[HN Gopher] Cutting Google out of your life (2019)
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Cutting Google out of your life (2019)
Author : yarapavan
Score : 109 points
Date : 2020-01-05 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| hardlianotion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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
| godelski wrote:
| 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?
| Spearchucker wrote:
| 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.
| gitgud wrote:
| 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
| r00fus wrote:
| Liking this analogy - if we continue the logic - there is
| another property of plastic in that it's known to be toxic with
| mass consumption.
|
| Also would the advertising industry then be like
| oil/petrochemical complex?
| jlarocco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| coder1001 wrote:
| 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?!
| megous wrote:
| 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.
| avocado4 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| colordrops wrote:
| Why not both?
| coder1001 wrote:
| Pretty sure you would have to cut more than Google to stop
| both?
| Lammy wrote:
| One implies the other. How can they sell access to your
| eyeballs without surveilling you to study your
| likes/dislikes/habits/etc?
| mikedilger wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I try to avoid services which use ReCaptcha as much as I can.
| [deleted]
| burgerzzz wrote:
| 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.
| jchw wrote:
| Have you tried using Google Takeout? I have not but it claims
| it can export all of your photos/videos/etc. and is probably
| the sanctioned way to do this.
|
| The iOS app needs photos access because it is less a Google
| Photos client and more an alternative Photos app with Google
| Photos syncing/integration. I think it would not be ideal to
| use it if all you want is to export data.
|
| (Disclaimer: I currently work for Google.)
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > The iOS app needs photos access
|
| Unfortunately that's partly Apple to blame, as for the
| longest time it was an all or nothing permission, no option
| for write only access.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I exported all my Google photos with takeout recently. After
| around 70 hours I got a dump of 59 50GiB tgz files (format
| and size was my choice). I decided to have them sent to drive
| so I could sync them to a computer. It was a pretty pleasant
| experience, they even export metadata as json.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Google Captcha
|
| This one's scary from an infrastructure perspective. Way too
| many websites depend on Recaptcha, and an outage would be
| somewhat painful. There aren't tons of competitors, so with
| Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > There aren't tons of competitors,
|
| Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I
| believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent
| solution, even if for the traffic it fronts. They kind of
| have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such
| an offering.
| 0xEFF wrote:
| If you're on iOS how would the app download a photo without
| write access to photos?
| burgerzzz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hv42 wrote:
| I was going to suggest to use rclone to download everything,
| but it seems that they are a couple of limitations:
| https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#downloading-images
|
| Seems that using Google takeout is your best bet.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| pkaye wrote:
| Downloading as zip files worked for me. It produced a bunch
| of zip files each of 1GB size.
| jeena wrote:
| 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 ...
| weystrom wrote:
| RSS of my subscriptions into a youtube-dl script works well
| enough for me. You could also just watch YouTube with mpv.
| cycloptic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No, I've never noticed that. I don't try to access google
| or youtube directly through Tor. I just use those programs.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Could one use AWS AppStream [0] or Mighty [1] similar tech to
| proxy-view YouTube?
|
| [0] https://aws.amazon.com/appstream2/
|
| [1] https://mightyapp.com/
| Cilvic wrote:
| Maybe look into Jarvis an open source stt and home automation
| seiferteric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Just commented on this myself:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dempedempe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of
| Protonmail have some dubious ties
|
| 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/
| elagost wrote:
| Fastmail is great, but as this list is supposed to be "privacy
| focused", Fastmail (company from Australia) is not a good
| alternative. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-
| law-global-...
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