Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. FastMail seems to be the worst of all. Migadu seems to be good but an extremely bad value for your $.
Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services. Don't let any marketing fool you.
I'd rather be in iron clad hands of Google's engineering and security practices than a 30 people company with no fricking clue about security. This is often not part of the discussion.
Regarding your counterpoint, I disagree. It's not about ProtonMail claims of encryption or security or anything, it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail services and not advertising, and they have no incentive (nor the technical expertise in-house) to read your e-mails for advertising purposes. Furthermore, ProtonMail and all these other services only get a part of your data, so even if they do use your data nefariously, it's better for each one to misuse a separate chunk of it than for one entity to have all of it.
Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?
Another counterpoint to my original post is - you can call someone at ProtonMail, can't do that with Google.
You list a bunch of services Google provide for that $5 and yes, no doubt you can extract good value if you want to use all those things, and also don't mind relinquishing privacy for the content you choose to put on there. FWIW Gsuite is more like $7/m where I am.
For me personally, you can list those bunch of things and gmail is the only really useful, day to day tool - mainly because their spam filtering is better than most. Essentially that's where the only value is, for me.
Also bear in mind Google's history of retiring products, hardly 'iron clad' reliability.
For me, their lack of privacy ethos compounds the problem of them having a monopoly on search, and to a large extent information discovery. That, alongside their huge reach in how they can gather information on people to aid advertising, via Chrome, Android, DNS, analytics... that huge list. Sleep walking into a society where a handful of large corps know everything about you isn't necessary.
And the concept that there is only a single company in the world that knows a thing about security seems deluded to me.
There are no links to sources, there's no evidence presented, there's nothing to dispute. There's no substance to this comment.
Hacker News has a bias towards Google because Google offers a bunch of services for free that are useful to HN's audience, so HN users would rather not have reasons not to use Google services, which is why comments like this get upvoted, despite their lack of substance.
There are multiple threads every single week that get hundreds of upvotes for criticizing Google. I think Hacker News is heterogeneous enough on this that "bias towards Google" is an overstatement.
...
> Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services. Don't let any marketing fool you.
You also don't get any useful customer service for that $5. I know companies that charge less but provide customer service. So what you value isn't what others may value.
At the very least, if you use providers other than Google, you can decentralize it. You can give one company your search history and a different company your emails. Even if both companies are equal to Google in terms of privacy, you still end up with better overall privacy because tehy can't join the two datasets.
> ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general).
Can you back that up with some references? I live in Switzerland and Swiss data protection law is certainly better than American.
- Reader, possibly to make room for Google+
- and then Google+
- etc
You also forgot how they'll ban you from accessing your own paid account, and there won't even be a sham trial or even a kangaroo court, just an automatic death sentence for your data.
Seriously: Google has earned the distrust they are now facing. They have dug this hole
- one shady tactic at a time
- one let down at a time
- one deal with China at a time
- etc
until even former fan boys like me become happy every time I see Google in hot water.
@Googlers: nothing against most of you as individuals. Hope you get well paid and good jobs when Google has to cut. (Except those who think it is OK to use search as a playground for wacky AI experiments, those who implement rules to punish logged in Firefox users with Captchas etc :-)
Customer here. What have I missed?
This is the kind of nonsense comment that ends up being used as the moral justification engineers need to build these privacy invading services.
People are entitled to their own privacy, end of story.
The thing is, if you're concerned about a state agency, you have bigger issues. If all you're after is "I don't want to give Google my money", FastMail is pretty good - and to boot they're one of the few with a still working push notification certificate for Mac Mail.app users, I believe.
Email is a lost cause. Just choose the one that sucks the least, and don't do important things on it.
There was another highly voted post on HN that compared all services (except Migadu) just last month, I can't find it.
If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed to the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few countries and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and works more on).
> and still a little YouTube (anonymously in a Firefox container)
If a Firefox Container is an option, then I'd rather prefer Startpage to DDG for search. Most of the time, I end up performing the search on DDG at least twice (the second time with a bang command to go to Startpage or Google) or I have a heuristic that DDG won't help and just go to the other search engines.
> DNS → Cloudflare DNS
Others to consider are Quad9 (9.9.9.9) and NextDNS (if you want ad and tracker blocking lists to be configured at the DNS level, sorta like a Pi-Hole, but on the cloud).
> I feel like I've won a lot by doing all this. I own my data now, so Google can't arbitrarily take it away from me, which gives me peace of mind. I'm no longer part of their ad ecosystem, being tracked all around the internet and having my attention sold to the highest bidder.
The "Google can't arbitrarily take it away" is a good argument, but "I'm no longer part of their ad ecosystem, being tracked all around the internet" requires a lot more effort than just avoiding using google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com, etc. I'm not saying that the current transitions are useless, but that there's more to it.
Try https://satellites.pro/plan/world_map# - you can switch between Apple Maps, OSM, Mapbox, Google Maps, Yandex and Esri
But anyway, I didn't realise how bad Apple Maps was. It's miles away from OSM and even from Google Maps, at least in the places I looked up in France (so not like in remote areas of Mali or the Amazon forest).
I like DDG, but for many things it's still not good enough.
This becomes much easier with uMatrix + uBlock Origin extensions for Firefox!
All that said, I’m optimistic and hope they move in that direction.
Yeah this is fair! I don't want to give the impression that this is all it takes to get Google to stop stalking you. But I do think it at least helps. I found a lot of the chatter in the de-googling community to a bit purist and defeatist at times, but maybe I went too far the other way, here. I want to encourage people to do the same without thinking it's all hopeless or doesn't make any impact because Google's gonna get you one way or another, but I also don't want to paint an unrealistic picture, as if this is all it takes to wash our hands of Google's reach.
I updated the post to reflect this.
I too actually want to use certain software from Apple, I just refuse to use it on Mac as me and the Mac WM keep talking past each other :-)
After reading up on it, okay, I get that those upstream forwarding resolvers will be faster due to being geographically distributed and having a huge number of users (== very current cache), but man. Seemed to be defeating half the point.
I'm using the supported Unbound config now, but.. still surprised it's not the default.
It may actually be more private to use a public resolver (with DoT or DoH of course) that will know your IP address but maybe not directly tie it to your identity (like an ISP does). Also, imo they generally have better privacy policies than ISPs (not that I trust those but still).
The next more private options include using DNS over Tor or Oblivious DNS (https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/). Those options are better for privacy, but I don't see them are default (at least for now) as they imply some slowness (Tor) or are more opinionated (ODNS).
Even after all that, your browser will leak the SNI header in clear-text (eSNI isn't popular yet) so your ISP can still get the precise name of the site you want to visit.
For me "offline" doesn't mean "requires network connectivity and mandatory updates within the the next thirty days."
If apple would have done that (for Maps and other services), how would it be different than Google?
Google offers these services for free to the end-user and generates revenue from ads.
Apple is using these services to sell more hardware devices, and generates revenue from there.
We pay them with our data. It’s an exchange of services.
The only real solution is self-hosting[1], which is becoming a bit difficult with email these days.
[1] No, a rented server in some datacenter is not self-hosting, self-hosting is when you can walk into a room and point to the box that stores your mail.
One of my fears is that as soon as you outsource hardware maintenance, then employees who were good at this sort of thing lose much of their value, either in their own head, or in the group consensus. They start to wander off to work for other companies, and you quickly lose critical mass. Once that happens, the quality of advice you get for architectural proposals degrades, and your number of stupid design mistakes notches up considerably.
These people also provide a lot of your 'informed consumer' qualities. They can explain why you shouldn't have to pay $1000 a month for a service.
I've seen this play out a couple of times. It's too slow to be called a train wreck. It's like watching erosion take out beautiful house. You can enjoy it for a while, but eventually it starts to sag and then fall apart. Slowly at first and then all at once.
It is though. Don't be elitist.
If my ISP wasn’t so aggressive with sending mail, I would’ve just self hosted on my own computer.
However, mailinabox also comes with nextcloud, and it works out of the box with exchange activesync, allowing me to basically mimic gmail’s syncing of calendar/contacts/etc. I made the switch about a year ago, it took registering two domains (one for the actual mail server and one for <lastname>.com) and paying for the VPS, plus all the overhead of initial configuration, but it has been smooth sailing since. My email is happily firstname@lastname.com to the public and private@mailserver.tld for private stuff- it even supports the firstne+string@lastname.com.
At the end of the day, this is probably the best someone can reasonably do. Then it’s just ddg and Apple Maps.
I ran my own business email for a while in a DigitalOcean VPS, but it was a huge pain. I did it all by hand though, I should give mailinabox a try.
I'm willing to be the other services have similar situations where you might as well just pay someone to do it for you. $160 to not have to maintain a server room seems like a nice deal to me.
Still there's a huge gap between "might do that according to the contract" and "does so on a regular basis and is well known to have no official way to appeal".
And with edge-case, I don't meen technical ones only, but also customer-support ones.. If you've got support for many more people, then more people are going to have a bad experience, and even more likely that someone has a rare (in percent of total experiences) terrible one.
I'm the one entirely against any cloud stuff, I just don't buy the argument that other providers are necessarily better. The bigger you are, the more interactions you do with your clients, the more likely that you will mess it up big-time for some of them.
You are right that self-hosting means that your data sits on your devices, and this should be made possible to most users without having to pay 3rd party services, buy domains, pay for VPSes and learn to manage servers.
(edit: hah, the downvotes are coming already!)
I suspect otherwise. DDG is as good as Google in certain topics, especially programming-related topics. But otherwise, not so good. Sometimes, it feels like it simply has indexed less pages than Google.
But I still use DDG as much as possible, only !g when the results are unsatisfactory. I don't know how much it actually help DDG, though, since it doesn't seem to get much better over the past few years.
The main problem seems to be that Google will no longer surface anything that isn't on a major site, so even when you know that the thing you're looking for exists, it can't find it. Obviously this also implies that it's missing a ton of stuff you didn't know existed but would have wanted to see.
I like this search engine very much. It has all the "alternative" stuff.
Would you mind sharing a few tips (or pointing me in the direction of some tips) for better DDG searches?
I love the concept and philosophy of DDG but the search results I get could definitely be better!
Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite (as I mentioned in another comment here). In general searches, DDG and Google return about equally good results, with 10% of the time DDG doing better and 10% of the time Google doing better. With programming-related searches, Google is pretty much guaranteed to return better results for me. Doing the Advent of Code 2020 was the first time in months that I had to consistently do `!g` re-searches, because DDG results were significantly worse.
It was most useful for cleaning up the horror show that is YouTube recommendations if random YouTube videos from searches and chat recommendations don't get tracked to my logged in account. There's still a ton of noise in the recommendations engine and I will never trust auto-play again, but I'm having to block and/or report fewer channels and I don't automatically shudder just seeing the recommendations column show up above the fold anymore (though I still tend to prefer browser widths that drop recommendations below the video I'm watching because what a waste of space that is).
I have seen this work more than once.
Never use my own Gmail account for work. Or my own FB account for that matter!
I don’t need FB locking my account as it’s connected to some clients dodgy FB ads :-/
Email - 1$
Calendar - 1$
Document Collab - 1$
Each addon a calculated minimalist approach to each. I still recall what gmail was when it was invite only back in the early aughts. I would still utilize that gmail client. I do NOT need gmail as it is today. And I would certainly pay 1$ per month for that service.
(E) For a minimal and basic interface, along with a low cost, I and certainly others that I know who are tech illiterate, would pay that low cost for simplicity + privacy.
You'll get wrecked. But there's good business in it if I'm wrong. So I wish you good luck.
They're likely able to do so because it entrenches their existing profitable businesses. It's unlikely that $12/year per account will be break-even, let alone profitable, as a standalone business.
There's also Tutanota with a €12/year plan, offering a little bit less but with end-to-end encrypted email and calendars.
[1] https://mailbox.org/en/services#e-mail-account [2] https://tutanota.com/pricing/
OSM would be a better solution.
If only an email service as good as Gmail existed anywhere on this planet :(
Edit: I checked, the OSM wiki actually has a page about it [1]
After doing some basic A/B testing (checking Google Maps, Waze and Apple Maps for routing guidance) and establishing that Apple Maps has been giving me earlier arrival times through different routing guidance (and actually delivering on that earlier arrival time, by means of actually using it), I've determined that's less likely to be true, if you're in a city that has been refreshed recently.
Combined with the (potentially anti-competitive) use of private APIs on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, enabling the phone lockscreen to always display routing guidance, and the watch to provide haptic feedback for routing guidance, Apple Maps has become a superior experience as far as driving goes.
This is all if you're already a sucker in their eco-system, and happen to live in a city they care about, which I am.
EDIT: At the same time..
> Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face.
If you're taking this from the perspective of moving from one megacorp to another, rather than quality of service, then yes, there's basically no difference here. Apple today is claiming to care, in a similar manner to Google's old mission statement of "dont be evil". Apple have been pretty clear that their interest in your privacy only extends as far as lip service goes, given the lack of E2E encryption on iCloud storage for the majority of your data.
2 decades ago Google was "don't be evil" and here we are today. Where do we think Apple will be in a decade or two from now?
So yes, in that respect, don't stab yourself in the face, and don't use any megacorp products.
Respect for user privacy is going to have to come from regulation.
Office 365, which is Microsoft Exchange under the hood?
Limitations
Downloading Images
When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location (according to the docs and my tests). This is a limitation of the Google Photos API and is covered by bug #112096115.
The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort Downloading Videos
When videos are downloaded they are downloaded in a really compressed version of the video compared to downloading it via the Google Photos web interface. This is covered by bug #113672044.
I stumbled on a new project which simulates a browser download using a headless Chrome Developer tools session[0]. Looks interesting, supports continuation and can be ran on a cron job. Worth a look.
Surprisingly, the Takeout split archives can contain partial contents for a given folder or album. If you extract everything into a single merged root, you'll see both the sidecars and images in the same directory.
If you're on macOS or Linux, you can do this by mounting the tarballs with ratarmount and skip the extraction step. Details and links here: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/archive-file-format-compr...
Of course, at that point you are just trading opt-out Google tracking for opt-in Bing tracking, and that may defeat some of the reasoning behind why you are using VPN for those searches. I find Bing ads and Bing tracking far less problematic and insidious than Google's, so it's an interesting trade off, for sure. One interesting part of the trade off that Google doesn't match (neither opt-out nor opt-in tracking) is "Microsoft Rewards" where Bing gives you a small cut of tracked ad fees in "rewards points" (like credit card/frequent flyer "mileage" programs) that you can redeem for things like gift cards. Sure, it's a cynical loyalty grab, but at least for me it shows that Microsoft still prefers to be a product company at the end of the day and is a little less likely to fall into the evil opt-out only panopticon tracking ad direction that Google has. Obviously other people's opinions vary, and many are loathe to trust Microsoft, but it's an interesting trade-off to be aware of.
Do you mean it's good for tech searches? That would be good news, because those are pretty much the only searches DDG uniformly performs badly on, for me - the only searches where I know that a `!g` would improve the results significantly. Perhaps it should be a `!b` instead now, I'll try it out.
But this is how you try making something new to eventually work, and maybe even become the polished "best available".
I'm planning on setting up my own nextcloud server, and they also have their own file manager system (Nextcloud Files), which is great for keeping files in sync across devices.
And although it's nice to edit a text file that's stored on a cloud server from any of your devices, I want to be able to use more powerful desktop applications to edit/organize other files. e.g. beets for music, digikam for bulk organizing the directory structure of my photos. Darktable for editing photos.
Does anyone know of a workflow that lets me do all the organizing/editing on a desktop, but still keep it all in sync with my other devices via a cloud server?
However I should clarify: One of the reasons I want to move my data to a cloud server is that I am running out of space for more hard drives on my PC.
So syncthing will work for editing stuff on my local and syncing the changes with my cloud server. But I don't want to store all my data on cloud _and_ on my local PC. I want something where it is usually stored on the cloud server, but where I can bulk edit/organize the data selectively on my local machine.
There are actually much cheaper VPS providers than Linode. Check out lowendbox.com for deals. I've had a Linode for years and it's completely underwhelming for the cost. I'd try out multiple different cheaper VPS providers instead, maybe even use multiple for redundancy at the same cost as Linode.
If you take a stand against Google's societal impact, why switch to CloudFlare? CloudFlare's 'content neutral' stance enables a lot of hate speech and other, more disgusting material.
It seems odd to have ethical concerns about Google, but not CloudFlare.
I find it extremely hard to be an ethical consumer these days and honestly just get burnt out learning about all the horrible things people and companies with lots of money get away with, so I need to pace myself and take it in manageable doses. I will spend some time learning about Cloudflare this year.
They have online chat support, so I tried that. I got routed to a sales rep who called me on the phone and who, after taking all my information while basically ignoring my question, finally heard me. She didn't know the answer.
She sent me a support link which was the same one that routed me to her. I told her this and all she could say was she was sorry and she couldn't help unless I was ready to launch a campaign.
I honestly don't think she knew anything. I'm suspicious that these are indy workers getting routed prospects by Google. I don't know. The whole thing was sleazy.
Years ago when I managed to get someone on the line she stayed with me until my problem was solved. And this wasn't even a problem (or maybe it was? wouldn't be the first bug I found on their site). I was just asking a question.
Google Keep -> Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/)
I tried a lot of note taking apps and liked this one for its simplicity (just markdown) and cross platform support. Then just store sync it all either via boxcryptor or nextcloud.
The internet is rotten with linked media, amp pages, blogs, and ads hosted on Google servers.
If you want off Google, you should use something like Pi-hole to lessen that. Since it's DNS level only, I imagine even that won't make you invisible to Google.
This was a great read, but Google has a million other ways to collect data about you, against your will. That deserves a mention.
I wonder if youtube-dl really helps ? It doesn't change the IP, you can refuse/clear cookies in your browser, and for fingerprinting, isn't scraping via youtube-dl make you even more unique among other regular browser users ?
A) IP - use a VPN. youtube-dl == browser
B) Cookies - youtube-dl doesn't retain cookies, I presume. youtube-dl >= browser
C) Fingerprinting - good question. I'd hope youtube-dl doesn't offer as many avenues. Can it identify you from one visit to the next? Beats me!
It seems as though there's no way to break this voluntary-monopoly. Waze came along with brilliant innovations like BLE devices monitoring traffic in underpasses etc. (my company makes some of the devices they use) and finding best alternative routes, and an innovative UX, so Google simply bought them, problem solved.
There's a whole menagerie of alternatives to Youtube, but they're like ants next to an elephant. And of course, Youtube itself was bought by Google; they've advanced it technically, but it was better in the old days, less censorship and better remuneration for creators.
Like a lot of other techies, I've switched to DDG for searches and I don't really miss Google search. Probably I use !g about once or twice a month.
It seems to me there's lots of opportunities to improve on Google's offerings; Apple seems uninterested in competing head-to-head aside from its mobile phone OS, but there are still innovations out there waiting to be discovered. Perhaps some here will be among those future billionaires, giving us better alternatives to The Goog which in my opinion has gotten a little too big for its britches.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple keep nibbling at Google's software business as it transitions more fully to an added-value services model. Little moves like Apple Music on android, Apple TV+ on Android-based TVs... One could see a similar play occurring with fitness, books, and maybe even maps in the services-centric Apple future.
It's better for sure, just from trying a couple (OpenDns, cloudflare, quad9) I really love the offering from nextDNS
It somewhat smashes together the features of pi-hole and opendns with the features like DoT or DoH as you get in cloudflare
Email and search are easy, email is standard so anyone can do the same features more or less. Search has no lock-in so you can just try whatever. Photos doesn't seems to be either, and I don't personally want to invest the time to try them all.
HERE Maps is good.
As developers we understand the most how privacy is violated across the Internet. If we can’t contribute to the change in the ecosystem, we don’t have much hope for the rest of the industry.
EG.: one of gmails main selling points always was the „available anywhere“ web interface and its quick, and useful search.
Same on the desktop we have MS, Apple.
Yes Linux (variations) are available on both, more so on desktop, but not a real possibility for most consumes.
IMO paying money and thus enabling humane businesses to thrive is key.
For anyone looking for a simple self-hosted file sync system I'd recommend Seafile though. It has delta sync (like Dropbox) and great performance. I finally switched to it after years of increasing frustration with Nextcloud, which has none of these things.
All of Google’s unethical practices are supported by its advertising business, so the only replacement I will consider is the search engine, but even here there are no good alternatives.
I can't find Apple maps in the play store. Is there another alternative?
