I switched from google search to duckduckgo. I still hit an occasional search on google but that's a percentile of the searches they got from me before that decision.
I host my own mail server. Yes I still have that gmail account for stuff that are not important enough to migrate and look it up from time to time but the majority of my personal email traffic now goes through my own server. They still get some of my mail if the recipient is a gmail account but guess what? It's not all of my mail.
I don't host files on Dropbox or the Google drive. I have my own owncloud server on the same box as the mail server.
I host my own jabber server for real time chat - mostly with my wife as a lot of people no longer use anything except google/facebook chats. I talk on IRC with tech friends/work, jabber for personal stuff and once in a blue moon I open up that g+ chat to check if someone wanted something from me.
I do my backups on tarsnap, feels great.
I run Linux for my work machine and OpenBSD for my private machine.
I do have an Android phone but I essentially stopped carrying it with me everywhere. I hate being a slave of the phone, no longer have a mobile data plan and I take the phone with me only when I really need to be reached.
Does Google know a lot about me? Yes. Are they still learning more from people I communicate with? Yes. The point is, they are getting less information. I already noticed a large quality drop in the accuracy of google searches/youtube recommendations for my account.
Side effect from all of this is that people in my close circle of friends tend to pick up some of the habits (duckduckgo & other small bits). You don't take down a giant with one stroke, you cut it up piece by piece.
> I switched from google search to duckduckgo. I still hit an occasional search on google but that's a percentile of the searches they got from me before that decision.
You can use !s in duckduckgo to use startpage instead of duckduckgo, so you end up with google's results but avoid the privacy leak (so long as you trust ddg and sp).
> I don't host files on Dropbox or the Google drive. I have my own owncloud server on the same box as the mail server.
I prefer syncthing, and it's easier to stay on the local network. ownCloud has lots of features, but it's overkill if you only need a dropbox clone.
> I do have an Android phone but I essentially stopped carrying it with me everywhere. I hate being a slave of the phone, no longer have a mobile data plan and I take the phone with me only when I really need to be reached.
No longer have a mobile data plan either, that just means I read my emails and hn a bit less. Cyanogenmod seems to be a big improvement over plain Android privacy-wise.
> I already noticed a large quality drop in the accuracy of google searches/youtube recommendations for my account.
What do you need a google account for?
Also I don't know if companies are legally entitled to gather personal information based on ip addresses, but I use Tor Browser as my default browser so I don't feel threatened by that. On the whole the situation could easily improve if gmail actually had a proper competitor.
> You can use !s in duckduckgo to use startpage instead of duckduckgo, so you end up with google's results but avoid the privacy leak (so long as you trust ddg and sp).
Actually, the reason Google search results are better is because they profile you and can relate the term to your usual searches. I doubt using sp would yield better results but no I didn't try.
> I prefer syncthing, and it's easier to stay on the local network. ownCloud has lots of features, but it's overkill if you only need a dropbox clone.
Thanks for mentioning syncthing. I don't remember why I crossed it off back then. Will give it a second look. Might be hard since ownnote got my wife off evernote so that's one big plus in favour of ownCloud.
> No longer have a mobile data plan either, that just means I read my emails and hn a bit less. Cyanogenmod seems to be a big improvement over plain Android privacy-wise.
The amount of work required to root the phone seems absurd to me. People say it's frictionless but all the materials I found on it so far didn't convince me yet to try. I might just be getting a dumb phone tbh as my next phone.
> What do you need a google account for?
Like I mentioned. Locked in by some people who refuse to use anything else. Partially work hangout chats included. Consider it a leftover that I log in from time to time to use a one off feature.
> Also I don't know if companies are legally entitled to gather personal information based on ip addresses, but I use Tor Browser as my default browser so I don't feel threatened by that. On the whole the situation could easily improve if gmail actually had a proper competitor.
There's a bigger problem. There are a few corporate players (apple, microsoft, google, facebook) which amount to almost all routed email. If they decide to drop email to your host you are essentially blocked from contacting them. They also don't play nice with spamd type daemons since they use an MX pool to deliver it. They could essentially kill all of us running home email servers in one go, that's why it's important for people to run their own. I hope someone won't look at a spreadsheet one day and say 'ok, it's now not a loss for us to ignore traffic from those guys/gals'. Think that won't happen? There was a time when you could use jabber to talk with people on google talk. Now there's no federation.
Aren't you worried about your data security? Yep, you've great skills but in the end, ports are open and software needs to be trusted (although it cannot really be trusted). Should I really expose an ownCloud installation to the Internet?
Yes I am worried, and not extremely happy about ownCloud. I was thinking about limiting access to it to my home IP but that limits the usability of sharing a link to some pictures etc with friends.
Don't get me wrong. The whole setup is both a burden & a liability as suddenly I am responsible for stuff that was done for me (security upgrades, proper configuration, monitoring, backups). That's the price I decided to pay for the ability to learn and control my own privacy. I may wake up to a hacked server - that's true. On the other hand I could wakeup to Google banning my account, then what?
I'm more worried about the centralization of the Internet. That's why I run my own servers (web, email, dns and FTP) and don't rely upon other companies to host my data.
I switched from google search to duckduckgo. I still hit an occasional search on google but that's a percentile of the searches they got from me before that decision.
I host my own mail server. Yes I still have that gmail account for stuff that are not important enough to migrate and look it up from time to time but the majority of my personal email traffic now goes through my own server. They still get some of my mail if the recipient is a gmail account but guess what? It's not all of my mail.
I don't host files on Dropbox or the Google drive. I have my own owncloud server on the same box as the mail server.
I host my own jabber server for real time chat - mostly with my wife as a lot of people no longer use anything except google/facebook chats. I talk on IRC with tech friends/work, jabber for personal stuff and once in a blue moon I open up that g+ chat to check if someone wanted something from me.
I do my backups on tarsnap, feels great.
I run Linux for my work machine and OpenBSD for my private machine.
I do have an Android phone but I essentially stopped carrying it with me everywhere. I hate being a slave of the phone, no longer have a mobile data plan and I take the phone with me only when I really need to be reached.
Does Google know a lot about me? Yes. Are they still learning more from people I communicate with? Yes. The point is, they are getting less information. I already noticed a large quality drop in the accuracy of google searches/youtube recommendations for my account.
Side effect from all of this is that people in my close circle of friends tend to pick up some of the habits (duckduckgo & other small bits). You don't take down a giant with one stroke, you cut it up piece by piece.