Seriously don't know why anyone is surprised that a browser built by an ad-tech company pushes the user tracking tech of that company.
Just use Firefox and have done with it - there's been a series of these kinds of posts over the last couple of days with people suggesting insane workaround hacks instead of just changing their browser.
P.S. if you keep chrome because some websites only work properly there, maybe y'all should follow standards at work instead of targeting a proprietary browser like its 2001/IE6 again.
Dropping chrome is not enough. Switch to bing (Just as good as G), or ddg if you really want. Then ditch android which is the spy in your pocket. If you're installing G analytics for clients then choose an alternative (I'm open to suggestions here).
It's really time to disentangle ourselves from google. They've quietly and effectively insinuated themselves across the web. Enough is enough.
If you have your own server somewhere or access to such managed by someone you trust may I suggest using a meta-search engine like Searx [1] instead? That way you get to swat a whole cloud of flies in one fell swoop:
1: no personal tracking or profiling data for the search providers
2: no 'personalised' search
3: search results from several providers condensed into one list, i.e. more results for the same query
You can also use one of the public Searx instances [2] if you trust them enough not to do their own profiling. By default Searx does not use cookies but there are other ways of tracking individual browsers so that is not a guarantee for tracking-free browsing.
I'll second the recommendation of Searx - I appreciate DDG, but it has noticeably worse search performance (relevance of results etc) than Google, while Searx, being a metasearch engine, provides high-quality results but still maintains privacy.
I really wish iOS allowed for custom search engines, it's hard coded to just google, yahoo, bing, and duckduckgo because then that would allow for this roll-your-own pattern to be accessible when on the phone / tablet (if using an iPhone/iPad).
It's only Safari on iOS that doesn't let you change search engines. If you install Firefox you can install any search engine you want and you can customize the search URL. It still uses the Safari engine under the hood, but the user facing bits are a condensed version of desktop Firefox, including tracking protection and sync.
Bing is nowhere near "(Just as good as G)". If it was, a lot more people would have already switched. As of now, it's surprisingly behind Google in almost all but the most basic searches.
Not really, Google has pushed the "relevancy customization" to it's extreme limit and the conclusion of this process is search results that are often just garbage.
Not just in the filter bubble sense of keeping out any info that the targeted user might find unpleasant, but also in the sense that "we don't surface anything outside of very recent, very mainstream, large corporate sites" even when that's exactly what I don't want to sift through on a given search.
It's a real pain if you're trying to do research in a niche area or in an academic field that isn't hip and popular, if you're not in the 90% bracket of the distribution results for what people click on you just don't exist on Google anymore.
This phenomena is most obvious when you're searching for something that you know still exists on the web, you can remember it being a top result years ago, but has now been effectively eliminated from the results because it's not sitting on the domain of a large corporation. Bing will still surface these sites, at least for now.
> Not really, Google has pushed the "relevancy customization" to it's extreme limit and the conclusion of this process is search results that are often just garbage.
> Not just in the filter bubble sense of keeping out any info that the targeted user might find unpleasant, but also in the sense that "we don't surface anything outside of very recent, very mainstream, large corporate sites" even when that's exactly what I don't want to sift through on a given search.
I think this is why many people perceive Google Search to be "better." Those people are mainly looking for mainstream topics on a small number of mainstream sites, and Google has heavily biased their algorithm in that direction.
> It's a real pain if you're trying to do research in a niche area or in an academic field that isn't hip and popular, if you're not in the 90% bracket of the distribution results for what people click on you just don't exist on Google anymore.
> This phenomena is most obvious when you're searching for something that you know still exists on the web, you can remember it being a top result years ago, but has now been effectively eliminated from the results because it's not sitting on the domain of a large corporation. Bing will still surface these sites, at least for now.
I first tried DDG years ago. It really wasn't great. The results and astetics were not up to snuff. I went back to google. About a year ago I decided to try DDG again. I've been using DDG ever since. Maybe once a month I'll google something. I use chrome only for google products like gmail.
DDG sucks and hasn’t really improved at all. I’ve used it for a longtime but I use bangs endlessly. Unless you can provide some quantifiable metric to prove its “getting better” then it’s delusion getting the better of you.
DDG uses other search engines for results (such as bing), so unless you agree Bing is improving, it’s just a placebo.
DDG is only useful because we can all fall back on g!. It’s sad but true. There is still no substitution for Google search.
Indeed, DDG usually gives better results for me because it second-guesses precise search terms less than Google, and because its instant answers from sites like StackOverflow are high quality.
The one place it's really currently lacking is in rejection of spam sites.
To me, it comes across like a skewed, disproportionately-negative cognitive distortion, of what I won't speculate because I won't armchair/keyboard psychoanalyze.
Back the fatalism FUD truck up from going off the cliff with baseless, whiny negativity...
DDG is so good that I use GOOG maybe once a year as a secondary search engine. And I started with GS since it had a comically-terrible interface in 2000. I switched because they went evil and DDG was more than good enough being privacy-focused. The !bang searches are a big innovation and timesaver that sealed the deal.
That's kind of how I feel about DDG but am concerned that they don't offer the privacy they promise since they aren't open source and are hosted on AWS. Feel free to try something I created....jivesearch.com. You can get all the !bangs they have.
I find you have to train yourself to use DDG a bit. For example when I'm searching something JavaScript-centric but is a language agnostic concept, I have to prefix it with "javascript" whereas Google can already guess the context. On the plus side It helps you stay aware of the world outside your own! I find DDG's hashbangs incredible useful e.g. `!bi whales` (bing image search: whale) when it doesn't deliver.
I use DDG as default search for little over a year now. Mostly I am quite happy with it, and do not have to fall back to Google.
But for some searches I do have to do that. E.g. searching for a HN discussion from the last week: usually no hit. Also image and video search yield surprisingly little results. This last thing is my biggest complaint on DDG.
You would be surprised. I am using Bing alone for over a year and had to use google for 2-3 cases at max. Agreed google sometimes return different results, but you cannot say it's better, especially if you are used to seeing Bing results. I would suggest you try Bing for a month and go to google if you cannot absolutely find anything in Bing.
I switched my default search engine to Bing on my phone (when AMP started to become a thing) and it's been great.
I do still use Google on my work PC, because it knows I'm a C++ programmer and can show more relevant results. I am against the direction tracking is going, but it is useful in some cases.
Hi Vanadium....I'm a journalist and saw a post of yours on an older HN thread that I was hoping to ask you about. Any chance you'd be willing to connect so I can share details about me and what I'm working on? Cell is 847-380-0751
Programming queries, that too only occassionally. And also recently I had an issue with my MacBook Pro and Google showed the more forum answers and more accurately.
I think people are just used to a certain page, just like they are/were used to their favorite local news station. I doubt most people periodically run tests to see which search engines return the most relevant results for them.
Plus, people know that google search is the best, so why use something else? The problem is that they seem to "know" in the same sense that they know Kleenex are the best tissues; its all marketing.
Some people might do that (not care enough to try). That's not what I mean specifically. I did go back and I did try, again and again. Bing just misses so much of the context of each query, does not understand to switch context based on some specific keyword like "ubuntu"vs"linux", etc. etc. It does not understand my half-articulated searches, - in which Google just shines because it thinks the rest of the thought for me and gets the result I really want and am looking for, usually on the first page of results.
This is not about liking the visual style of the webpage(google vs bing) or how it looks. This is about quality of results and me saving time.
This is not about me being lazy not doing "good search queries". If I can search google and get a result in 5 seconds, why would I spend 1 minute figuring out the best way to phrase something, then 3 more minutes trying different things that Bing would understand? I know there is enough information in my search, because Google understands it. Why should I add more words to it (and sometimes operators) for Bing to get it? Why should I waste my time for no reason? This does not hinder my thinking ability. It's just that Google is so good that it knows what I am thinking before I am completely done with formulating the thought. Damn, sometimes I am on a wikipedia page, I stumble upon a 4-word term unknown to me in that page, I start typing it and Google knows after 2 letters, it shows the whole complete term as a suggestion! And this happens with terms starting with very common words, so it's very likely that google just knows that most people google that exact thing after going to the Wikipedia page (since google sends me to wikipedia page from the beginning). When Bing will do these little things to aid my work, I will gladly switch.
I did try, and I do wish that Bing will get better. Right now it is simply not.
(Yes, I know there are privacy implications, and those suck. But we were talking about quality of searching...)
Really? It seems to work for me for all but the most intricate searches. Recently I’ve noticed the first page of google results is getting a bit useless from all the SEO pushing commercial results to the top—ideally I’d want to filter out businesses from results. I don’t see this happening any time soon, unfortunately.
Finally, the quality of search results is mildly subjective the closer you get to “keyword search” and away from “text search”. Google handles this scenario the best interface wise, but quality it seems to have been going down since they introduced the knowledge base—too many unrelated bits of information being pulled in without being asked for.
This is visible in both the results and in the logs of any large, complex website. You'll see Bing requesting things which shouldn't ever exist, and continuously trying things which are unavailable without much persistent backoff. That still have some way to go.
All Microsoft has to do is let people white label their Bing product, look at DDG...that's Bing's engine. Most people don't know, or care. The results are good. That's actually how Google became so popular, Yahoo used Google. Bing just needs to keep integrating itself into the next big things. Unfortunately Google often will pay a handsome sum to make sure it keeps a foothold...I mean look at Siri. It went from Google to Bing to Google. No doubt there was a negotiation that caused that. Given Apple's focus on privacy, it would be a bit surprising if they don't switch again.
What's the alternative to Android though? Apple has its own well-documented issues, as well as a rather large price-tag. I just use my phone for maps and some chat services, don't need a very fancy phone. Even the iPhone 7 is listed at £449, which is already £150 more than I paid for my Sony Xperia.
I wish stuff like HP WebOS or Meego was still alive, but as far as I know, Apple and Google are the only serious players in town at the moment :-(
There are no perfect alternatives, just imperfect ones.
Apple has their own issues, but they've claimed that their business is selling you a device and software and media to run on it, and making their money from that as opposed to reselling your data. Everything they've been doing lately supports that stance, and they've already recognized it as a differentiation, hence the way they have been up-playing the privacy features of their devices lately. Since they aren't selling you as much after the fact, they are going to charge you more up-front, and since they make their money selling software, they're obsessed with controlling the marketplace.
Google gives away software and media, and sells your personal data and advertising. They're showing increasingly that they don't care about your privacy if it affects their bottom line.
You have to decide which of those business models you support, and then support it. There's no third model where a business gives everything away and cares about your privacy. That's inconsistent with a bottom line of making money, and at the end of the day that is what the business is trying to do.
For a while Google gave the impression that they cared, until they established a large enough market, and now you're seeing them make the natural transition. They've grew their cash cow by giving away stuff, now they are milking it.
Any rational company with their business model is going to do the same thing though, so if you jump ship to another ecosystem now selling you a business model that is too good to be true, don't be surprised down the line when that proves to be the case.
Google does make a ton of money from ads and tracking, but how do they not "sell software and media" too? They sell apps and media in the same manner that Apple does.
Abusing users isn't OK just because they've found additional ways to extract money from users.
Disclaimer: I was a Google fanboy until a few years ago and I disliked but trusted Google until a couple of weeks ago. Now I don't know what to do but at least I've finally got around to switching my search habits.
Oh I agree, absolutely not. I'm against Google and don't use their software. I just thought that the parent comment wasn't very accurate as it characterized Apple as selling apps and media and Google as doing neither of those things.
Google has relatively few ways to actually give them money directly for software and media. There's Google Apps (assuming you aren't a grandfathered free customer from back when it was free), and I guess YouTube Red, and, um.... is there any other way to actually pay money to Google for services rendered? I honestly can't think of another option.
(I'm ignoring their hardware here because of course that's not free, and I don't think it's even intended to be a significant source of revenue anyway)
Don't they take a cut from any transaction in the Play store?
In stores around here, you can buy gift cards with a Google logo on it (play store credit). That's about as direct a way of giving them money as i can think of.
They do, but I wouldn't consider that to be the customer paying Google directly. There's a reason why people usually use the word "tax" to refer to this (and Apple's cut on their store).
I suppose buying a gift card is technically giving Google money directly, but that isn't the same thing as payment for services rendered, it's just exchanging USD for Google Play credit, which you then spend on apps. Or in other words, you get the exact same service that you do if you skip the gift card and just pay for apps at the point of sale.
>Google has relatively few ways to actually give them money directly for software and media.
Doesn't Google sell music, e-books, and movies/TV through Google Play? They also have Google Play Music as a subscription service. I was counting the Play Store as buying applications from Google, although it isn't Google's first-party software.
They do, but the context we're talking about is paying Google for Google software, not using Google as a storefront for buying other people's software.
I didn't realize Google Play had their own subscription music service. Good to know.
Android (the Android Open Source Project) itself is not the Problem. It's the lock-in ecosystem that Google tries to establish with the Google Services Framework, Play Store and the like. What is missing, is an open and privacy-friendly alternative to GSF. Without GSF we don't have efficient push notifications (Firebase Cloud Messaging), a geolocation provider, a maps API etc.
Personally, I have been using microG (https://microg.org/) instead of GSF on my phone for many years now. However, that is still just a partial solution. While it does its best to be privacy-friendly and does not have any integrated tracking / analytics like GSF, it still has to use Google's servers for push notifications, thus tracking is still possible to some degree.
microG is certainly not perfect and I wouldn't recommend it to the average user. Expect some things to not work or even certain apps to crash. It's a techie-solution for people who value their privacy highly.
What, specifically, are Apple’s well documented issues? They have fought for user privacy in court cases and in the court of public opinion over the last couple of years.
SailfishOS is still around, which is pretty much the spiritual successor to Meego. That said, even in Finland it has a tiny fraction of the market share of Android and iOS.
You can run Lineage OS without installing gapps. It's all the Google apps, including Play, that does all the tracking. I'm not 100% certain, but I see references in the bugreport log to dm-verity so I'm pretty sure it's doing cryptographically verified boot.
And then the next question is what are the alternative store options and which is the best?
Google searching (oops! irony!) I found aptoide.com, and found they have a lot of apps: Firefox, Firefox Focus, Lastpass, Expedia, Chime Bank, etc. I don't know how their build and distribution system ensures safe binaries - didn't check it out.
I recently dropped Google Maps in favor of OsmAnd, and I'm still having growing pains. You have to download maps offline, it's not on demand. It looks like I only get 7 downloads for free. I haven't checked pricing. I'm not sure what happens if I do a phone reset, if I get a new stack of downloads or not. Local searches are super screwy, listing things like delis, pizza, hardware store, in other towns but not my own town. It's...not like Google Maps.
I'm quite surprised how many up-to-date applications can be installed via APK files or alternative markets (F-Droid) and work. For instance, thinking of Threema or Whatsapp, two continously maintained applications which do not inevitably depend on GApps.
How is the experience, though? Do you find that most mainstream apps run without issues? Or do you need to exclusively depend on one of the OSS app ecosystems like F-Droid?
Google tracks you via Play Services. And any Google application comes with Play. So if you're trying to get away from Google tracking, you have to get completely out of the eco system including Play Store. So yeah F-Droid (haven't used it) or what I just mentioned in another answer, Aptoide (haven't used it but searched for some common apps and found them).
Sure, I get that. But everything is a trade off. I'm probably not as concerned about the privacy issues inherent in Play & GSF, but I'm at least somewhat concerned. Just trying to figure out what exactly I'd be giving up, and in what ways I'd make my life more difficult. (Obviously that's a pretty me-specific thing, so I'm probably not gonna get a great answer here. But I think it's worth thinking about.)
Google Play Services and other nonfree Google software can be installed on top of LineageOS, but LineageOS does not include them in its installation. I've used Lineage extensively with F-Droid as my apps source.
I can't resist the sarcasm. In that thread, others argue vehemently that you should sacrifice your money for your values. So arguing that the more privacy-conscious phone is too expensive, is... an unexpected argument :-)
I've found Startpage and its sister site IxQuick to be a good alternative to Google. Same search results with a lot of detritus filtered out, keeps you out of Google's search bubble, and it has built in proxy features.
Instead of Bing, which tracks you for monetization on Microsoft's behalf (though I trust Microsoft with my information more than Google), try DuckDuckGo. It uses Bing as a back end but, like Startpage, proxies the query so your information and identity never hits Microsoft's servers. It's also a much cleaner page code-wise than any other search engine I've seen. It often comes up with more relevant results than Startpage; I find myself often searching both for the same subject so I don't miss what I'm looking for.
Honestly, does using Google even matter anymore unless you are trying to search for something extremely obscure?
Most of the time, my searches are directly for products (ie, Amazon.com, Target.com, Walmart.com), people (ie fb.com), Wikipedia (first few hits on Google), locations (yelp.com, Google maps, ___ maps), recommendations (yelp.com, etc), hotels or travel (expedia.com, kayak.com, hotwire.com, united.com, southwest.com, etc) or Stackoverflow (first page of Google) — I’d wager any modern search engine such as Bing or DDG can easily present all the relevant Stackoverflow/Stackexchange/Stack{...} results you could ever desire.
It’s not the same as the old days of random (important) data sprinkled across the personal/hobby pages of some knowledgeable people across Geocities — is there even a need for using Google anymore?
You are introducing a concept worse than google not deleting cookies. Limiting the web to a handful of sites kills the concept of the web. I would suggest spending as much time out of the top 20 popular sites as possible. Diversity is key.
Just to chime in, I’ve found Spotlight on iOS to cover about 85% of my needs. It uses Bing for web results, but I often don’t even need the web results.
Everything else I just invoke DuckDuckGo or Startpage.
I actually missed this, that said the pertinent details that would concern me and others like me are covered right here:
> As is expected with Apple now, searches and results are all encrypted and anonymized and cannot be attributed to any individual user. Once you click on the ‘Show Google results’ link, of course, you’re off to Google and its standard tracking will apply. Clicking directly on a website result will take you straight there, not through Google.
In effect, this is much like using Startpage instead of google.com, at least up until you load a full results page (which I actually haven't done in quite a long time now that I think about it).
It would be nice also for websites to have an alternative to recaptcha. I hate to have to train google's models for free just to access a website. I'd prefer to do some work for data that can be openly accessed (OpenStreetMap for example).
I quit using all websites that use Google captcha. I also don't want to train Google's models and spend 2-3 minutes doing free work for Google just to sign into Discord. It's extremely annoying using a VPN with Google services too, as you 9/10 times have to do lengthy captchas. I miss early-mid 2000's captchas.
I'm pretty much done with Google now, and I think a lot of tech users will start pulling this way too.
Honestly I don’t think I even do that many actual searches any more, maybe I work too much, or am just odd?
The most frequent services I use, after thinking about it, are:
- local business/food/bars (hours, reviews)
- driving directions
- accessing email to confirm a signup/lookup a receipt/license etc
- events, theater showtimes
- flight prices
- pay bills etc
- check reviews/HN/ random articles.
Most of these I access directly or could be provided by any basic app/search engine.
After reviewing this list, you are left with a few extremely low margin services and a dismal grouping of actual usage, at least seemingly from Google’s point of view.
I’m not saying I’m better than a non power user (mom etc), but are they really worth more? Does clicking on Pinterest links half of the day, or forwarding political/funny emails really have value to 3rd party companies? (Google etc)
Maybe in the short term, there is a circular, ad revenue generation model, but is it really sustainable?
From a monetization perspective, why not just charge $99 for chrome vs charging $0.00005 * x-thousand and being seedy via ads? Not going to pay now, since trust is blown, but here’s to anyone in the future.
> Because nobody pays for software
I find this really annoying and silly. People spend money on many other useless stuff, but not software. We have reached a point were software and internet services is expected to be free.
I can't believe that this needs to be said here, but don't use Microsoft products if your goal is to avoid dark patterns and user monetization. Microsoft is at least 10 times more corrupt than google.
lol, nope. Like, what unit does one even measure corruption in?
GP appears to be expressing a rote dislike of MS uncritically carried through from the 90s. Nowadays they're nowhere close to Google or FB in terms of EITHER anti-competitive business practices or user/consumer/human hostile product designs.
No kidding, two sides of the same coin. Not claiming a sacred cow, but least MS has a viable business model outside of selling user data. Duck Duck Go is a better search engine than Bing or Google, anyway.
You should be good if you're using Android without Google services, I think.
That's exactly the rub. We don't really know.
My Windows phone is going defunkt and the only alternative I really see is either an iPhone, or then back to a dumb phone (a 4G wifi hotspot function would be great, but I haven't found a reasonable dumb phone supporting that).
I'll be damned before I carry any Android device on me.
Replicant runs on a total of around 5 devices. LineageOS runs on a lot of devices, the only difference is that LineageOS includes proprietary drivers, but not proprietary userland.
So, Lineage is a more realistic alternative. They're unlikely to spy on you through the drivers, at least it's more unlikely than being spied on by Apple by using an iPhone.
The problem with that approach is that I don't want to fiddle with my phone. I don't fancy installing custom roms and I don't need the frustration about a device running 99% fine, except for those annoying 1% that you need right now.
I see an analogy in GNU/Linux, which I started to use in 1999 (yeah, on the desktop). It was really good fun. I liked compiling my own kernels because I could. It's great when you can compile, say, Postgresql to the exact specifics of your box, etc.
But then you get to the point where you just want that damn thing to work. You don't want to waste a couple hours or more in figuring out how to burn a cd. let alone games (a situation, which is much better now). So, at one point and as much as I like GNU/Linux, the philosophy behind free software and the endless possibilities of tinkering with your system I switched back to Windows.
It's probably even worse with a phone. I want that damn thing to just work and I don't see that with keeping an Android phone Google free.
At least Apple is not in the business of selling my privacy to the sleaziest of sleaze in order to make a quick buck.
Edited to add : Thanks for the Librem 5 suggestion. I'll look into it.
My phone on Lineage OS 15 without Google stuff just works. There is nothing that does not work. It is flawless.
Actually, it works better than an average Android phone, or than the same phone with stock system:
- better battery life (it used ~ 2% battery during this very work day, with a few texts and one call) because it quite literally does nothing if I don't use it (granted, I use ForceDoze and that helps a lot).
- It never shows any sign of slowness, is never laggy like I can witness on many phones around me (and I use Firefox Mobile, which is supposed to be slow from what I read).
- I didn't have to disable any unwanted app.
Well, except for EAP SIM Wifi authentication, which does not work on any custom ROM that I know of and flashing a custom ROM is indeed a stressful experience, especially the first time.
Librem 5 will be pricey but seems like a good option when it is ready.
Maybe I should indeed do some research and look into it seriously. Your experience sounds really good and, provided I go that route, should save me a bundle (iPhones, especially the new lineup) are brutally expensive in Europe.
Your reply (and others in the thread) once again shows what a valuable resource HN can be.
This is my only chance right now unfortunately. As I've written here before I use open source closed loop insulin systems and Android is the most convenient OS to run them without needing to reinstall every now and then as you do in iOS.
I'd like something more linux-y, maybe with support for Android that I can run xDrip and AndroidAPS. But nothing else from Google. Anyways Signal, Email and Firefox are the other apps I need from the system.
I'm stuck on deciding what my primary mail provider will be. I do not mind paying a few bucks a month, would anyone have a suggestion? Regarding drive replacement, I will probably host a nextcloud instance.
I've also been using ProtonMail since the beginning of last year and neither a heavy mail user, but need it still. I'm paying for it and using my own domain. Some things to consider:
1) The web UI is probably not very nice and snappy if you use email a lot.
2) No IMAP for Linux (still).
3) If you happen to be like me (a bit of an idiot sometimes) and lock your phone so you don't get access to your authenticator AND you forgot the security keys, all your old emails will be PGP garbage from now on.
4) The Android app is a bit so-so... Bugs happen.
The good parts are it works, doesn't spy on you, encrypts everything client-side and is based in Switzerland outside of US and EU jurisdiction.
Really, the most important thing is to control the domain, so that changing the provider later is not a big deal. I've been using FastMail and it is great, but the hardest part was moving away from @gmail.com
If you just want pure email, migadu.com works very well. I like the fact that they price based on emails sent, not domains or addresses. This lets me run a different domain with a regex based catchall for account registrations so that my personal inbox remains clean.
They do require you to purchase your own domain but you should do that anyway to ensure that a provider can't lock you out of your digital life.
I can drop a vouch in for Protonmail. Been using them for a bit over a year now. They also recently added full PGP integration, with the ability to assign public keys to contacts, as well as the ability to use your own private key.
Im a longtime ios user thinking of switching to android soon - can you elaborate on android spying? All android devices? How do they spy and what do they gather? I hadnt come across this in my research so far
I'm not OP but I've been an Android user since the release of the T-Mobile G1 and have been trying to get rid of Google stuff for a while:
> All android devices?
No, not all Android devices. Only the ones with the Google Services Framework installed (or, if you're as paranoid as I am, any other Google service that is running as root).
To give you an overview, Google's power over Android users basically rests on the following pillars:
1. Google Services Framework (GSF): AFAIK every Google app requires the GSF to be installed on your phone these days. The GSF runs as root, includes all kinds of analytics libraries. It also links your phone to your account if you decide to set it up on your phone (which, theoretically, you don't have to but, in practice, you are often forced to). If you indeed do that and connect your phone to your account, things like contacts, calendar entries and so on get synchronized automatically.
Even worse, there's also a way for the GSF to back up all your apps' data and upload them to the Google servers. I'm just mentioning this to make it clear that the GSF really has access to everything on your phone.
Solution: Use MicroG (https://microg.org) as a GSF replacement. This, in turn, requires using a custom ROM like LineageOS and, thus, your phone's bootloader to be unlockable. Not all Google apps will work with MicroG but most do in my experience (see below).
2. Google Play Store: Most apps are only available on the Play Store, so if you want to use any of these you'll have to use the Play Store in one way or another. The Play Store, however, needs the Google Services Framework. And even if you got rid of the GSF and replaced it with MicroG (see 1), you would still have to install the Play Store as a system app, giving it root access to your phone.
Solution: Apart from getting rid of the GSF (see 1), use F-Droid for open-source apps and something like Yalp Store (or the Aurora fork) to download apps from the Play Store. (There are also ways to download apps from the Play Store using F-Droid, see e.g. https://github.com/NoMore201/playmaker) You won't be able to obtain paid apps this way, though. (Or, more precisely, you won't be able to download apps that you haven't already paid for.)
2. In-app payments ("Android Pay")
As you might expect, these are also tied to the Play Store and the GSF.
Solution: I haven't tried this in a long time but you might be able replace the GSF with MicroG and just have the Play Store installed and tied to your Google account in order for in-app payments to work. No guarantees, though.
3. Google SafetyNet (part of GSF, as well)
From my POV, this is the most painful Google "feature". It's a Google library that apps like Netflix and online banking apps use to verify that the device they're running on has not been "tampered" with. (What "tampered" means exactly is unclear -- it definitely includes rooted devices but the precise definition is Google's secret.)
If you want to use apps like Netflix, there is no real way around SafetyNet. This is because, if installed on your phone, SafetyNet will download a binary blob from Google, execute it and send its output (basically all the information the blob collected about your phone) to the Google servers. The latter will then do the verification process and notify the Netflix servers (or your bank's servers) about the result. The Netflix servers can then tell the Netflix app on your phone to lock you out if need be.
Solution: While MicroG can't circumvent this, it does support SafetyNet these days by emulating the original SafetyNet implementation. So it, too, will download the binary blob and execute it.
Put differently, in order to use Netflix and most online banking apps you will still have to make sure that your phone passes the SafetyNet test. Here, you've got two options:
Option b): Don't use root or any of those modifications in the first place. (I.e. you could just run LineageOS without root and you should be fine.) The problem with non-rooted devices is that they also don't allow you to run a firewall or apps like Xprivacy for more fine-grained privacy control. (When it comes to firewalls not requiring root, NetGuard does come close, though. However, it should be noted that you won't be able to use VPNs anymore.)
4. Google services that are tied a Google account, e.g. Gmail, Drive, Maps, Picasa, Home, Google Now/voice assistant etc.
As already mentioned, they all require the GSF to be installed on your phone.
Solution: I would recommend staying away from them but if you really need them you should be able to replace the GSF with MicroG and they should still work. There might be exceptions, though, depending on how deeply they are integrated with your phone. (The voice assistant might be one such example.)
5. Google services that are not tied to a Google account, e.g. Maps
Solution: Same as 4) and/or use an OpenStreetMaps-based app like OsmAnd as a replacement for maps.
This is one thing that I genuinely have never understood: if it's this challenging (and effectively impossible for non tech savvy users) to make android devices safe / private / secure and also feature-complete - why, oh why are so many people still using them? This is not me fanboying Apple, it's just sort of mind boggling to me.
This is from someone who used a nexus 6p for two years, and some older stuff before that - but who has recently switched back to iPhone for its ease of use and privacy stance.
Coming back to iOS from Android can be painful - there's too much "you're holding it wrong" mentality in the platform and its UX. If your use cases fit the design, everything's great. The moment they don't, it's extremely frustrating.
(This is very similar to Windows vs macOS, by the way.)
Indeed! I find that the degree of customizability that Windows allows to be more than sufficient for my needs; but I have no doubt that there are people who have different needs that are not accommodated.
If you think it's "challenging" to use Android devices without Google, you should try using your iPhone without Apple. At least with Android you have the option of installing a custom ROM based on AOSP with no Google services.
I think that's a very good point. Also, the vast majority of Android users doesn't mind the tight integration with Google in the first place and among the minority that does, there are only very few people with the technical expertise to change anything about it. So most people end up surrendering themselves to Google because 1) they don't see any other option and 2) it's also the most convenient "solution".
While it's definitely a lot of work, the author of the sibling post is right: Getting rid of Google services is fairly easy. The issue is rather that you might still want them in some cases. Then, it's often not so much a security issue but a rather a matter of getting them to work with your restricted setup.
DDG has improved substantially recently. I've had some technical search queries that gave me 2-3 results on DDG, and when I used the !g bang to lookup in Google, I got a "no results" page. =P
You might want to take a look at AT Internet, they're GDPR compliant and have been in the business for a long time. It's more of a B2B company though. They have big companies as clients, mostly in France and Europe (BBC)
Is there a good alternative for google photos? I remember I looked for one few months ago after I got a little freaked out by google facial recognition, but didn't find any good alternative.
> Then ditch android which is the spy in your pocket.
To what? iOS spies even more by default (no way to disable AGPS vs. opt in on Android) and doesn't allow using privacy-enabling apps by default (system-wide ad/tracker blocker, real Firefox, Signal, local maps, etc.) unless you hack your phone. Worse, it doesn't let you develop for your own phone without rebuilding weekly or paying a yearly fee for the privilege. Between the two evils of Google and Apple, Google remains the lesser evil by a long stretch.
Being unable to disable AGPS is not the same as "iOS spies even more". Apple charges more because they don't sell you data or spy on you. There are system-wide ad-blockers, Firefox Focus is great, and there is a Signal app. Apple is actually going out of there way to make Safari harder to track - https://www.wired.com/story/apple-safari-privacy-wwdc/
They're also the only company who has been strong enough to stick up for their customers and publicly decline the US government assistance or backdoors into their products.
> Being unable to disable AGPS is not the same as "iOS spies even more".
True but I'd like to point out that different standards are being applied here when talking about Android's lack of privacy vs iPhone's privacy friendly policies. Namely there is a large post above on how Google Services Framework has access to everything in your phone so it is bad (and we need to do everything to get rid of it) simply because of what it _can_ do, rather than of what it actually does (because what it does largely depends on user settings, like for example if you want to backup your whole phone, obviously that's going to package and save all your phone's contents on Google servers).
Most of the privacy features you mention seem targeted to stop a certain type of information gathering (that of web based adtech, obviously those are Apple's competitors so it's not surprising) while it's not covering the biggest issue IMO with smartphones: information gathering by the system applications that you have no control over. Do we know how much information does Apple collect with their system software and store it associated with your AppleID and you have no control over that? I never used an iPhone so I'm curious, especially things like: location (nearby cell tower information, GPS and wifi networks), contacts, phone call log, SMS log, process list/applications running or installed, DNS logs, API calls logs.
> Being unable to disable AGPS is not the same as "iOS spies even more".
I just showed you one way that iOS spies on you that you can't turn off. All other default data collection is exactly the same between iOS and Android. N + 1 > N. Q.E.D.
> There are system-wide ad-blockers
Where? I'm talking about blocking ads and trackers in all apps, not just in web views.
> Firefox Focus is great
It doesn't use Gecko or Spidermonkey. It is not real Firefox.
> and there is a Signal app.
Which, as I already said, you can't set as your default SMS app.
> They're also the only company who has been strong enough to stick up for their customers and publicly decline the US government assistance or backdoors into their products.
Even Google has declined to assist the US government. There is no difference here. Everywhere else, iOS is significantly worse.
> Apple charges more because they don't sell you data or spy on you.
Apple charges more because they know they have enough rubes that will buy into their marketing spiel, even convincing some software engineers to buy programmable devices they aren't allowed to program. Google doesn't sell your data either, and as I've already shown, Android spies on you less.
Most "full ad-blocking" requires being rooted on an Android device too. And you've obviously not done very much research about what data Apple collects vs Google. Simply using each OS will show you a big difference in philosophy. Google makes you approve all permissions when you install an app without clearly stating what it means. iOS apps have to ask for specific permission the first time they want to use GPS, camera, microphone, etc. Default apps? Yeah that's annoying, but it's not like you can't use Signal. And Google is currently working with the US government on many projects, which has caused many Googlers to quit the company.
> And you've obviously not done very much research about what data Apple collects vs Google.
I showed you exactly how Apple collects more data from iOS than Google does from Android. You're trying to Pee-wee Herman your way out of this with an "I know you are but what am I?"
> Google makes you approve all permissions when you install an app without clearly stating what it means. iOS apps have to ask for specific permission the first time they want to use GPS, camera, microphone, etc.
You're wrong — Android also asks for permission at the time the app wants to use a feature. More importantly, this has nothing to do with what data Google or Android collects, which is the whole point of this thread.
> it's not like you can't use Signal.
Moving the goalposts. You can't use Firefox. An SMS app is nearly useless if it can't be set to the default.
> And Google is currently working with the US government on many projects, which has caused many Googlers to quit the company.
Again, not by sharing user data with them, which is the whole point of this discussion.
Signal is not an "SMS app". Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, that just happens to also support SMS. Note that if you use Signal as your SMS app, to send SMS messages, they are not encrypted.
The whole point is that it falls back to SMS if the other party doesn't have Signal, so you don't have to think about it beforehand. It most certainly is an SMS app, and not being able to set it as the default makes it nearly useless.
>> There are system-wide ad-blockers
> Where? I'm talking about blocking ads and trackers in all apps, not just in web views.
Apple allowed them for about a year before reversing course. Lookup Adguard's blog posts for detailed history.
Their app was fantastic (I've still got an old version installed which is still working great on iOS 12.1) and allowed the use of standard tracking lists for systemwide blocking / firewalling.
My guess for why Apple reversed course is that they had no easy way of stopping spyware-masquerading-as-adblockers without blocking all.
That’s pretty much the reason Google has a browser in the first place. Most normal users don’t really grok the difference between ”browser” and ”Google” anyway.
>Most normal users don’t really grok the difference between ”browser” and ”Google” anyway.
I doubt that. With the marketshare on Windows it is very likely, that people deliberateley install Chrome. So they know what a browser is, now that they have at least 2 installed.
Google push Chrome crazy hard whenever you touch a Google service, and they have a crazy bundling game in play - they bundle with flash, acrobat reader, some free A/V products - wherever they can get marketshare.
Plus some pre-built PCs come with Chrome preloaded.
To expand on that, every single person I know who has actively tried to avoid Chrome, have all been fairly technical, but still somehow been lured into installing Chrome, at least once if not more.
If I remember correctly, that's what Google said when Chrome was introduced. Browsers at that time did not adequately support their services, so they made their own browser.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. A render engine monoculture makes web dev easier---if I could have all the hours back I spent on taking perfectly working code on Safari and Chrome and making it work on Firefox, I'd take them in a heartbeat.
And if they implemented these "features" as part of the core browser update rather than as an extension, it would have been okay?
There may be a legitimate debate worth having here, but basing the complaint on the good code hygiene practised by Mozilla's developers is silly.
These so-called "compromises" were nothing in any practical sense. Meanwhile, every web page you visit leaks the fact of your existence a hundred different ways and 99% of us don't care much.
They just did it again to gain a count of users who turned telemetry off.
In general, I see firefox's point that using the system extensions to deliver autouodates and allow them to iterate more quickly. However, it also feels like whenever we see these extensions that they're something shady.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but what your saying is true.
Firefox activates limited telemetry for folks who turn off the heavy stuff. While your firefox browser shows that no telemetry is taking place, the browser will silently send information about your browser, os, and other information to Mozilla.
Personally, the privacy implications don't concern me as much as a browser that is deliberately lying to and deceiving it's users (though I can certainly see how it can be privacy concern).
If someone wants true and total control over their browsing experience, neither firefox or chrome are a good choice (imo).
You can't disable it installing new extensions behind your back without telling you, though. These are "system extensions" and you can't opt out of them.
System extensions are not really extensions, they're just parts of built-in browser functionality that have been implemented by programmers with good code hygiene.
It's unfair to describe these as "installing random extensions without asking" because you would then have to admit that it's equally true of every new feature of every software program that is ever updated.
That is a logically incoherent statement. The only mechanism Mozilla has for "installing secret extensions" is via software updates. If you turn that off, they can't install anything.
It's sad to see people jumping between the same browsers, when the amount of change between each jump is getting smaller and smaller. All of them are becoming more hostile, just at different rates.
The outlier is (was?) IE, it kept the same interface and configurability while others continued dumbing down (although things are changing with Edge too) and it seems the massively anti-user decisions the other browsers made never really took hold at MSFT until most recently when they began sticking telemetry up the wazoo.
If you care more about user control than web standards compatibility then perhaps IE is the best choice... for now. At least it is more compatible than the "fringe" browsers like Dillo and NetSurf, or even the text-based ones. Opera, before it became another WebKit-shell, might be another good one.
(Disclaimer: No affiliation with MSFT, just someone who has watched these browser wars for a long time and saw this gradual "illusion of choice" take hold. I use various browsers depending on which site it is.)
I think the core motivation of the Vivaldi team is also a browser that's maximally customisable, so Vivaldi is another viable option that's not 'dumbed down.'
Shows how powerful Google's brand still is with the software industry. Company was built on it, and now for at least a decade it's been exploiting that brand power to subvert any/all expectations of control over our data. And frankly we're all to blame for having the wool pulled over us.
I tried to switch to Firefox lately after this new speedy version had been released.
I really underestimated how good Chromium is.
Basic stuff, like in page search(Ctrl+F) is awful after Chromium experience. Resistance to copying omni-bar is silly.
Crashes every day. The UX is bad compared to Chromium.
Spent month dealing with it and just abandoned this endeavor.
Really sad, i want Firefox to be better.
"Resistance to copying omni-bar"? It seems to work OK for me. What are you trying to do and how does Firefox resist it?
"Crashes every day"? I can't remember the last time I had a Firefox crash; maybe this is OS-dependent. (I use it on Windows and on FreeBSD; how about you?)
"The UX is bad compared to Chromium" -- obviously if you're used to one program's UX then another's may seem obtuse. What about the Firefox UX is actually bad as opposed to different? (For what it's worth, to me FF and Chrome seem very similar to use.)
(I think I agree about ctrl-F, which on some particular pages seems to misbehave on Firefox in ways I don't understand.)
I'm one of those people who can't use Firefox thanks to the frequent crashing. It happens for me at least once a day, particularly when I have the same site open in multiple tabs. I get a yellow bar saying a script is slowing down this website, and ALL the tabs lock up thanks to it. If you're lucky enough to kill all the impacted tabs (you're rarely that lucky, it's that unresponsive) your browsing experience from then on will be bad, and the whole browser will need restarting.
I haven't seen a Chrome crash in years, yet the Firefox ones are very frequent. Not that I want to switch, I might be the only one here who is happy with Chromium on all my PCs!
Interesting! I occasionally get the "a script is slowing down this website" message, but not nearly so often and killing the affected tabs seems to work OK. I guess some pages are super-extra-bad for Firefox. Or perhaps some extension you have is causing grief? (Though that should be much less able to happen in the era of WebExtensions.)
I think he was referring to the fact that Mozilla is still unsure about unifying the address and search bars. They only show an unified bar on fresh profiles, IIRC. What he thinks is wrong with keeping distinct bars, besides being different from Chrome, I don't know.
If whoever downvoted the above would care to tell me what they find unsatisfactory about it, I'm all ears. (For the avoidance of doubt, I mean that; I'm not just being snarky.)
I haven't had Firefox crash in years, and I use nightly for all of my day-to-day browsing. Chrome crashes or locks whenever I iterate on a canvas based game after some amount of refreshes.
I was thinking more in terms of replacing traditional desktop apps that work with USB like sensors, single-board comp dev, and hardware diagnostic tools (protocol analyzers etc) it’s nice to be able to quickly update a webapp and have native access to usb as needed.
Displaying colors properly on wide gamut displays is one. Can't use Firefox because of it — I can't design in the browser if it renders everything wrong on my iMac.
Do you mean Firefox doesn't have a way to return the zoom level to its default? (It has two; you can do ctrl-0 or you can click on the zoom-level indicator in the URL bar.)
Or do you mean you can't tell it to default to a zoom level that isn't 100%? (That seems to be true.) I confess that's never a thing it's occurred to me to want; it feels like if I wanted every website's text to look larger or smaller, I'd probably want everything to look larger or smaller and would adjust my OS's scaling level. But I know some OSes handle that better than others, and maybe there are good reasons for wanting different scalings for websites than for everything else. Still, it's not clear to me that this is so obviously important a thing that "doesn't even have" is fair.
This has been a sticking point for me too when trying to transition to FF from Chrome. My main monitor is a 4k 24-inch, and at that pixel density, the Windows HiDPI scaling isn't always enough to get the text the correct size for comfortable viewing. For text-heavy sites like HN, Reddit, and Wikipedia, being able to set a default 125% zoom in the browser is very nice, while still being able to keep the default zoom for sites like Youtube where video player size is more important than text size.
Considering the cost to implement would probably be pretty low, I think it is a fair complaint against the browser. Still, privacy concerns may supersede convenience in this particular case, and I think I might try again to switch.
Just use Firefox and have done with it - there's been a series of these kinds of posts over the last couple of days with people suggesting insane workaround hacks instead of just changing their browser.
P.S. if you keep chrome because some websites only work properly there, maybe y'all should follow standards at work instead of targeting a proprietary browser like its 2001/IE6 again.