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This article is part of the bigger article series: Big Tech Detox which will cover articles about how to DeApple, DeMicrosoft, DeMeta and DeAmazon your Life.
First I have to admit, Degoogling is harder than it might sound at first. Depending on how much you know about how deep entangled google really is on the web, you might already have a clue that this would require more than just 2 or 3 steps. The decision to detox from big tech is a wise one. But not using any of the services google offers visibly or under the hood of other webpages / webservices is easier said than done. I will guide you on this and list some good alternatives for googles services. A lot of them are easy to use and offer flexibility, privacy and security combined.
Transparency: I have not yet checked which services are completely Google free. I have to check if any of their hosting takes place in the Google Cloud. This article is under heavy construction and far from finished.
Part I
- Changing your default search engine -
This is easy and can be achieved in the settings menu of all major browsers. The harder part is, which search engine to choose. You might ask which search engine should I trust? Well this is up to you. I won't recommend any of them regarding this.
But I will name a few that I think are a better alternative to Google and Bing. From a privacy standpoint of view, you should do your own due dilligence and decide on your own which organisation or company you trust.
At first we should clarify, that a lot of websites that are considered to be a search engine by lots of people in fact aren't real search engines. Most of these are only providing a search mask, some kind of routing service or tunnel that connects you to the big search engines and delivers the search engine results back to the webbrowser. In most cases, these "search engines" use the search index of google, bing or other webgiants. Only a few search engines have their own search index or are working on setting one up theirselves.
These search engines have their own search indexThe alternatives to googles search engine are:
Ecosia seems to be evolving into a real search engine. They are establishing their own search index in cooperation with qwant and may get completely independent from google or bing some time soon. But be careful. At the moment and depending on the country you live in, the use of their service makes connection requests to bing.com and bingapis.com or googles servers. Ecosia makes use of googles and bings search index to deliver the search results and loads scripts from these sites as well. So Ecosia shouldn't be considered a privacy friendly search engine. Their focus on ecological well-being is quite charming but from a privacy focused point of view - Forget Ecosia for now. Maybe they will evolve into a privacy friendly and eco search engine.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience. Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).Source: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
Being the default search for the Brave Browser this search engine powered by its own search index can as well be set as the default search enggine for any other major browser. Brave seems to be a privacy friendly company that
First, and most importantly, Brave Search adheres to core principles of privacy. We don’t profile you. Ever. This is far different from most other search engines, who collect every piece of data about your search behavior and tie it directly to you as a way to sell more targeted ads. Second, Brave Search operates from a fully independent search index.Source: https://brave.com/compare/google-vs-brave-search/
"We have made a number of changes to the available APIs and added a number of new features. Manifest V3 aims to be the first step in our platform vision to improve the privacy, security, and performance"Source: Google Documentation https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/what-is-mv3
Wait what???
Google wants to "improve the privacy"? Well let's break it down. In parts, this statement is true. Webmanifest V3 embodies a stricter ruleset and limits the power browser extensions get granted. So with a fully Manifest V3 compliant Browser, the browser extensions on the webstore aren't going to be the same anymore. Manifest V3 limits web enthusiasts as well as power users from making use of some of the best browser extensions, of which many have been in use and developed for years or even decades. While this might be not that bad for the uninformed user that surfs through the web with an extension free browser - The shift to Manifest V3 has a serious impact on people that consider the web as their universe and their webbrowser as their spaceship.
Why this decision was made - Cui Bono
Who profits from Manifest V3. Well look no further. All the companies that rely on the delivery of ads and selling your data do. As far as we all know, google does heavily rely on the ad-revenue from various channels and websites they own to empower their company. Manifest V3 makes it impossible for browser extensions like uBlock Origin to work properly by limiting the ways the extensions can operate and interfere within the browser / the connections. What do you think? Did google force Manifest V3 on us to protect our privacy or did they do it to keep users from blocking ads and making google or other big tech companies earn less?
Write your opinion to my comment-box.
Should I still make use of a Chromium based Browser?
Well, that is up to you. If you want to go the full route of Degoogling, using a browser or framework made by google developers doesn't seem to fit your intention of Degoogling in the first place. However, there still are chromium based browsers that keep supporting V2 Extentions. At least until now.
Namely Brave and Opera. While Brave only hosts 4 V2 extensions (afaik: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript) that are adblocking and security related. When Google finally drops V2 support (expected 2025) Opera has plans to keep supporting all Manifest V2 based browser extensions. At least until now. Opera has a big advantage over he other competitors, it operates their own extension store. It remains to be seen how this will work out in the long run.
Google has plans to remove the support of V2 from the chromium framework entirely.
Some browsers may end up implementing their own adblock adaptations (Brave actually has one) and Opera and Vivaldi have integrated Adblockers as well. These are are actually quite usable because they work outside of the extension framework and thus are not limited by V3. But they also aren't as feature rich, capable and adaptable as, for example uBlockOrigin is. The option to download custom filterlists for uBlockOrigin as well creating your own filters is, what makes this extension superior. You can do way more with that extension than just blocking ads.
Gmail doesn't offer end 2 end encryption out of the box. So Google should be able to read the contents of your E-Mails. They officially state, that they scan your mail for viruses and malware which in return means, they can't have any end 2 end encryption in place. Regarding this, Google does not only scan your e-mails, they also track your data across the whole web and sell it or make use of it by distributing personalized apps to you. While Google has stated: “we do not process email content to serve ads.”, it's up to everyone do believe it or not. While they pretend that they don't serve their ads to their clients based on the content of their e-mails, it remains unclear to what extend they really use all the data of their users for. The problem with G-mail is not necessarily their E-Mail hosting service, it's the whole entangled Google ecosystem that raises privacy concerns in me. While there are lots of e-mail providers without e2e encryption, it's only Google which has dozens of other online services that will track you across the web. Well Google and the other big tech giants of course. Hint: You can make any e-mail provider unable to read your e-mail contents when using PGP (Pretty good privacy) encryption but its not as user friendly as some of the services listed below Privacy friendly Gmail alternatives
There are lots of good alternatives to google products out there. The question you have to ask yourself when degoogling: Are you willing to hand over your data to any other big data giant like Microsoft or Amazon? Even when switching to a provider that is not affiliated to any of the big players, chances are high that their web services still rely on foundations or server structures managed by AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft) or within the Google Cloud. When correctly configured and encrypted, your data should be safe from the Big Tech companies but you never know. They are as well affected by data breaches regularly: See here, here or here.
I encourage everybody to rethink their use of cloud storage. Ask yourself: Do I really need my files to be online? In the case of using cloud storage for backup reasons only: Instead of paying for a subscription, you could as well buy 1 or 2 extra hard drives and store your backupped files yourself. If you need to access your files from several places or devices, you could as well host your own cloud solutions. But covering all of these option would blow up this article too much. That's why I will list you some easy to access Alternatives for Google services.
Not all phones can be reliably freed from googles tentacles. These are the phones you can consider:
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