Man how the hell are we supposed to degoogle so fast. I literally only became aware that they sucked like 2 years after them being cool for most of my life. Getting rid of gmail is going to be tough. There literally isn’t a service the equal of YouTube or Gmail.
tutamail.com. tuta.com. No phone required. No email required. No forced 2 factor authorization that is an excuse to grab your personal information to sell it. Never again on any of the tech email companies. Never again. I never agreed to give them my phone, they forced me to years after the fact when I needed to get in there suddenly.
Google, yahoo, aol, et al, will, for your own safety, because they are concerned about your security, make you hand over your phone number that they are allowed to use for commercial purposes in their TOS. You are welcome!
Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!
There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.
Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.
I’ve found ProtonMail to be pretty nice. Easy to import your mail into too. YouTube has been hard though. PeerTube is cool but rather small (feel free to ask my any questions about it though). Ideally we’d be using stuff like Nebula and Patreon to support creators directly, but you can at the very least use a fronted to minimize contact with Google.
For one thing the US sent them a list of accounts and they suspended them with no process or appeal just last year. For another Someone who isn’t me signed up for an account and had it immediately suspended for suspicious activity, after a sleuth it was found their IP was on some shady blacklist, despite them not using that IP for anything but social media scrolling and news.
Suspicion is Israel is behind it. Anyway, proton gives no way to appeal like the other one does. I think there was another incident of proton suspending accounts for the US too.
One of the unfortunate realities of operating a sensitive service like email is that you have to cooperate with valid government requests or risk getting fined, or worse, banned from the country. The good thing is that end to end encryption restricts the information they have to turnover about your messages, but this is vulnerability of pretty much any service. Your email provider will not go to jail for you.
I do find the IP blacklisting a little ironic considering they run a VPN, but that’s not much of a surprise either considering their freemium business model. I don’t see how either of these practices would link them to Israel, but it’s fair if you’re uncomfortable with them. I think you’d be hard pressed to find services that don’t also do these things, though. What do you use for email?
The IP blacklist is separate, there are a few dozen firms that compile blacklists, you can run your ip online to check quite easily. This suspicion is the US/Israel is putting persistent critics of Israel that have gotten traction, on these blacklists. If one was born yesterday in a cave that would seem paranoid, but to anyone paying attention it’s really not.
The fact of the matter is, the other privacy focused free email has appeals for these things, while proton just suspends your account based on the word of the most dishonest pieces of shit on the planet.
Grayjay’s kind of nice for that since it aggregates results from all platforms in a search - sometimes missing youtube videos (or stuff that got DMCA’d) can be found in peertube instead.
There are alternatives to Gmail. I’d probably list out such services as Yahoo/AOL (I personally use the AT&T branded version of this service) and Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com), but instead I’ll just tell you that you can enter a query like “free email provider” in your web search provider of choice and find several perfectly viable options.
Those are all awful, none of the corporate tech companies are better they are all garbage. If they force you to give them a phone number, they do not deserve your business.
Man how the hell are we supposed to degoogle so fast. I literally only became aware that they sucked like 2 years after them being cool for most of my life. Getting rid of gmail is going to be tough. There literally isn’t a service the equal of YouTube or Gmail.
tutamail.com. tuta.com. No phone required. No email required. No forced 2 factor authorization that is an excuse to grab your personal information to sell it. Never again on any of the tech email companies. Never again. I never agreed to give them my phone, they forced me to years after the fact when I needed to get in there suddenly.
What?
Google, yahoo, aol, et al, will, for your own safety, because they are concerned about your security, make you hand over your phone number that they are allowed to use for commercial purposes in their TOS. You are welcome!
getting rid of gmail was actually the easiest part for me.
Google drive and maps was the hardest.
And I had replaced maps pretty well until magicearth decided to implode
What happened to magicearth? I haven’t used it much, just one of the google alternatives in my “maps” folder.
They went “freemium” while breaking the app and hiding most useful features behind the paywall.
And I cannot stress enough how much they broke the app. It used to be so smooth and no nonsense. Now it’s just unsafe to use.
at my work, one person decided to start an email group to connect everyone for after hours activities…
only 2 people out of 20 were non gmail accounts
Snowden was in 2013, bro.
Use a client for video content like Grayjay (gets rid of the ads too).
Look at Tuta Mail or Proton Mail as viable privacy focused alternatives.
Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!
There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.
Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.
– Frost
I’ve found ProtonMail to be pretty nice. Easy to import your mail into too. YouTube has been hard though. PeerTube is cool but rather small (feel free to ask my any questions about it though). Ideally we’d be using stuff like Nebula and Patreon to support creators directly, but you can at the very least use a fronted to minimize contact with Google.
Proton mail is compromised I believe. In bed with the administration of the US.
What makes you think that?
For one thing the US sent them a list of accounts and they suspended them with no process or appeal just last year. For another Someone who isn’t me signed up for an account and had it immediately suspended for suspicious activity, after a sleuth it was found their IP was on some shady blacklist, despite them not using that IP for anything but social media scrolling and news.
Suspicion is Israel is behind it. Anyway, proton gives no way to appeal like the other one does. I think there was another incident of proton suspending accounts for the US too.
One of the unfortunate realities of operating a sensitive service like email is that you have to cooperate with valid government requests or risk getting fined, or worse, banned from the country. The good thing is that end to end encryption restricts the information they have to turnover about your messages, but this is vulnerability of pretty much any service. Your email provider will not go to jail for you.
I do find the IP blacklisting a little ironic considering they run a VPN, but that’s not much of a surprise either considering their freemium business model. I don’t see how either of these practices would link them to Israel, but it’s fair if you’re uncomfortable with them. I think you’d be hard pressed to find services that don’t also do these things, though. What do you use for email?
The IP blacklist is separate, there are a few dozen firms that compile blacklists, you can run your ip online to check quite easily. This suspicion is the US/Israel is putting persistent critics of Israel that have gotten traction, on these blacklists. If one was born yesterday in a cave that would seem paranoid, but to anyone paying attention it’s really not.
The fact of the matter is, the other privacy focused free email has appeals for these things, while proton just suspends your account based on the word of the most dishonest pieces of shit on the planet.
Grayjay’s kind of nice for that since it aggregates results from all platforms in a search - sometimes missing youtube videos (or stuff that got DMCA’d) can be found in peertube instead.
Nebula also works on it as well.
They have been evil for over 20 years. What are you on about?
There are many email providers. Like… thousands. Personally, I use Zoho.
There are alternatives to Gmail. I’d probably list out such services as Yahoo/AOL (I personally use the AT&T branded version of this service) and Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com), but instead I’ll just tell you that you can enter a query like “free email provider” in your web search provider of choice and find several perfectly viable options.
Those are all awful, none of the corporate tech companies are better they are all garbage. If they force you to give them a phone number, they do not deserve your business.