this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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You don't have to look at reducing your Google use as a monumental effort. You can slowly transfer, minimise the number of services you use.
Simple - Switch your default search provider to Duck Duck Go.
Easy - Switch to Firefox
Mid - export your documents from Google Drive
Complex - Transfer your primary email to another provider.
I actually think switch email wasn't too bad (just take it slow!). It's Google Drive I actually don't have a good replacement for.
That and Google Photos.
Suggestions welcome.
You don't need to take it slow. I moved from Gmail to a private email that I manage about 5 years ago. I just put email auto reply on my Gmail saying that I've changed my email due to an onslaught of corporate spam. Spammers won't get the new one because they're using auto responders, but actual people will get the auto reply and start using your new email address. You can change your email associated with accounts as you log in, or you can just keep those on Google so that the accounts don't start spamming you on your new email too. The only drawback is that your account won't be in some big data database and some sign up processes that use services like Informatica might reject your email as invalid since they don't have a record of it. When that happens just use your Gmail and then update it later.
There's proton drive...which i hasn't actually used. It looks like google drive, and there's a photo option, but so far I've only used the proton mail part.
It's pretty decent. They just released a Windows PDrive client, but Proton Drive is usable from pretty much any browser. I use it for keeping additional backups of a few things.
Nextcloud can be self hosted very cheaply, or you can find some hosted instances. There are applications that can encrypt cloud storage for some services. I would recommend just getting a NAS or a VPS and running nextcloud on it.
Pretty much any other cloud, OneDrive can do all that docs stuff if you need it.
Pro solution: buy a NAS, many of them do have online office suites (like, for example, Synology), and stop depending on the cloud in the first place.
Impossible: get a smartphone that is neither Google nor useless.
So what email providers are good alternatives?
Proton Mail and Tutanota always rank high on lists of privacy friendly email providers.
DuckDuckGo results still suck and are not even remotely comparable to Google‘s. The best alternative imo is Qwant, which uses bing and I think also it’s own index.
If the DuckDuckGo result for your search doesn't yield anything then just append it with
g!and it'll take you straight to the Google results.It's a useful trick but very rarely do I find I need it. Only really when researching a very specific error.
I only wish I could default DDG to not show results from certain sites I simply don't care about. Maybe it's possible and I just haven't found how to do it, but that's the one thing that would really elevate my experience