha, which I absolutely abhor. I downloaded Google Photos a few days ago to try and export some old photos and it refuses to let you view your old photos until you have give access to your current photos. That really typifies my experience with Google.

0xEFF 7y ago
If you’re on iOS how would the app download a photo without write access to photos?
- burgerzzz 7y ago
  To be clear, the first requirement after opening the app is access to your Photos. I didn't even get far enough to view the old photos, let alone an attempt at an export.
Daniel_sk 7y ago
Also there is no easy way to export all your photos. I learned this the hard way when I decided to move my photos to iCloud. There used to be an option in Drive to link your Google Photos albums and download them, but they removed it. You can request your data from Google and then download a large ZIP, but I had numerous issues with it and it broke the Live photos from iPhone. In the end I had to manually select ~100-200 photos in the iOS Google Photos app and click Download and then do this for all photos (it will not let you select all at once, there is a limit). And then I enabled iCloud to back up the downloaded photos.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Probably an issue with them choosing the most general route. They most likely think most people using Takeout want photos they can open and move to other storage/photo services, so putting the converted png/jpg provides more compatibility than the 'heic' photos that are only supported by iCloud and a handful of other services.
- 7y ago

Spearchucker 7y ago

There are a whole lot of products and services in that list I haven't heard of so will be checking those out. Notable about the list is the absence of anything from Microsoft. I cannot (will not, truth be told) do without Office and Exchange. Are all the items in that list free? Finally, I hope to see affordable and credible, non - Apple alternatives to Android some time. Still on Windows Phone which to this day has a better UI and UX than Android. But no WhatsApp does suck pretty hard. Anyway I'm Google free too but always looking for better alternatives, so thank you for this list.

newscracker 7y ago
If you’re not collaborating with others who won’t change their habits and your needs aren’t very complex, then LibreOffice is a relatively good enough alternative to MS Office. It’s difficult to recommend anything without knowing why you prefer MS Exchange, but there should be options depending on your needs.
lucb1e 7y ago
No, not all products in this list are free: neither as in beer nor as in freedom. Which is fine by me: moving from something like Google Analytics to any other closed-source paid product is probably an improvement for every visitor.
sjy 7y ago
I’d also recommend giving LibreOffice another try if it’s been a few years. I wasn’t at all interested in switching as of 2014, but Microsoft Office has become a lot more annoying with its slow new UI and constant advertising for cloud services, and in the meantime LibreOffice has enjoyed some incremental improvements. Plus, with so many people using G Suite and mobile OSes, it’s no longer much of a disadvantage to be unable to render an Office document with pixel-perfect accuracy.

jeena 7y ago

I almost successfully cut Google out with one exception, YouTube, I don't seem to be able to find what I get there anywhere else. Fun anecdote: Google is very smart, because I've been a paying customer of YouTube for a long time they gave me a Google Nest Mini for Christmas free of charge. And it fills another niche which I can't really find a meaningful alternative for: Speech to text hardware/software which can be connected to my smart home (which is cloud free until now). They really do press the right buttons because I'm thinking of connecting this thing to my home. And then they can listen to everything I'm doing, which is not cool, but then I already have the device and so on ...

Cilvic 7y ago
Maybe look into Jarvis an open source stt and home automation
cycloptic 7y ago
I will only access youtube in ways that limit its tracking and anti-features. That means always using Tor and Youtube-dl/Invidious/Newpipe. Never use the official frontend or any of the official apps.
- IAmGraydon 7y ago
  Then you may have noticed that you can’t access Google through Tor. They intentionally send you to a captcha you can never solve.
  - cycloptic 7y ago
    No, I've never noticed that. I don't try to access google or youtube directly through Tor. I just use those programs.
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      Wait, you can get around IP bans (Google certainly has a CAPTCHA on anyone trying to access Search from a Tor exit node IP address) by using a different client? Like, the check is client-side? That seems odd.

hardlianotion 7y ago

Looked at the site. Not sure I understand what flagging the services as 5-eyes, etc. is supposed to mean. Perhaps - sponsored by 5-eyes (that seems to miss the point) - prevents spying by 5-eyes? This seems strange also. Clarifications welcomed.

extra88 7y ago
“The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- hardlianotion 7y ago
  Thanks. I should have made clear that I had read up the definitions.
godelski 7y ago
The idea is that if you operate a server in -eyes territories then your data is not secure. I'm not sure I buy this argument though. We've seen companies just not hold onto data, be served, and release "sorry we got nothing". AFAIK you don't have to create backdoors for the NSA. Canaries are legal. You don't have to store data. So listing if a service is from a -eyes country misses the point really. Point being if the service is secure and follows best practices or not. Something isn't secure because it is located in Switzerland. Or am I missing something?
- newscracker 7y ago
  What you missed in your reply is the fact that your view is completely U.S. centric. Australia legally requires companies to build backdoors and not disclose them if mandated by the government. Lookup the Assistance and Access Bill from more than a year ago and the concerns around it.
  - godelski 7y ago

gitgud 7y ago

This reminds me of people trying to cut out plastics from there life. This is hard because plastic is cheap, convinient, useful and it's embedded in every product in modern life.... Just like Google

jlarocco 7y ago
I don't see the problem. There's still privacy benefits to be had by cutting Google out of your life 90% of the time, or even 75% or 50% of the time. I've largely cut out Google, but still occassionally use YouTube, Maps (usually through a 3rd party), and very rarely search. For me, StreetView and the huge library on YouTube are just too useful to completely give up, and, unfortunately, I don't know of any alternatives making headway in those areas.
- maximente 7y ago
  yeah, the original comment's comparison seems disingenuous as it just lists various generic positive things and completely ignores any negatives. television would also seemingly fit the bill. there are obvious downsides to plastics, google and TV. that excising it completely is extremely difficult if not impossible in the modern world does not diminish the positive effects of reducing consumption.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Bing Maps has a street view equivalent that covers most cities, at least in the US somewhere close to a margin of error difference to Google in terms of cities covered. In fewer cities and increasingly hard to find in the interface (because a lot of it is growing out of date, and it is in general more rare than Street View), Bing Maps also has a really cool best of both worlds "Bird's Eye view" taken from helicopters in daylight at a particular distance and an isometric-esque angle chosen to provide a strong amount of detail. I've found that be extremely useful for picking up a neighborhood-worth of landmarks in a glance for navigating a space by foot or car. It really is a shame Microsoft/Bing stopped advertising it so heavily as a competitive advantage and have let its prominence in the UI disappear to the point where finding it is a labyrinthine task, but unlike the mythical minotaur, I know it still exists (for now). I don't know what to do about YouTube. I keep hoping that they've made the non-Premium experience so bad that enough of the people I follow might move to better platforms, but so far network effects win again.

seiferteric 7y ago

I am going down this road atm. I just signed up for fastmail, but I don't see it on this list, does anyone have any comparisons with the others listed? My main concern was being able to use my own domain.

jlarocco 7y ago
I've been using Fastmail for several years now and love it. I can't directly answer your question about a comparison, though. I know I looked at several alternatives before signing up, but I don't remember exactly why I chose it over the others.
dempedempe 7y ago
Just commented on this myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964531. I can't recommend Fastmail enough. If you really wanna save money, Zoho allows you one free email alias. They seem like a pretty cool company too, but Fastmail is more mature and so simple, easy-to-use, and feature-rich. I signed up for a three year subscription with them instead.
dempedempe 7y ago
Also, setting up an email alias for my custom domain was a complete breeze. They give you instructions on how to do it and explain each step. I think they offer a 1 month free trial. Try it out.
jtw 7y ago
Fastmail has really superb custom domain functionality. Highly recommended.
newscracker 7y ago
Fastmail is a company based out of Australia using data centers in the U.S. The Five Eyes concern is why it may not be listed in privacy focused sites. To use your own domain, I’d recommend other services that are a lot cheaper than Fastmail, focused on privacy and are not in the Five Eyes (but may be in Fourteen Eyes). Check out mailbox.org, runbox.com and lastly, Migadu for a fixed price for unlimited mailboxes/storage (prices are based on outgoing mails sent per day).

dempedempe 7y ago

I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties (and work in the same office) to a shady European data collection agency. Can't find the link atm.

ignoramous 7y ago
> I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293 Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts. Re: Zoho: As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't 5 eyes or 9 eyes, it has some of the most restrictive laws in terms of Internet freedom and is a surveillance state. Ref: https://internetfreedom.in/ https://internetfreedom.in/
- foob4r 7y ago
  In response to your linked (unsourced) post: > This is not correct as far as Proton is concerned and easily verifiable. ProtonVPN is 100% owned by Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland) which also develops ProtonMail and is not affiliated or owned by any other company.
- throw434324 7y ago
  > Internet freedom and is a surveillance state. I think these terms as understood by Americans becomes quite meaningless for people of a country that is victim of a civil war led by both the Islamists and the Left-Loonies (see the latest staged "false-flag" operations at Delhi's universities).
elagost 7y ago

mikedilger 7y ago

ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha. Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.

chopin 7y ago
I try to avoid services which use ReCaptcha as much as I can.
- booi 7y ago
  What do you replace it with?
  - mhasbini 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I was part of hCaptcha team. https://hcaptcha.com/ https://hcaptcha.com/ is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA. It's privacy focused (supports privacy pass), and is fair: webmasters get a cut for each captcha that is solved correctly (they can choose to directly donate it to a charity of their choice), hCaptcha get a cut for running the service and a customer will get their images/data labeled.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    In a lot of projects lately where I've seen ReCaptcha used or requested I've replaced it with YAGNI [You Aren't Going to Need It]. It's a "what's your threat model?" question for Bots. Do you have the scale that human moderators are infeasible? (Not do you "wish to have". YAGNI suggests add it when you have that scale, not before.) Do you need that form to be publicly accessible? Are you requiring multi-factor authentication already? Can you or should you? Can you use a spam filter? (Are you sure your process isn't already going through half a dozen email spam filters anyway?) Do the simple tricks not work for your use case? (CSRF tokens, "honeypot fields", form name/ID obfuscation, dumb simple weird rotating required fields like "2 + 2 =?")

ironarm 7y ago

Does anyone have suggestions on polyfills/fallbacks for google CDN scripts? I'd like to straight up block all of Google in my host file, but it breaks about 90% of sites at the moment.

newscracker 7y ago
There’s a browser extension called Decentraleyes [1] that hosts popular scripts locally and avoids the need to connect to any CDN, not just Google, for those. [1]: https://decentraleyes.org https://decentraleyes.org

ugotjelly 7y ago

Question. Why?

lucb1e 7y ago
I think that's a bit out of scope for the discussion about this list. A very short summary might be that a lot of people see Alphabet/Google as having gotten too big (various monopoly issues) and their business is largely based on advertisement that involves lots of tracking. Especially the combination of the two makes it bad. (You probably already knew this and I'm not actually sure if I should be spending time giving a serious answer to a two-word comment.) Anyway, I think this thread should be about the list and not about the mystery of why anyone would not want to use Google products.

amelius 7y ago

Is there a websearch benchmark which actually shows objectively how good all these alternative search engines such as DDG are? How do we know which one is better, and how much worse we are off by using alternatives?

dmoy 7y ago
There are benchmarks, but they're probably closely guarded secrets of the various search teams out there. So not very useful public benchmarks, no.
- amelius 7y ago
  Perhaps you are right, but still difficult to believe that nobody at a university or in open-source built something like this. It's the thing I would start with if I wanted to design a search engine.
  - dmoy 7y ago
    Defining such a benchmark and making it public would be incredibly difficult, because as soon as you do, it becomes too easy to game. Think of the worst possible SEO hacks out there, except from the perspective of the engine itself.
inimino 7y ago
There is no such thing as one right answer from a search engine. Use them both, get used to how they work, and see what works for you.

hkai 7y ago

Regrettably one worrying trend I'm seeing is people hearing that Google and Facebook do despicable things, and switching to an alternative like Wechat, which is arguably infinitely worse. Perhaps when discussing Google or Facebook, we should put that in context and mention that they are some of the world's most transparent major tech companies.

lucb1e 7y ago
Why trust a monopolist that makes its money using tracking when you can use the alternatives from the list?

iamaelephant 7y ago

> News > r/news - Includes both USA and International. > r/worldnews - International news. Typically excludes news specific to the USA. > Most country/state/provine subreddit's act as local news hubs as well. Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.

aleister_777 7y ago
Yup, once I saw that I noped on out of this nonsensical framework. Someone is missing many clues about who is tracking what for whom...
CharlesW 7y ago
> Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please. Have you used them? These are mainstream subreddits, and the stories aggregated there aren't substantially different than the stories linked to to the similar Google News categories.
- wobbly_bush 7y ago
  As someone not from a NATO country, the discussions on r/worldnews have been pretty disappointing about anything outside of NATO. The news stories upvoted there suffer from similar problems.
squaresmile 7y ago
Yep, just saw this [0] yesterday. A "powermod" posted a misleading title and nobody removed it. Yikes is definitely the correct response. I'm not saying it's better or worse than Google News but people should know the place's bias and bring a healthy dose of salt and actually read the articles. I'm only viewing it as a list of things that happened. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ek3ean/undermining_white_houses_public_line_us_officials/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ek3ean/undermini...

Maximus9000 7y ago

Is the browser extension "https everywhere" still useful? I find modern firefox versions will default you to https automatically now. (for what it's worth, doesn't chrome do this now too?)

pzmarzly 7y ago
No major browser redirects to HTTPS when the site is not on HSTS preload list AFAIK. I don’t have a PC with me, but at least Firefox for iOS doesn’t. But I've been using HTTPS everywhere for a while now, and still once in a while manage to find sites that have a correctly configured SSL certificate, but only serve the default "Apache has been installed" screen over the HTTPS, while serving the full site only over the HTTP. I guess if the behavior you described was the default in any browser, those sites would have got fixed already. The extension is still worth running, though, as some sites I visit have a perfectly fine HTTPS version, but don’t redirect to it (some even serve HSTS header there).

dpcan 7y ago

Well, this long list is certainly a nice reminder that Google is going to be a permanent part of most peoples' lives for ... forever. Seriously. Google can use this as marketing for why people love Google so much.

stOneskull 7y ago
It does seem so much easier than a hundred different services.
koheripbal 7y ago
It's definitely the reason I'm a shareholder.

rajhereiny 7y ago

Thank you! is there a way for us use a safe and secure bank transaction ... i'd love to see a bank who does not sell our data to a insurance firm or an analytics firm.

GlenTheMachine 7y ago

Still no replacement for Google Voice. Which is my one indispensable app.

darynaop 7y ago
Have you checked out OpenPhone (www.openphone.co)? We've been building a simple and reliable phone for professionals though are used for personal communications as well since our pricing is very affordable at $10/mo per user or number. We've just recently launched our web app in beta (launching officially soon) so we're now at feature parity with GV and beyond since we've really invested time into creating a fast and modern service that works seamlessly. Would love your thoughts!
- GlenTheMachine 7y ago
  Can it dial me at multiple numbers? My primary use for Voice is that I can give people a single number that, when they dial it, will call my cell, my home, and my office numbers. I have never found another service that foes that, and it isn’t clear to me from your web site whether yours does either.

crystaln 7y ago

Is there something like Google Drive / Dropbox that allows you to use cloud storage with local encryption, that has nice OS integration on desktop and mobile?

TheRealNGenius 7y ago
I use iCloud
- crystaln 7y ago
  Interesting. Is there a good read on iCloud's general document security? My sense is that while Apple is great about iMessage and this stuff in general, they probably haven't implemented the same level of privacy for all of iCloud. That would be very challenging.
jbc1 7y ago
Cryptomator allows you to use local encryption with Google Drive or Dropbox as the cloud storage provider. I haven't used it so I can't speak to its niceness.
sneak 7y ago
Syncthing. Run an extra instance on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 512gb sd card plugged in in a closet somewhere for the always-on node. Make sure to set STNOUPGRADE=1 in the environment though to disable the RCE that it gives the developers.
benhurmarcel 7y ago
The ones I've found which claim good encryption out of the box are https://www.pcloud.com/ https://www.pcloud.com/ and https://tresorit.com/ https://tresorit.com/

wishinghand 7y ago

Somewhat related, here's a site for switching to open source solutions: https://switching.software/ https://switching.software/

larnmar 7y ago

Personally, I feel safer knowing that all my embarrassing personal data is at Google, along with everyone else’s, rather than somewhere else. I’m confident that Google can’t do anything genuinely shitty with my data without also pissing off millions of people more powerful than myself.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

prince707 7y ago

It's surprising to see LineageOS listed in the repository. It relies on several Google services, even if you are not using Google Play services, and doesn't even include microG. For instance it is using: - google servers for connectivity check - google server for ipV4/ipV6 check - google NTP servers - google DNS servers - google search engine by default and all the default apps like calendar etc. are fully oriented against google services. I think LineageOS should definitely be considered from removal, though it's a nice project and a great playground for ROM hackers.

megaraid999 7y ago
Couldn't agree more...

kureikain 7y ago

I used Youtube Red for video without ads and google one membership which give me 1TB for evertyhing: photos, docs, drive for up to 5 people. I'm very happy with it. But I read so many stories about people getting banned by google. Recently someone got ban because they used Apple Card. I'm a bit worry about getting block by google photos as well. Anyone know something that cheap as google photo? Basically it gives everyone in family 1TB

DavideNL 7y ago
It's cheap because you're paying with your privacy. If you don't want to pay with your privacy you'll have to pay with money... choose between the 2, it's that simple.

wewegogo 7y ago

How about having your cake and eating it too by using google for the free storage but encrypting everything that sits on their servers: https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator

amai 7y ago

See also https://nomoregoogle.com/ https://nomoregoogle.com/ .

luord 7y ago

My very first step to get rid of Google would be finding a stock android phone with an update schedule as good as the pixel. So far I'm yet to find a convincing candidate, but if someone here can recommend one such phone, that doesn't require my bothering with rooting, and that is expected to be maintained, I'd really appreciate it. Well, I guess I can get an iPhone if I ever get really serious about ditching Google, but for now I don't hate them enough to move on from Android.

gwenzek 7y ago

There is also the Framasoft effort: https://framasoft.org/en/#dio https://framasoft.org/en/#dio