Congratulations! Personally, I'm not that radical but I agree with the motives.
I don't use gmail or google docs for anything essential and have my own email address for the past 20 years anyway, but getting away from Youtube is harder. There is a lot of interesting content on Youtube, like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown, and I wouldn't know where to find this elsewhere. I also use Youtube for its intended main purpose, listening to illegally pirated music content. I don't understand how Youtube's management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far, it seems that the laws in this area are applied extremely selectively. Anyway, you can find and listen to almost any record from any time period at any time on Youtube without paying a cent, and I haven't found a replacement for that yet either.
> I don't understand how Youtube's management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far,
They manage this by letting the big media/music corps claim ad revenue from any video they feel like they own, no questions asked. That's how they manage to stay out of jail. I suspect Youtube is a pretty decent revenue source for these corporations.
Too big to jail. Google spends million lobbying so politicians that usually held local representativs accountable look elsewhere - I mean who would want to cut off their supply of free cash. Google/Youtube also hires tens of thausands of employees, including hefty chunk in California. So those local representatives like govenors or mayors won’t mention raidin Youtube because that may mean many people out of jobs - people that voted them in the office/s in the first place. But please don’t try it at home. Unless you are a Google size or Google connections, you can be sure they will come after you. I mean they still are on Dot Com case and most likely he will be soon extradited to usa.
I can imagine that in the USA interest google stays on top, because when that spot is open and suddenly a foreign company competes for it it will be a big loss. Maybe even as far as considering it to be of national security interest.
I avoid Google when possible, but... can we stop saying shit in these articles that isn't proven true? Google doesn't release your email address if you delete it. Squatting isn't an issue there.
When we just start saying things that are proven incorrect it makes the entire discussion look like a bunch of spooks, it's not helpful.
That's true at the moment, but there's also no way to know what Google will decide to do with it in the future. Presumably if the account is deleted, it might not be possible to veto that decision in the future. Better safe than sorry, right?
Sorry! I should've been more clear. I'm keeping it so there's no chance of them releasing it without my knowledge down the line. Whether their policy right now is to release it or not, I feel safer by not deleting the account.
> [...] they have access to most of our web browsing via Google Chrome (62.5% market share – although given the amount of broken websites (some explicitly Chrome-only!) I’ve found since switching to Firefox, I believe this number may actually be higher)
Anecdotal, but I got in touch with a pretty popular newsletter hosting tool to tell them the charts on Firefox didn't render correctly, only to be told to use Chrome.
I’ve see the odd app / website like that, if it’s not OSS I give them the finger and move on (while politely suggesting they should offer non-google integrated options), if it is OSS I start by opening a feature / bug request (if there isn’t one already) and submit a MR if I’m able to (which often I’m not as I’m more experienced in the Ops and Sec space than I have development (understatement of the century)).
I switched to Fastmail from Gmail years ago. In the beginning I missed the tagging when I went back to a folder structure, but you get used to it. Other then that, I'm super happy and can only recommend the service.
I am doing the same. Chrome was the hardest move but Safari got much better recently and 90% of the websites are working perfectly only few exceptions. Has anybody tried Amazon Workmail yet? I would be interested in the experience.
I agree, I'd rather suggest FastMail or even ProtonMail which has paid offerings. At least they make a profit from you paying for their services (at least in regards to FastMail).
At least it's a different one, and at least Amazon typically offers a straightforward exchange of money-for-service/product, as opposed to directly monetizing surveillance.
Do you have some examples of websites that don't work with Firefox? I've never considered moving to Chrome, and I've never had a problem (at least not since the death of IE-only sites).
Cool... Congratulation. This is a project for me as well, which started two months ago. Still moving the drive files and re-registering all accounts where I used @gmail.com and my domain email. It's a pain after 16years. Everyday something pops up which I didn't consider. I'm doing it with own server (hetzner) and protonmail.
> I started by moving all of my websites off of Google App Engine and onto a dedicated box that I had already owned. That was straightforward enough.
That surprises me, that it was straightforward, I haven't used GAE for some time, but when I did it was python but with a custom ORM etc. - you couldn't just use anything.
For me the hardest part is other accounts associated with an old email address. I’m also moving away from google, but it is tiring to change accounts associated with gmail address to a new one
Get yourself a domain with some webhosting attached and start switching mail-by-mail. Everytime you receive something "important", log in to that service and change the mail address.
Thunderbird with filters does a pretty good job with keeping my inbox clean, although I'm aiming for much less mails anyway.
Emails are like postcards, easily read by anyone who handles them. Just because your mailbox provider isn't google, doesn't mean it doesn't come in contact with google somewhere else.
If you really don't want them to be able to collect the content of your mails then you and all who write to you have to encrypt them. And then you would still have the problem of the metadata to be accessible.
> I’ve debated deleting the @gmail.com e-mail address, but I think it’s wiser to keep it and essentially squat the username lest someone else take it over and cause me trouble down the line.
No need. The google does not allow to register email addresses that was already deleted.
I second Fastmail. GMail is 6MB now according to devtools, Fastmail is about half a meg. The latency in Gmail using any non Google browser makes it unusable.
I don't use gmail or google docs for anything essential and have my own email address for the past 20 years anyway, but getting away from Youtube is harder. There is a lot of interesting content on Youtube, like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown, and I wouldn't know where to find this elsewhere. I also use Youtube for its intended main purpose, listening to illegally pirated music content. I don't understand how Youtube's management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far, it seems that the laws in this area are applied extremely selectively. Anyway, you can find and listen to almost any record from any time period at any time on Youtube without paying a cent, and I haven't found a replacement for that yet either.
reply