These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles.
I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happened.<p>Or maybe I'm too pessimistic.
Seeing Notion ranked so highly makes me wonder what other people do that's so different from me. I try to like it (I was an early paid adopter, and now my company uses it so I must too), but there are so many points of friction that most of my effort is spent fighting it rather than using it.<p>Does the general typing latency not bother people? There's a noticeable delay between pressing a key and seeing a character appear. Other apps, Electron-based even, don't seem so slow. But then you type something like a/b and you realize why it's so slow. About half of the things a technical person might type while writing notes or documentation result in some "helpful" popup which must be canceled. I have a long laundry list of usability issues, but from all appearances their company has been growing and selling but not making good on the promises of addressing feedback.<p>My team and I use google docs to get the initial collaborative concepts down, and then one of us manually creates a Notion page with the more permanent result. I sincerely wish to find a collaborative writing/spreadsheet/drawing suite that was open source (paid service even) that could come close to the utility of gdocs.
Hacker News is incredibly biased against Google. There was recently an informal survey[0] in "Tech Twitter" (i.e. other technical people) regarding opinions about the top tech companies and Google scored second highest overall behind Apple, with something like 85-90% positivity overall across different questions. Facebook, for reference, was something like 35-40%.<p>[0] <a href="https://coda.io/@sriram-krishnan/2020-state-of-the-tech-industry-live-twitter-survey-results/large-companies-11" rel="nofollow">https://coda.io/@sriram-krishnan/2020-state-of-the-tech-indu...</a><p>Edit: n=3017, 93% are in tech industry.
I (Xoogler) personally don't think Google is as evil as they color it. But the risk of The Algorithm locking me out on a whim is definitely scary. That's why I'm following more of a "have a backup plan" strategy: mostly just making sure I have copies of all I care about in other places. Gmail, Drive, Photos, etc. Sure, changing workflows and stuff would be painful, but not as much as all that PLUS losing all my data.<p>Sure, my gmail address is still the primary (possibly only) contact on many many places, but I think that risk would be outweighed by my domain registration accidentally lapsing, or my servers getting spamlisted, or smaller providers going out of business. Again, it would be infuriating and bothersome, but not the end of the world.<p>That said, I try to keep my personal account for personal stuff, and whenever I want to try something out of the "ordinary layman user" realm, like trying out dev tools or APIs, cloud products, you name it, I'll use a secondary unrelated account just in case The Algorithm finds that odd and ban-worthy.
Saw the alternatives to Google Sheets, clicked on Coda wanting to learn more and guess what I got?<p><pre><code> Welcome to Coda
Coda is an all-in-one doc that brings
words, data, and teams together.
Sign up to make a doc for free.
[Sign up with Google]</code></pre>
The issue here is ecosystem. Googles advantage is everything syncs together across there platform seamlessly. Going the no google routes fragments my ability to share photos, share docs and sheets, access easily across platforms.The trade off is being locked out and tracking (which you can limit in privacy settings).<p>Edit: also want to add that there is also a risk with using smaller platforms as they have a high chance of going bust. I employ a strategy of keeping files on both google, iCloud and a personal drive to have redundancy in case of issues. Of course this does make sense if you want to be absolutely invisible
This is a great compilation, but it sort of misses the point. The problem isn't that Google owns all of the services we use. It's that <i>someone</i> owns them and even if you switch to a handful of independent services (which is a worse UX), someone else is snooping on you. Google's value proposition is that if you're inside the Google family of services, each service is made better due to having a unified analytics and user profiling. This is a double-edged sword:<p><pre><code> 1. A single service has full visibility into your habits
2. The upper bound for the efficacy of each service is higher.
</code></pre>
Is this worth it to you? That's the question you should be asking yourself.
Honestly, for me, the hardest one to replace is YouTube. I think the best I can do is to create an account specifically for it + use firefox containers.
I personally ponder the idea of de-FAANGing my life as much as possible. There's something distasteful about these very small number of global companies shaping so much of our human condition.<p>I already dumped Facebook. I feel like I could do Google and Amazon next. I make my living with AWS, so there's that.<p>I'm not sure if Netflix is worth dumping, by din of this criteria.<p>I feel like Apple is the least offensive here, but their app store missteps this year put a harsh light on their relationship to their dev community.<p>Twitter I'm likely to close after the election. I know I need a year off it, no matter what happens.<p>So, maybe I want to de-GAFT.
The title says "Privacy friendly alternatives that don't track you":<p>Then there are entries for Google authenticator -> Authy, Google weather -> DarkSky (whose Android app was killed), Google Scholar -> Arxiv, etc.<p>I can't take these posts seriously no matter how loud their proponents have become
arXiv as an alternative to Google Scholar is a bit misleading, since<p>1. arXiv does not feature any sort of metrics (h-index, citations count) for the author(s) and<p>2. Probably no author's complete list of non-informal publications would be available on arXiv, which is why it may not be the place to look for some obscure paper of said author(s).
I've found this list generally useful along the very same lines: <a href="https://degoogle.jmoore.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://degoogle.jmoore.dev/</a>
I never -- personally -- used much of Google aside from the search engine. Never GMail. I watched them buy and kill things I was interested in well over a decade ago. At work, I noticed how hard it was to get Chrome off of a machine when first installed and decided against that. Then they rather unceremoniously discontinued their search appliance without giving us much of a transition path, on very short notice, and that was something of a bummer.<p>I used to attend search engine conferences, with special talks given by someone who spent a lot of time analyzing Google's "special sauce." It became increasingly clear to me that search serves the ads, and everything else is a either a distraction or a temporary step in improving search and/or ads.
I'd like to add Jitsi Meet (<a href="https://meet.jit.si" rel="nofollow">https://meet.jit.si</a>) works great. I would say from being forced to use Google Meet and using Jitsi Meet, Jitsi's audio quality and reliability are superior to Google Meet.
Some time ago, I switched to google fi. The experience has been pretty positive (monthly bills are low, speeds are decent, the idea of seamlessly switching between networks is appealing).<p>But when I read horror stories of people getting their google accounts terminated, I realize that losing my google account would also remove my ability to receive SMS 2FA codes, and recovering all my accounts would be even more difficult than for a person who is merely dependent on gmail.<p>This would be less of a concern if google had a way to associate separate accounts with each service, users could have confidence that google would actually treat them as distinct, even if they're continually used from the same devices, etc.
Opera as a non-tracking alternative? It's almost entirely owned by Chinese interests. And Cloudflare as a non-tracking alternative?? This site needs to revisit some of its alternatives.
I am a Life-Long, grateful Google user who has some thoughts on AdSense that I've considered quite deeply. Adsense allows anyone of any economic standing to access some of the most refined and powerful tools for gathering, using, and sharing knowledge that humanity has ever built. Google's contribution to modern ad tech is, in that sense, an immensely laudable contribution to humankind.
The lack of the ability to choose where I spend my valuable attention amounts at some level to a nonconsensual interaction. I am willing to pay for both Google's services and those of the content creator (and I am sensitive to the fairness of that relationship as well), but not being able to choose how I pay has led me to make some personal use decisions that put me in conflict with Google's revenue model.
I have to use an ad blocker
Security concerns
Unhealthy child development
Anti-patterns showing in the development of the internet both technologically and socially
Google's anticompetitive ad-tech behavior leading to
unhealthy browser market share leading to
Reduction in diversity of thought in internet technology conversations
Centralization of power in ad selection has the unintended side effect of dragging content along with it. Ad personalization (for the sake of maximizing profits in ad sales) led to over-personalization of the types of ads we see (echo chamber effect).
Automatic content curation followed the ad-tech model, increasing profits by increasing "engagement." This led to a dangerous strengthening of the echo chamber effect.
We're all now used to the central artery of human information being "free" as in beer, but costing us our ability to have a balanced, more-or-less impartial information diet or at least forcing us to work very hard for it.
Google, please figure out how to give us another way to pay.
These alternatives should definitely be taken with a huge grain of salt. I don't see how Discord is the third most "privacy-friendly" alternative to Hangouts that doesn't track you while explicitly claiming they "may" collect your email, messages, images, VOIP data, etc. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://discord.com/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://discord.com/privacy</a>
Probably the best way to get away from google is to use the
Huawei phones which the USA banned from operating, and their version of android has been de-googled, from google services.<p>You will be getting spied on by China. But at least not by google. The P40 has some amazing cameras.<p><a href="https://consumer.huawei.com/ca/phones/" rel="nofollow">https://consumer.huawei.com/ca/phones/</a>
I have mostly degoogled by planning then doing a big bang. I wrote out all the things I depend on, all the things I need to migrate, the alternatives, etc. I researched the alternatives and made a decision to implement it. I then did it in stages.<p>Currently I use my new pixel 3a with grapheneos, no google services, fastmail + k9, ddg, cloudflare dns, signal etc.<p>I still need to sort out office suite. Collabora does have android apks that should just work but I am waiting til it gets into f-droid.<p>The one thing I haven't migrated is Chromecast. Once that is done I will be pretty happy.<p>Note that you will never be totally free of Google. You will still be subjected to google analytics, captcha, dns, chrome (and derivatives), etc. The idea is to be less dependent on their services, reduce Google's capability to harvest your data, and ultimately reduce their influence, power and control.
Another option that can replace a lot of Google services is getting your own domain. You can get email with that, and install a bunch of applications to replace a lot of the services like photo sharing. Of course the downside is you have to maintain some of it yourself (but you can get an auto-updating Wordpress installation for sharing photos), and you don't get as much connectivity because you have to promote it yourself.<p>The advantage is that you don't need to worry about Google's whims to shut things down or change policies or whatever. Also typically with your own domain, you get more control over your email. For example, with cPanel you can program in a filter to permanently delete emails you don't want instead of sending them to the trash.
Offering arXiv as a substitute for Google Scholar isn't okay. The arXiv is one of the places indexed by Google Scholar. But Google Scholar also indexes most of the journals out there. A better replacement would be PubMed, but even that's pretty specialized.
Shameless plug: ente[1] is a privacy focused alternative to Google Photos that I’m building. Please sign up for the beta program if you’re interested, I could really use some beta testers. Thanks!<p>[1]: <a href="https://ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io</a>
In response to how many people are influenced by these sorts of posts, I'm a best of breed person so these articles only inform me further but rarely have much impact. I don't use Google, but that's because Google just isn't the best search engine, DDG is. If I want Google results I use Startpage through DDG since they're anonymous, and will once in a blue moon still tunnel through to Google.<p>I've been meaning to move off of Gmail to Outlook.com for some years. I definitely don't think Gmail is the best, just gave me a lot of space in 2004 during the beta when no one else would.<p>Youtube is Google's only must-have product in my view. The rest is easily replaceable with equivalent or better choices.
I think it's great users are always attempting to break free from Google. I don't think 3 companies should control half the internet content (I'm sure my measurements are way off).<p>I just see it as inconvenient. Firefox has been well known to underperform Chrome in many areas. The GUI feels dated and clunky. Something about the experience feels very obviously backed by only software political activists, developers, and people who simply haven't moved to Chrome.<p>I also don't see how using Chromium based browser distros is non-Google. I thought part of the problem was that even with those browsers, Google can still blacklist sites it chooses to.
Wow, I didn't know about <a href="https://wego.here.com" rel="nofollow">https://wego.here.com</a> and both the UX and the map design are miles ahead of Google's, to my taste. Nice!
Anyone using any of these email services? I'm not looking for a workplace product, I just want to be able to get myself out of Gmail reliance and gradually get my family away from it too.
Some weird ones I'm seeing:<p>Airtable doesn't seem to be an alternative to Google Sheets, it seems like a much different application than a generalized spreadsheet that can do math operations.<p>Vimeo isn't really a replacement for YouTube, it's fundamentally different in the types of content it markets itself as being for.<p>The Google Docs alternatives all seem to be note taking applications (except for Zoho), not document editing software.<p>Dark Sky no longer offers an Android app, not really a good replacement for Google Weather.
I used to use Chrome browser for everything, but not anymore. Now I use Firefox, Safari and Brave. I am making preparations to move from Google Apps Mail and Gmail to Fastmail. I would not use Google drive and Google docs for anything. Still use google search, but looking for an alternative as I don’t trust results in many cases. I feel technically they are still better than other search engines, they just heavily manipulate search results.
I have tried to use FF for year now and I am about to dump it.
I want Mozilla to succeed, but there's no way I cold recommend it to friends/family, which is the major thing.<p>Non-major websites, and even big name ones like Intuit's (quickbooks etc) are constantly having problems. I had to go into settings: just to get into bitbucket in the past week because of some 'referrer' issue<p>On mobile, it just crashes constantly (e.g. on twitter).
Is PinePhone a valid replacement yet?<p><a href="https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/</a>
We're trying to build an ad network that stands in stark opposition to Google's tracking: <a href="https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/</a> -- it's still early days, but we're always look for more OSS projects and products to join.
What are the options (ideally Linux based) to synchronize files and data (e.g. contacts) between Google Drive, iCloud and Microsoft OneDrive? I guess we have to do RAICP (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cloud Providers) now? I get that I can do the clients/rsync dance, but I also want contacts and higher level data.
You could replace a whole bunch of these with a Synology NAS if you really want to own your own data. DSM has an extensive suite of good apps. <a href="https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm" rel="nofollow">https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm</a>
Here's a more complete list IMO, including not only services (even the services are more relevant), but also apps for various platforms: <a href="https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle</a>
I've tried to switch fully to firefox but it's just not good enough, especially on Android. Pages fail to load, get laggy, etc, none of which happens on Chrome. I'd love to ditch Google but it's hard when the second best option is so far behind.
I question duck duck go. Why am I getting ads everywhere for ddg? How are they honestly making enough money to take up billboards and tons of other ads? Willing to change my mind, something just doesn't add up to me, someone please explain
I might be one of the lucky ones who never bought into the Google eco-system - even still have a Hotmail email address and it's getting cool again now that many are getting more upset with Google and their business model.
I try to remove Google where I can, but for search... let's be honest, ddg and qwant just had inferior results. I try to use one of those, but find myself having to type !g or &g on a disturbing number of searches
It would be interesting to add up the monthly fees for the top alternatives and see how much it would cost to completely replace google. Just the first few items already put you in the mid double-digits per month.
Nothing for calendar. The only thing keeping me on Google is a spreadsheet that has a script to query my calendar to make a budget forecast. I haven't found a good alternative calendar with an API.
I would like to point out:<p>Looking down the list of google services I use for PERSONAL use (and my wife/child) I would easily be paying $100/mo for all the alternative services.<p>I can afford that. Most google users cannot.
There was a privacy focused analytics alternative that recently launched on producthunt: <a href="https://panelbear.com" rel="nofollow">https://panelbear.com</a><p>No idea if it's any good.
Of the browsers listed, which if any do multiple users? I silo my clients / projects by giving them their own instance (read: user) of Chrome.<p>If I could get past that then the rest would fall into place.
There was an analytics startup focused on privacy that recently launched: <a href="https://panelbear.com/" rel="nofollow">https://panelbear.com/</a><p>No idea if it's any good.
I don't understand what criteria is used to get on this page. As an example, Airtable uses Google Analytics. What makes you think Airtable doesn't track you? They clearly do.
So Zoom is supposed to be a privacy-friendly alternative to Hangouts?<p>Also, all those recommended flight engines/sellers absolutely do track everything as if their life depended on it.
I mean there really is no realistic replacement for youtube at the moment. The youtube breadth of content is at least two orders of magnitude above the next competitor.
I really want a good alternative to Google Photos. Jottacloud is getting pretty close, but there are problems when using it for photos and backups at the same time.
Seeing Zoho, the alternative-universe version of Google where it failed at basically everything, as an alternative listed for a lot of these is hilarious.
this is the Google curse. every company will become like Google only if they can.<p>every of them. the only exception is Wikipedia and i donate monthly.<p>I remember how good Google was in the early days. most of the “alternatives” could become much worse when they reach 1/100 of Google scale.<p>I can’t trust “alternatives”.
And yet the site has Clearbit according to UBlock Origin.<p>Talk about hypocritical.<p><a href="https://help.clearbit.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015659148-What-is-Clearbit-" rel="nofollow">https://help.clearbit.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015659148-Wha...</a>