
Cutting Google out of your life (2019) - yarapavan
https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle
======
dempedempe
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.

~~~
elagost
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-...](https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-
impact/)

~~~
tyingq
Yandex might be a niche choice, if your main worry is "5/9 Eyes". Free, even
to bring your own domain.

~~~
Kye
Some of what I want to send and receive by email might be considered illegal
in Russia, so that's a hard no. I don't trust Russia's legal system to
interpret the law in my favor. Does, for example, this email receipt for a
book about a bi football player figuring out his sexuality count as
propaganda? I wouldn't risk it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law)

~~~
sjwright
Do you fear the Russian legal system though? Are you really doing anything so
controversial that you’d motivate Russian Intelligence to care about a
foreigner?

~~~
im3w1l
I'd be more concerned about being blackmailed by Russian intelligence
services.

~~~
sjwright
To what end? Seems like a lot of work for a tiny return relative to the size
of their Government.

~~~
im3w1l
Not blackmail in the sense of "give us money". Think more "do us a favor".

~~~
blaser-waffle
"hey let us log into your digital ocean instance every once in a while. we'll
even reimburse you for the VMs..."

------
gitgud
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
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.

~~~
WorldMaker
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.

~~~
jlarocco
I do like Bing's "Bird's Eye View", but I have to disagree about their Street
View coverage.

Here in Colorado, for example, Bing Maps doesn't cover anything in the western
half of the state, not even larger cities along the interstate, like Grand
Junction. Meanwhile, Google has Streetview imagery for practically every paved
road in the state, and even a lot of forest service roads in the middle of the
mountains. I know that's not a big deal for most people, but it's a huge use
case for me to help plan bike trips.

And Bing doesn't cover much, if anything, outside of the US.

------
jeena
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 ...

~~~
doctor_eval
Siri can control your smart home and doesn’t phone home (any more). You can
hook it up with a raspberry pi to control just about anything, including
generic zigbee devices.

~~~
jeena
Does the voice recognition work hands free? On phones the microphones were
never good enough to be used in the pocket or from a different room and I
don't want to hold my phone in ma hand just to turn on the lights.

Another problem is that it's as closed as googles eco system so I don't know
what they're doing behind the scenes anyway, if it's not free software then
what's the point switching from google to apple?

~~~
WorldMaker
Apple has a Home Hub device as well.

Also, as a new owner of an Apple Watch (had to back out of Fitbit now that
Google bought them, sigh, and this was the most interesting option), the Siri
integration with the Watch is fascinatingly better than I'd expect and made me
much more interested in using Siri more than I had before. The Dick Tracy-ness
of talking to an assistant on your wrist is amusing/fun in general, of course,
but so far I've been impressed with the range of both the microphone and
speaker for a wrist-worn device, and you don't _have_ to do the Dick Tracy
style arm raise (though of course, that doesn't necessarily stop you from
wanting to; the amusing long tail impact of old pop culture).

(I'm a pragmatist and don't hold closed ecosystems against them. I am on the
side that Apple seems more clear about seeing me as a customer than a product
or a black box source of data, and that's more than enough reason for me to
switch to them over Google [though in my case I was switching from Windows
Phone, RIP].)

------
mikedilger
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.

~~~
steelframe
You don't _have_ to use ReCaptcha. You just elect to do your business in
another way or with another company. For example, I was a lifelong member of a
regional bicycling club until they started trying to force me to solve
ReCaptchas whenever I'd need to log in to their web site, and they stopped
accepting membership dues and event registration fees by a check in the mail.
That was easy enough: I stopped giving them money, and I started self-
supporting on any ride events they held out on public roads. My kid's
pediatrician threw a ReCaptcha in my face after I entered all the information
to make an online payment. I closed the tab and sent them a check.

At first I got passive-aggressive about it. I would purposely fail the
ReCaptcha and then contact support to tell them it wasn't working. They'd
always provide a workaround. But then I realized it was easier just to stop
giving them my business. For me personally, so far it really hasn't been any
kind of big inconvenience.

~~~
Spooky23
There are states where paying your sales taxes for your business or performing
online DMV transactions require recaptcha.

------
dpcan
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
It does seem so much easier than a hundred different services.

------
hkai
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
Why trust a monopolist that makes its money using tracking when you can use
the alternatives from the list?

------
burgerzzz
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.

~~~
Daniel_sk
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
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.

------
prince707
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
Couldn't agree more...

------
seiferteric
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.

~~~
newscracker
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).

~~~
efiecho
But if privacy against state actors is a concern, I would recommend to just
encrypt your e-mails, then Fastmail would be as good as any of the other
services, but with the added merit of being in service for 20 years, so it
will not close down tomorrow, you never know with any of the others.

------
ironarm
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
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)

------
Maximus9000
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
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).

------
Spearchucker
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.

~~~
sjy
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.

------
luord
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
There is also the Framasoft effort:
[https://framasoft.org/en/#dio](https://framasoft.org/en/#dio)

------
kureikain
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
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.

------
coder1001
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
Why not both?

~~~
coder1001
Pretty sure you would have to cut more than Google to stop both?

------
amai
See also [https://nomoregoogle.com/](https://nomoregoogle.com/) .

------
wewegogo
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)

------
hardlianotion
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.

~~~
godelski
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
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
That's a good point. Thank you. But I'd argue that is a different point. Not a
*-eyes problem (though that is part of the issue), but rather a backdoor
problem. There's a degree of difference.

------
amelius
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
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
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
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.

------
wishinghand
Somewhat related, here's a site for switching to open source solutions:
[https://switching.software/](https://switching.software/)

------
rajhereiny
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.

------
crystaln
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
I use iCloud

~~~
crystaln
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.

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

~~~
darynaop
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
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.

------
larnmar
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.

------
ugotjelly
Question. Why?

~~~
lucb1e
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.

------
iamaelephant
> 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.

~~~
CharlesW
> _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
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.

