It feels weird coming from LTT.
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I agree and I still have my doubts that he would personally use many of these alternatives. Still, we should not gatekeep the message. Anyone this big discussing the positives of de-googling will certainly push it further into mainstream society.
That's besides the point. LTT is a corporation at this point so they'll use whatever corporations use. The video provided genuine value for its audience so they deserve praise for that.
They did a video about alternatives to Adobe a while back. And while they generally liked and praised programs such as Affinity, they did conclude that as a company, even minor losses in productivity (e.g. for their editors) quickly add up.
So yeah, it would not be the first time they present and praise alternatives even of they don't end up using them.
The decision to use Adobe suite is more likely to be a company wide decision. Part of Adobe suite lock-in is also familiarity making things faster. By promoting others, that may help future generations avoid at least part of the problem.
Google services may be much more piecemeal. Even if the boss personally happens to think there's a productivity benefit to using a given search engine, it would be unusual to block others.
Practicing what you preach is sometimes important, but I'm not sure how much it bears on these issues. A single company eschewing either won't make a difference. Getting the public to slowly consider alternatives may.
Its is a sign of the times I suppose.
A surprise for sure, but a welcome one.
In what way? There are tech savvy people on the team, so obviously many of them are well aware of the privacy concerns. Besides, they don’t live in a vacuum, so they see the same posts and videos we do.
Probably they just noticed that now is the right time to talk about this.
I thought he stopped? Must have just been a break, but like he should have imo
posts on youtube
Well, you're sure to reach tons of Google users there
Where else would he post it, that would not be preaching to the choir?
They also upload to their own platform to be fair (floatplane)
Still, happy he did, kids got reach...
For the lazy like myself
This video is about how to degoogle your life, czyli [in Polish] to minimize your reliance on Google products and services.
In the first part of the video, the speaker discusses why you might want to degoogle your life. They mention that Google collects a lot of data on its users, and that this data is used to target ads and to train machine learning algorithms. The speaker also argues that Google's services are becoming less and less usable.
The speaker then provides a number of alternatives to Google products and services. Here are a few examples:
- Search engines: DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia, Brave Search
- Email: Proton, Tuta
- Photo backup: Ente, Stingle, PhotoSync, Image
- DNS: Quad9, NextDNS, Cloudflare
The speaker acknowledges that there are many other alternatives available, and that this is just a starting point. They also recommend checking out the sponsor of the video, Pulseway, which is a monitoring and management software.
The video ends with a call to action, encouraging viewers to watch part two of the series.
Uhm.
Thanks, AI?
Google's 😂
@[email protected] whoa thats neat! I often wish a YouTube video were just a blog post or forum thread .. how can I do something like this myself?
I used Google Gemini. Just asked it to summarise and pasted the link and voila.
Oh the irony!
Nice to see a YouTuber with a massive audience demystifying some of the alternatives to Google. There are of course many smaller channels who have provided better and more in-depth guides in the past, but someone this mainstream weighing in on their side does a lot to help the cause.
I hope one day there will be a good Google Wallet alternative. I've got a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS, and Google Wallet does not work because Google doesn't trust it. It would be great to get something in it's place.
Let's hold the breath for the first bank or official exchange to support GNU Taler.
Apparently a few coop banks somewhere are adopting/have adopted taler, so hopefully it takes off.
I thought I should comment to highlight that LTT has not improved and has doubled down in their attempts to cover over sexual harassment in recent days putting out the following statement earlier in the week:-
There were a series of accusations about our company last August from a former employee. Immediately following these accusations, LMG hired Roper Greyell - a large Vancouver-based law firm specializing in labor and employment law, to conduct a third-party investigation. Their website describes them as “one of the largest employment and labour law firms in Western Canada.” They work with both private and public sector employers.
To ensure a fair investigation, LMG did not comment or publicly release any data and asked our team members to do the same. Now that the investigation is complete, we’re able to provide a summary of the findings.
The investigation found that:
Claims of bullying and harassment were not substantiated.
Allegations that sexual harassment were ignored or not addressed were false.
Any concerns that were raised were investigated. Furthermore, from reviewing our history, the investigator is confident that if any other concerns had been raised, we would have investigated them.
There was no evidence of “abuse of power” or retaliation. The individual involved may not have agreed with our decisions or performance feedback, but our actions were for legitimate work-related purposes, and our business reasons were valid.
Allegations of process errors and miscommunication while onboarding this individual were partially substantiated, but the investigator found ample documentary evidence of LMG working to rectify the errors and the individual being treated generously and respectfully. When they had questions, they were responded to and addressed.
In summary, as confirmed by the investigation, the allegations made against the team were largely unfounded, misleading, and unfair.
With all of that said, in the spirit of ongoing improvement, the investigator shared their general recommendation that fast-growing workplaces should invest in continuing professional development. The investigator encouraged us to provide further training to our team about how to raise concerns to reinforce our existing workplace policies.
Prior to receiving this report, LMG solicited anonymous feedback from the team in an effort to ensure there was no unreported bullying and harassment and hosted a training session which reiterated our workplace policies and reinforced our reporting structure. LMG will continue to assess ongoing continuing education for our team.
At this time, we feel our case for a defamation suit would be very strong; however, our deepest wish is to simply put all of this behind us. We hope that will be the case, given the investigator’s clear findings that the allegations made online were misrepresentations of what actually occurred. We will continue to assess if there is persistent reputational damage or further defamation.
This doesn’t mean our company is perfect and our journey is over. We are continuously learning and trying to do better. Thank you all for being part of our community.
As you can see, they hired an outside legal firm to declare that they did nothing wrong in enabling said sexual harassment because there wasn't a paper trail, despite them admitting that the victim was told to talk it out with the abuser.
They followed up by threatening the victim with a lawsuit for continuing to speak out.
I feel that, as a woman and a victim of sexual harassment myself, its only fair that I must stand by other women that the patriarchy attempts to silence and ensure that those who wish to uphold a safe space for sexual harassment are held to account and not given an unopposed platform.
As you can see, they hired an outside legal firm to declare that they did nothing wrong in enabling said sexual harassment because there wasn't a paper trail, despite them admitting that the victim was told to talk it out with the abuser.
You are assuming intent, and ignoring the false statements made. What I see is them hiring a third party to do an investigation, exactly what the public called for. Would you rather the former employee pay for it?
They followed up by threatening the victim with a lawsuit for continuing to speak out.
There was no threat, only a statement of fact that the evidence was strong enough for a defamation case, and that they did not wish do go down that path.
Providing this statement is hardly doubling down and if anything moves in the other direction. Hiring a legit firm with a reputation of its own to defend is by all accounts the right thing to do, particularly after all the other fumbles that took place. Was waiting for an investigatory body to come along and do the legwork for free the more sensible option? No one was silenced here, and these allegations were made without proof. I tend to believe others, but this cuts both ways.
I'd say that laying your own experiences out as germane is gross, but then I do appreciate those strong biases being highlighted. For my own part I'd have rather not defended a media outlet that I do not care for.
While I ain't gonna excuse some shiti company atro turf, why is this being "litigated" on the web?
Criminal misconduct should be handled by the police.
If misconduct that us not criminal gets handled by civil court.
What outcome is the victim looking for here?
Thanks for this, I've been wondering for a while what was of that investigation.
I appreciated his comparison charts for various alternatives and the features they offered. I’m going to check out Ente and Stingle for self-hosted photo backup.
Check out immich as well!
Ente is great if you need a drop-in Google Photos replacement that is open-source, E2EE, externally audited and private. It’s the perfect solution for families tbh. Switched to it like two weeks ago and it’s been great so far.
Google services I still use before being unGoogled:
- Voice: I have to make like 1 or 2 calls within the US a year & not worth a SIM
- Maps: for when OSM isn’t cutting it & I’ll contribute the missing data after I found it
- Translate: for when Yandex Translate doesn’t cut it (everything ‘free’ only works with European languages)
- YouTube: no real alternative here that isn’t limited to just a piece of its scope, but viewed thru Librewolf+uBlock Origin+SponsorBlock or PipePipe
… and the last one is just basically every employer I have worked with puts all their company data on Google & it can’t really be avoided with them >:(
Can't help but mention Yandex is 100% as evil as Google is.
Out of popular choices, DeepL is probably least evil. Reverso is often a nice pick, too, especially Reverso Context.
There are also things like LibreTranslate, though the quality is generally lower (but can absolutely come in handy for simpler requests)
Brave has an openly homophobic founder, it’s weird to me that they’d mention the crypto issues and not this
Yes, I did it oftn. But main reason to avoid Brave is the somewhat fishy Crypto Policy and the betrayal of users in the past, redirecting searches to related crypto companies, which shows dubious business ethics regarding the user. For me Brave is simply not trustworth.
I've degoogled apart from:
- Google photos - I have shared storage with my family and I really can't be doing with sorting out the mess when I cancel my 200GB subscription. I do however back all photos up to my server.
- Pixel phone - I try not use any Google apps/search but the phones are updated regularly and are reasonably good value for money. Other brands have the Google tracking with the OEM tracking on top.
This video was fantastic and I hope they keep this series up. I'm switching to Kagi from ddg because of this vid and I'll spend time this weekend looking into ente/immich and all the DNS options highlighted here.
Super excited. It's weird paying for email or search engines given they've always been free in my lifetime but the services have been noticeably worse as of late and I miss an Internet constantly bombarding you with things you should believe or buy.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/YnSv8ylLfPw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.