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.
Privacy from whom though? I’d contend that more than 99% of people reading this would, in all honesty, consider their adversaries to be non-state actors—marketers, hackers and identity thieves. For the less than 1% of us for whom their adversary is a state actor, I would contend that any implementation of SMTP is non-viable, period.
If you’re sufficiently paranoid, the only thing you can say for certain is that there isn’t much you can truly trust.
This is the key. Model your threat and act accordingly.
There's (mostly) no reason for Joe Bloggs to want to protect themselves from a well funded state actor but they may want to prevent themselves being locked out of Google services because some bot triggered a threshold.
Reporting on Australia's encryption laws is wildly inaccurate. For one, it does not allow authorities to compel companies or individuals to introduce an encryption backdoor or otherwise weaken encryption. The law very explicitly addresses this issue in section 317ZG, which forbids any kind of "systematic weakness" or "systematic vulnerability" and very explicitly states that weakening encryption is included in those definitions.
What's permitted is to build something that targets a particular person in such a way that it cannot possibly affect another person's security.
The example I use (though IANAL) is that a request to backdoor WhatsApp's encryption would not be permitted under the law. However I think that pushing an update that checks for a particular person's hard-coded phone number and forwards messages to law enforcement would be permitted.
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.
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?
My concern is automated systems. YouTube videos get demonetized and cloud storage gets shut down because of automated copyright enforcement. They shut channels down and delete videos for the kinds of things I worry about, too.
This was not always the case. It might not be the case now that Russian companies scan for this stuff, but why risk it?
Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts.
Re: Zoho:
As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't 5 eyes or 9 eyes, it has some of the most restrictive laws in terms of Internet freedom and is a surveillance state.
> This is not correct as far as Proton is concerned and easily verifiable. ProtonVPN is 100% owned by Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland) which also develops ProtonMail and is not affiliated or owned by any other company.
I've been using mailbox.org for over a year. Very happy with the mail service - no reliability issues, supports Active Sync, built in support for PGP, works great with my own domain. They also accept bitcoin for payment.
Their cloud storage uses OX Drive, but the sync clients range from bad to awful. I found the Windows client slow, the Android client awful and there isn't a Linux client.
I migrated to a self-hosted Nextcloud, which I love - wonderful client software and very flexible customizable. I didn't have any difficulties setting it up, it all seems very polished and quite mature.
I have found nothing that comes close to replacing Google Maps yet, but I hope that OSM has a bright future.
Switched to Fastmail last year and I'm extremely happy with it. Best web interface and I can use the desktop clients I like, Google is actively working against this.
Another great thing is I'm no longer worried of suddenly losing access to my mail account, because an algorithm deems me not worthy for using a "wrong" browser, setting etc. and we all know that you can't talk to real people at Google so the account will be lost forever.
I've had countless false positives from Google's spam filter - everything from train tickets to cinema tickets to invitations to parties have been swallowed by it.
About 1 out of 15/20 emails that get flagged are legit. Most are newsletters I signed up to and don't particularly care about, but they're still not spam.
I am a very happy Fastmail customer. The one thing I wish for is more feature parity with Google Calendar, such as setting daily agenda emails.
However, I’ve found Fastmail search, spam filtering and user interfaces to be great, on par or better than Google for all my needs.
One aspect of poorer performance with Fastmail has been boot up time on mobile though. The iOS app doesn’t appear to cache anything offline, so without a connection you can’t do anything, and if the connection is slow, app startup and display of mail hangs while waiting for whatever initial web requests the app makes to complete.
Using Apple’s iOS apps will give you better integration with the whole Apple ecosystem, Fastmail‘s app has better integration with a few of their specific features
The biggest advantage of using Fastmail’s app is that searching emails is MUCH faster and flexible
I normally use the iOS Mail app to connect to Fastmail. This allows me to use the very useful VIP “inbox” to filter email. But, the Fastmail web interface also works great in iPhone Safari and provides their search facility.
On my Air or Linux workstations, I always use the Fastmail web interface, it’s better than a mail app, unless I’m doing something specialized - then it’s Mutt or even Gnus.
You can be logged into Fastmail from several computers simultaneously and processing email. It’s seamless, there is never a conflict. I believe they use Cyrus IMAP.
I cut Google from most of my life years ago, and switched mail to MXRoute.com instead. I have nothing but great things to say about them.
Grabbed a special offer back then, 10 years/XX GB for something like $99 total, including all the domains i can think off and all the users i want. Compared to what was available at the time it was super cheap, and it has had like 99% uptime since.
Latest offering, free of charge, is a Nextcloud account for user/calendar/notes syncing.
> Not a dealbreaker to me, as I am a native Texan by birth,
but might be an issue to someone looking to avoid 5-Eyes.
It's email. Any pretense of avoiding 5/9 eyes is already moot. Any conversation has at least 2 participants, and since 50+ percent of the world population runs on some kind of hosted email (Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/whatever), anything you send has a high probability of passing through 5/9 eyes anyway. It doesn't make much of a difference if you look through the "from:" or "to:" headers.
The only way to be safe from 5 eyes is encrypting all the contents in your mailbox, either through GnuPG or using Protonmail/Tutanota.
> 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.
Fastmail too is insecure by being run out of Australia - a strident member of the 5 eyes.
"In newer versions, the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed. "
Using an email alias could be also a solution to protect your email as it a)allows you to use a different email address for each website [1]. b)you can choose whatever email provider you want (Protonmail, Tutanota, Fastmail, etc).
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
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.
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.
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.
yeah, the original comment's comparison seems disingenuous as it just lists various generic positive things and completely ignores any negatives. television would also seemingly fit the bill.
there are obvious downsides to plastics, google and TV. that excising it completely is extremely difficult if not impossible in the modern world does not diminish the positive effects of reducing consumption.
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 ...
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.
Just made this jump recently and have been pleasantly surprised that all stated is true and it's delightful to use. More importantly, I feel as if _we_ use Siri, and not the other way around. Fingers crossed…?
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?
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].)
Yes - sorry you are technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but you can fully opt out of having your spoken commands recorded and reviewed. That was the point I was making.
I don’t know if that’s possible with the other players. None of them have showered themselves in glory but Apple’s track record has been generally positive.
Not GP but I'm a happy Apple products/services customer. Rightly or wrongly, I feel like I purchase products and services from Apple, rather than the data from my usage of their products being their core product or service.
If something abhorrent from Apple comes to the forefront then I'll happily switch back to self-build + Linux + self-hosted services, but for the time being I'm content.
On the flip side, I've done everything I can to eradicate Google from my life and will continue to do so.
Apple runs special servers for iCloud inside of China so that the CCP can monitor all traffic and more effectively disappear people who transmit information that they don’t like.
I will only access youtube in ways that limit its tracking and anti-features. That means always using Tor and Youtube-dl/Invidious/Newpipe. Never use the official frontend or any of the official apps.
Wait, you can get around IP bans (Google certainly has a CAPTCHA on anyone trying to access Search from a Tor exit node IP address) by using a different client? Like, the check is client-side? That seems odd.
Please re-read my original post, it was about youtube, not search. But I don't think you can get around the Tor captcha on search, so at this time I would say avoid google search entirely if you care about not being tracked.
Assuming Tor Browser, just change Tor circuit, ctrl+l (I believe), until you get one without captcha (works after 2-3 times usually). Only use Google search when absolutely necessary though.
> And then they can listen to everything I'm doing, which is not cool
If this is a concern to you I encourage you to read about hardware-implemented wake words to get a better understanding of how is that the microphone is only recording when you trigger the device. This has alleviated the concerns of a number of people I've spoken to about this. If you concern is about accidentally triggering the wake word and being recorded when you did not intend to be, can't help much with that, but it seems like something of a niche concern.
If this alleviates your concerns, I have a bridge to sell you.
If you trust Google to only activate recording when you say a wake word, why not just send a stream of your audio data and trust them to delete it? If you're trusting amoral corporations whose entire business is selling your data with access to a bug in your house, just go the whole way.
It depends. I used to self-host a VPN on DigitalOcean's VPS and didn’t experience any issues when routing all my traffic through it. But I suspected being logged in to my Google account as well as presenting cookies created for a residential IP address helped with that.
- how to build a smoker and smoke fish in it
- how to butcher a pig
- how to DIY motorized roller shades and integrate them into HomeAssistant
- a video walk through Hebron
- how to make a sabich
and so on and so on, but perhaps I'm just bad at searching for videos? I do it like that:
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.
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.
Personally every time someone asks me to pay them with money I roll my eyes and slap down some silver coins. I got in a big fight with the bus driver the other day because fluctuations in the price of silver made the same amount of silver no longer cover the fare
It's privacy focused (supports privacy pass), and is fair: webmasters get a cut for each captcha that is solved correctly (they can choose to directly donate it to a charity of their choice), hCaptcha get a cut for running the service and a customer will get their images/data labeled.
In a lot of projects lately where I've seen ReCaptcha used or requested I've replaced it with YAGNI [You Aren't Going to Need It]. It's a "what's your threat model?" question for Bots.
Do you have the scale that human moderators are infeasible? (Not do you "wish to have". YAGNI suggests add it when you have that scale, not before.)
Do you need that form to be publicly accessible?
Are you requiring multi-factor authentication already? Can you or should you?
Can you use a spam filter? (Are you sure your process isn't already going through half a dozen email spam filters anyway?)
Do the simple tricks not work for your use case? (CSRF tokens, "honeypot fields", form name/ID obfuscation, dumb simple weird rotating required fields like "2 + 2 =?")
I recently had to add a 10 second period where the contact form send button is disabled but appears to still work.
There was daily contact form spam coming from tor exit nodes. Only flaw is that it always sends the message within 7 seconds. That is faster than a human could get to the form and type a meaningful message.
So I was able to avoid blocking tor exit nodes by adding this timeout. This has solved the issue, for now.
Requiring JS execution by only accepting JSON stopped the lazier bots.
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.
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.
Have you tried using Google Takeout? I have not but it claims it can export all of your photos/videos/etc. and is probably the sanctioned way to do this.
The iOS app needs photos access because it is less a Google Photos client and more an alternative Photos app with Google Photos syncing/integration. I think it would not be ideal to use it if all you want is to export data.
I exported all my Google photos with takeout recently. After around 70 hours I got a dump of 59 50GiB tgz files (format and size was my choice). I decided to have them sent to drive so I could sync them to a computer. It was a pretty pleasant experience, they even export metadata as json.
Unfortunately, at least in my experience with several different accounts, the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files. I try to infer, interpolate, and recover what I safely can during PhotoStructure imports of Takeout archives, but mostly it made me want to dig deeper into my storage closet to try to find the hard drives that had the actual, original files on them.
> the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files.
Are you talking about the inferred bit from other sources like phone location history? My experience may have been different because I paid Google for extra storage so that I could store the original versions of all my photos (For those that don't use Google Photos, Google offers "unlimited" lossily compressed photo storage but counts original quality photos against your drive quota.)
The json data is what they display in the UI, not a verbatim copy of the metadata, but the photos have the original metadata embedded in them.
At least for my Google Pixel, my "original quality" files from Takeout do not match the SHA of the original files pulled from the device. They kept the pixels, but they mucked with the EXIF headers.
I'm happy if your files weren't put through a blender!
This one's scary from an infrastructure perspective. Way too many websites depend on Recaptcha, and an outage would be somewhat painful. There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.
Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent solution, even if only for the traffic it fronts. They kind of have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such an offering.
Cloudflare's "bot management" is effectively their own solution but doesn't provide a way to affirm you're not a bot like other solutions do; think of it like a fraud detection service and not a captcha service.
I also find it unlikely that they move away from Google's recaptcha since they seem to have an unlimited, unrestricted (can be used for any domain) recaptcha API key that they heavily rely on for the "captcha" challenge website owners like to use.
Really, they're worse. If Cloudflare decides you should not be, you're not allowed to use the internet at all. The last thing we need is to give them even more power.
There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.
The real purpose of it is to get free human labour classifying images their ML can’t handle. Why are there so many asking you to find squares with cars, or pedestrian crossings do you think?
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.
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.
To be clear, the first requirement after opening the app is access to your Photos. I didn't even get far enough to view the old photos, let alone an attempt at an export.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Just commented on this myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964531. I can't recommend Fastmail enough. If you really wanna save money, Zoho allows you one free email alias. They seem like a pretty cool company too, but Fastmail is more mature and so simple, easy-to-use, and feature-rich. I signed up for a three year subscription with them instead.
I've been using Fastmail for several years now and love it.
I can't directly answer your question about a comparison, though. I know I looked at several alternatives before signing up, but I don't remember exactly why I chose it over the others.
Also, setting up an email alias for my custom domain was a complete breeze. They give you instructions on how to do it and explain each step. I think they offer a 1 month free trial. Try it out.
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.
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.
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?)
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).
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.
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.
No, not all products in this list are free: neither as in beer nor as in freedom. Which is fine by me: moving from something like Google Analytics to any other closed-source paid product is probably an improvement for every visitor.
If you’re not collaborating with others who won’t change their habits and your needs aren’t very complex, then LibreOffice is a relatively good enough alternative to MS Office.
It’s difficult to recommend anything without knowing why you prefer MS Exchange, but there should be options depending on your needs.
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.
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?!
I'm glad for anyone who refuses to use products of these megacorps, as those are the people that keep alternatives alive and that's a check on power of comapnies like Google or Microsoft.
The goal is ridding world of American influence. There's nothing wrong with using the Gooogle products, your data is not being sold or abused in any way. It's a geopolitical effort first and foremost.
No, I would bet a good portion (possibly the majority) of this tool's users are Americans trying to take control of who has their personal information and data.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, just saw this [0] yesterday. A "powermod" posted a misleading title and nobody removed it. Yikes is definitely the correct response.
I'm not saying it's better or worse than Google News but people should know the place's bias and bring a healthy dose of salt and actually read the articles. I'm only viewing it as a list of things that happened.
> 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.
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.
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.