The Road to a less Google life. Help!

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Email: (biggest change for me) ProtonMail or Tutanota.

If you’re going to have someone else host it for you, consider Librem.one and Kolab Now as well.

I personally like that both of them rely entirely on self-hostable FOSS for their stuff. You get the convenience of having someone else run your mail, but if their service quality doesn’t meet your expectations, you can take it with you. Not just the mail (which should be portable no matter what), but the software you’ve gotten used to. Very handy for non-mail niceties like contacts management and calendar, which don’t have a quarantee of a portable format across providers.

Honorable mention to Mail-in-a-Box if you go the self-hosting route. Ultimately, that’s what I did because I ran into a limitation with all of the hosted accounts…

I generate a unique email address and password for every account I create, and just alias all of those to a single main email address. Effectively, I only have one mailbox, but none of the plans I’ve investigated work well for that use case. Limits to the number of aliases you can create (or worse, charging aliases as users) becomes cost prohibitive very quickly.

Browser: I plan to use both Firefox and Brave. […] How many browser do you use?

Three.

FIrefox ESR is my primary browser, which is fairly locked down and highly customized for me.

Chromium is my “clean test” browser. With the exception of uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere (managed by my OS), it’s completely stock. When Firefox gives me issues, I’ll fire up Chromium to see if it’s any better and figure out what is failing in Firefox.

Tor Browser is my “sketchy links and unknown sources” browser. The last thing I opened with it was a link for a game-related app sent to me in-game by someone I didn’t know. My suspicions that it was a scam where high, so I used Tor for it.

Search: DuckdDuckGo or Startpage?

DDG.

Startpage probably takes privacy and security more seriously, but DuckDuckGo has an amazingly handy set of features: bangs.

Password Managers: For this one I have no idea. Is it worth it?

Yes.

https://keepassxc.org/

Bonus – News: I’ve been getting all of my news reading from Google Discover and damn I must say they do a good job at it. But with that said can you recommend any good privacy oriented news aggregation services or websites?

Roll your own using RSS.

YouTube channels are also RSS feeds, so you can “subscribe” to your favorite channels using RSS without actually visiting youtube.com.

Pair RSS feeds with youtube-dl and you can avoid a lot of interaction with Google on the video front.

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This entire post is scarily similar to my setup.

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My recommendations/setup:

  • Mail: Tutanota. It works great, has an Android App, works with regular mail Programs etc. I had some personal problems with ProtonMail. Both are options, i just prefer Tutanota if “I need 100% encryption security etc.” isn’t priority number one.
    For switching: Keep your GMail account and make a rule to forward all mail to your new address. That way you are still reachable through the old address and you can start switching things to the new adress one by one. It’s also a great opportunity to get rid of adds and newsletters on the new address.
  • Search: DDG. For years. It’s great. I haven’t used google search in forever if just because of the instant results and cheatsheets you often get from DDG.
  • Browser: Firefox. I tried others. In the end i always come back because of the extension ecosystem and because it just works. Yeah, others have some nice features, but in the end i don’t use any of those.
  • Password Manager: Lastpass. Get one. It doesn’t matter which one. I recommend to choose one that’s available on as many platforms as possible. Makes it less likely for you to skip using it. Lastpass is my personal choice, but there are other great options.
  • Google Drive: Depends. If it’s just for having files in multiple places, i use sync.com. It works great, is end-to-end encrypted and prices are reasonable. If you need to full online office stuff, Office365 is compelling. Nextcloud on your own Server is an option too or Dropbox. This highly depends on your needs though. I have GDrive for some documents and sync.com for larger amounts of data.
  • All the small stuff: Things like navigation and such. There are options, but i found that for certain things, google’s products plain are the best. I still use maps because of supperior traffic planning. Waze is an option there.
    Youtube doesn’t have an alternative really.
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I might have taken photos during my countless trips to China but pretty sure I didn’t upload any of it. So If anything its most probably the GPS. But still, they manage to get all those info even without any live data in a country where the said services aren’t even available.

Thanks. I’ll definitely check out some password managers.

I’ll probably skip self-hosting as that is just too much work for me.

Oh cool stuff, didn’t know that. Thanks

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Great tip. I will definitely do this.

Yes, I agree. As I said at the beginning. I just wanna be less reliant on Google and its services. I’ll still use YouTube, Maps, Translate cuz theirs is just better than everyone else and I believe changing those 3 (email, browser and search engine) will lessen the direct infos they get from me.

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Totally. I just looked into my Data and all they have from me is my Maps entrys (searches and navigation) and the stuff from when firefox defaults to Google Search.
You can also set up for them to automatically delete everything older than 3 months. Keeps data to a minimum without impacting your use of the services at all.

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Waze is google.

Navigation is always going to include some data sharing these days I guess the question comes down to who to share it with. You could go for a dedicated device.

If you want to put in the work you can use and improve open street map but these days they seem to be a service for collecting user data to sell to other companies to sell back to you than an actual open platform with a good app.

Here maps? Is that still a thing?

I don’t know about android but on iOS there’s a shortcut that will download videos locally so you can watch at your convenience ad free.

I’ve seen that there’s actually a few other translation services out there that have good reviews. I don’t use I enough to really have looked at them myself though.

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Keepass has some extensions that allows you to read the passwords DB from cloud storage. If you use a key file and a password you can safely store the database on the cloud, the key locally and access all your passwords whenever you need them. I think it’s worth having a password manager.

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I gave up on going Google less, but I did go into the privacy and security settings, where they do allow you to customize your settings quite a bit.

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I’ve been using ProtonMail for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it. I actually like the interface much more than Gmail. I have the lowest tier payment plan to show some support. Plus if you pay you get multiple addresses, so I have my name as one of them as a professional email and for sites that require a real name to sign up, and then I have my leet haxor address for sites that don’t require me to tie my name to them.

Just keep in mind it’s basically web only. There is no native client for Mac, Windows, or Linux. It can be set up in a third party client like Mail (on Mac), and I had it working that way at one point, but I found that using it in browser is so much more simple that I don’t bother with Mail any more.

I use DDG. SP is better than Google, but I’d rather use a completely separate search engine that doesn’t rely on Google. Basically the same reasoning behind browser choice. I go with Firefox. If you want a more stripped-down version then use Waterfox. Mozilla has been known for adding some questionable (but not necessarily bad) features into their browsers. Waterfox is supposed to basically be like vanilla Firefox and you can add your own extensions instead of having to disable stuff that Firefox packs in by default.

Very quick summary of the two I have experience with:

  • Bitwarden - Fast, simple, cheap, works on everything. Premium is $10 a year.

  • Dashlane - More features, but slow (mostly just due to animations they add in to make it feel like it’s doing more) and expensive. Premium starts at $60 a year.

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I’ve been looking around for a long time for navigation too and finally settled on MagicEarth.
I wanted something that is OSM based but could still have proper Traffic Alerts. And I also wanted Online Maps (i.e. download as I go and not having to download a ridiculous amount of maps that I probably don’t need anyway). OSMAnd doesn’t work for that. You “can” get online maps to run, but then navigation doesn’t work properly (it needs the map data to find the route obviously). And OSMAnd’s Interface is also just too complicated in comparison (an issue that a lot of OpenSource stuff has). Traffic also isn’t a thing on OSMAnd from what I’ve seen. I then tried skobbler (now Scout), which… “worked”, but hasn’t seen development for 2 years or so. They are missing simple features like adding a stop on the road so that’s a nono. I wouldn’t have minded paying for the Traffic, but with no development in sight I don’t see why I would pay for it.
Anyway though, TL;DR;. MagicEarth has both online maps (even vector based like Google, so it doesn’t eat all the data), and traffic announcement (and circumvention), radar warner, speed limits. All the nice little things really. When I started using it, it still used Facebook Analytics, which wasn’t great, but compromises need to be made. Also the traffic to facebook could probably be locked down if wanted. But, as of now it isn’t using any known trackers on Exodus.
And if you ask “well how do they fund that stuff”, well they sell that navigation software to car companies, and also various accessories for the Apple crowd, so I imagine it’s fine.

If the goal is not to give everyone your location data, no. Just… No.
Also, I forgot about this (but it was bad even before):

Thanks :ok_hand:

Do you mean the service or the App? Because NewPipe generally works great, except when YouTube changes stuff in their layout, but even then it’s been pretty resistent for me in the past. It does break occasionally, but typically gets fixed fast.
Depending on the setup you could also setup youtube-dl at home to download your subscribed channels and host them on a mediaserver or something (if available).
But yeah as a service… not many alternatives.

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I just want to thank everyone for their helpful advise and suggestions and I will be making an update blog in a couple of weeks for these changes.

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