We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.

Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.

For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:

Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.

Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.

This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.

  • nullptr@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m using ProtonMail with my own domain, DuckDuckGo, self-hosted photo album, Firefox and PC/iOS devices. The only thing I have a Google account for is for a paid YouTube subscription, which I use in a Firefox container tab.

    I’d like to think I’m pretty degoogled, but due to network effects, I’m probably not. Everyone I send email to has a Gmail address, every web page I visit has Google Analytics (which Firefox may or may not block, I cannot be sure about that) and most people who have my phone number have it stored on their Android device. So Google gets a shit ton of data about me indirectly, regardless of whether I consent to it or not.

    • jcarax@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      What are you using for syncing and viewing your photos? I ended up with a mailbox.org account, because I really want my contacts to be synced to the OS on my phone. So right now I just upload them to my cloud drive there, but I need to at least automate it. I might end up using the OX Drive app that mailbox.org recommends, or I might end up using syncthing to sync locally, and then push them up to the mailbox.org drive using webdav.

      I’m just using Simple Gallery on my phone for now, not sure where I’ll end up on my laptop once I finish switching off the Apple ecosystem back to a Thinkpad running Linux. I’ve been looking at Piwigo and PhotoPrism a bit, but haven’t given them a try yet. PhotoPrism has webdav support, so it’s especially intriguing.

      On the other hand, I might switch to Proton Mail in 10-20 years when they implement the promised contact sync to the OS. Or even better, if Tutanota does it. But I guess if I use webdav, it leaves me pretty open to spin up a server somewhere for photos and other files. I’ve already been thinking about getting a Baikal server going for VJOURNAL support, to run jtxtasks, not that Baikal supports webdav…

      • nullptr@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I ran PhotoPrism on my home server for awhile but realized it was a bit overkill for my use case. Now I just use my NAS server’s built in photo gallery app (QNAP Photo Station), in which I can create shared albums that I can expose to the internet with Caddy server acting as reverse proxy and an extra authentication layer. I have a custom domain that hosts the photo gallery so I can copy and paste a magic URL plus login credentials into a Signal chat to anyone who asks (and whom I trust).