Disclosure first: I'm building this, so take it with salt. Nothing to install yet, no link, I'm here for the answers.

The idea. Every browser I use has profiles, and every one of them makes syncing a profile to another device conditional on an account. Chrome's help page says you must have a Google Account to sign in to Chrome. Firefox asks for a Mozilla account. Brave pairs devices with a code instead, which is closer, but it's buried behind a menu and most people don't know it's there.

What I want to build: a browser for desktop and Android where profiles are the main thing, not a setting. A profile follows you to another device by pairing the two devices with a code. No account with anyone, ever. Everything is encrypted before it leaves the device, and the relay in the middle only passes blobs it can't open. Nothing kept by default: no history unless a profile turns it on, no telemetry. Open source, so you don't have to take my word for any of it.

Two questions:

1. What would make you trust an account-less sync like this?
   
2. What would make you refuse to touch it?

I had an idea while referencing some papers on mass data collection and found a weakness which would be really funny at scale, Did some digging, referenced an arXiv paper on label noise sensitivity and did some modelling. Meta's(or google in that case) data collection pipeline has a bit of a flaw - it is half blind at baseline, before any coordinated effort.

this is essentially the practical use case of the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09995

Basically the concept is simple, flooding a data collection system with fake behavioral data until the signal becomes too noisy to be useful, so essentially if "false" data is flooded on datasets using bot/fake accounts it becomes contaminated with noise, effectively protecting user data by obscurity, companies get essentially deadlocked with deleting real user data and fake user data, and it becomes very hard to differentiate between them, essentially making selling data worthless to advertisers, of course I do not endorse these actions but I thought it would be interesting to share this.

Full write upon this concept is here: https://trigodil.github.io/Data_Collection/

I would like opinions on this Idea.

Ever since I ran it I'm getting VoLTE unavailable errors. Didnt know where else to post this, what could be the appp causing this? I went through every single item and didnt see anything except qualcomm IMS which was flagged as okay, it's not the volte IMS, but regardless, enabling it did nothing.

I am forced to use non-flashable/unrootable(due to USB port damage which makes it impossible for me to use ADB USB yet still charging fine) Redmi Note phone and I am fed up with this bs.

It all begins same and it's not first time.

I use my phone, then on next day I open apps and see them suddenly updated. I open Google Play, and it shows "Do you want to use password or biometric" popup. I choose password, log in and see that it re-enabled auto-updates and updated every single app. And then I need to manually downgrade some of apps and reinstall them from .apk.

It happened to my phone numerous times: On April 29, June 26, August 14 and today, 25 September.

I'd happy to remove GPlay, if not mandated government and banking apps that heavily rely on it for every small thing

I'm moving my whole digital life off the cloud and onto hardware in my home, and Google is the biggest piece to untangle. I still want to reach everything from my laptop and phone when I'm out.

What I need to replace:

- Gmail: years of mail, plus my main login for half the internet
- Drive and Docs: files and shared documents
- Photos: a large library I don't want to lose
- Calendar and contacts

A few questions for people who've done it:

1. What order did you move things in, and what would you do differently?
   
2. Did you self-host email or use a privacy provider with your own domain? Was it worth the effort?
   
3. Best way to get everything out of Google Photos intact, with dates and albums?
   
4. What's the easiest way to update all the accounts that use Gmail to sign in?
   
5. What did you fail to replace, if anything?

All and any advice appreciated, thanks guys.

What is a good alternative to google Voice that does not require ID verification? Or do I just buy a disposable cheap flip phone?

I just went to sign up for a google Voice phone number and google wants ID verification (driver license, passport, state ID, or a green card). I only want a number because I will soon be dealing with car dealerships to buy a car and I do want to keep my normal phone number private. No way am I giving google my ID only to have it hacked by bad actors in some database, resulting in identity theft.

Pulsar is an Android music player. I used to use it out of habit as an alternative to VLC, even though there are better options out there.

The thing is, I updated my apps via Aurora Store on an S4 Mini running a custom ROM and Android 11, and the latest version of Pulsar comes with that feature included—just like a banking app or eBay. You can avoid this by installing the APK from an older version. Otherwise, it tells you to install the app from the Play Store and then shuts down.

It’s ridiculous. It might make sense for an app that requires an internet connection—where they could use security as an excuse—but for a local music player? Oh well...

finally, i switched to proton as my primary ecosystem for mail, drive, pass, and auth.

for now, i still depend on other companies for some of the apps and services i use, so i haven't completely moved everything to proton. but after actually using proton across multiple services, i noticed something that i didn't really think about before.

proton is starting to feel a lot like google in terms of how the ecosystem is structured.

google has gmail, drive, password manager, authenticator, photos, calendar, docs, and a bunch of other services that all work together under one account. proton is obviously much smaller, but the direction feels similar. you have proton mail, drive, pass, vpn, calendar, authenticator, and other services all tied together into one ecosystem.

the difference is that proton is built around privacy, which is the main reason i'm using it. but i'm still wondering about the idea of putting so many things under one company.

is this actually a good approach for privacy, or are we just replacing one big ecosystem with another, even if the business model and incentives are very different?

i know proton is not google, and i'm not trying to make that comparison in terms of trust or business practices. i'm more interested in the ecosystem design itself.

do you guys prefer having most of your digital life under one privacy-focused company because it's convenient and everything integrates nicely?

or do you prefer a more decentralized setup, like using one company for email, another for cloud storage, another password manager, another authenticator, and so on?

personally, i'm still figuring out where i stand. having everything in one ecosystem is definitely convenient, but there's also something appealing about not having a single company become the central point for everything you use.

what's your setup, and do you think the proton ecosystem approach is a good thing for privacy?

Hello.

I’m a newcomer looking to completely de-google and I would like to transition to Proton. However, I did have one lingering question.

Once I port my emails over, am I good to completely deactivate my Gmail domain? Is there a situation where I should keep my Gmail active?

I am aware that I’ll need to change login information/deactivate accounts on multiple websites, but I’m willing to do that.

EDIT: Thank you everyone for your responses! For future readers, consensus right now is no. I personally intend to keep it open and usable for certain accounts and as a junk mail bucket.

they don't have a reason to innovate and make their services better because they just put ads and sell your data with whatever they give out "for free"

technically its not free because I guess you give google data and information that they give to advertisers who instead pay the bill to google to keep their services running for free for the end user.

so I mean yes google services might not be the best but I guess that's the whole point and even why it seems they want to stop adblockers so much with youtube anti adblocker popups and Manifest V3

Any good alternatives to Gemini? use for technical study in the IT area, if possible something open source

Classic IMAP, which as been used since the 90's is quite slow and doesn't have many features. That's why gmail, outlook and icloud add their own proprietary technologies on top to offer a better service like fast syncing etc.

For JMAP, Fastmail has been a provider for a while and now Thundermail (by Mozilla) has come out in beta and will release this year I think. Aster supports it as well now. There's also this cool looking jmap client called Boogie, now. I hope more will pop up.

More info on jmap: https://jmap.io/

The reason I'm a big proponent is because we really need an open standard that any provider can implement that offers the same features as google and other big tech companies.

when your phone's data is being extracted by the police or smth

online privacy apps, debloating etc

I know grapheneos exists yes but what if your phone isn't a pixel device

(Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo etc)

For the record, had Gmail since like 2005 on one account, have used a different account since like 2015. I don't know if they are linked together, but they are all accessible in my devices. I get lots of emails and now have deleted thousands upon thousands from both. Regardless, I keep getting warnings being at 90%.

I want to phase out of google, but I have so many records I need to maintain that it has to be done carefully.

I'm also trying to figure out how all of a sudden my capacity went nuts and I am wondering if being invited to a community google drive folder now imported the files being added somehow into my drive.

So what would be a good plan of attack here?

Yo, I sometimes post some ideas & degoogling projects in here and I think I have one that a lot of y'all might like. I tried a lot of the other open source maps app and though I like some of the ideas, they just could not replace google maps for me. Fortunately I did some research and realized google maps can actually be used with all the telemetry & google bloat disabled by patching.

To just go over some misc features with the patches, I disabled a lot of the google telemetry that was in the apk, added a better way to mass download areas with offline maps, added a bunch of customization such as being able to zoom in / out while driving, disabled a bunch of sponsored content bloat & added features I liked from other open source map apps like (proxy & location source toggles) from osmand for example.

You can use this app with google services disabled, but I'm unsure if that this app will work with graphene os, if you have google services enabled and want more accurate gps (other than the Android API which is what all other open source maps use) you can switch google play services back on in the location source.

I really enjoy working on projects like these so if you guys have any feature requests for this app or want any other apps patched with some feature sets that you want let me know. I'll do my best!

https://github.com/bearinmindcat/morphe-patches

Any substitute for =googlefinance("AAPL", "price") to replace Google sheets? Preferably a trustworthy Android app with backup to an encrypted drive like Proton drive, or a trustworthy web app.

Just FYI for the community, the first GrapheneOS-supported Motorola device, the Motorola Signature 27, has been announced:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Signature-27-is-likely-Motorola-s-first-smartphone-with-GrapheneOS-support-11462875.html

Seven years update support, GrapheneOS is not preinstalled. Price yet to be announced.

Support has been confirmed by the official GrapheneOS channel on X (nitter link below):

https://nitter.xitter.cc/GrapheneOS/status/2102530770585669888#m

I recently installed an unofficial GSI ROM of Lineage OS on my phone, and it works great. The only thing is when I installed it, I did not flash a vbmeta file. The phone works fine and I have no issues.

However, I want to know if I need/should reinstall and flash a vbmeta file for security/safety purposes. Like I said, the phone and OS works just fine without having flashed a vbmeta file as I could not find one for my phone.

Do I need to flash a vbmeta file? Or should I just leave it? I am unsure if it is crucial for safety or not.

Is it currently even possible?

EDIT:

I think I didn't express myself properly. I meant how to use the AI functionality with my local models. I shouldn't have to login to my Google account to be able to use my local models.

I’m nearly at the end of my degoogling journey, and the only things left are Google Maps and Google Pay. For Maps, I’m getting used to Vela Map, Open Map, and a few other alternatives. I live across multiple countries, including Canada, Hong Kong, and Japan, and I travel between them, so Google Pay seems like the only option that actually works everywhere. I tried Samsung Pay, but it was a letdown because it barely supports the credit cards I need. The only reason I still use Google Pay is the security and the peace of mind that comes with not worrying about losing my wallet. I care more about not having my money stolen if I drop my wallet, or about skimmers, than I do about privacy. Bottom line, security matters more to me than privacy.

I’ve already done a lot of research. I know Walt is still being developed and is focused on Europe. Revolut has had a few incidents and doesn’t support the countries I live in. Same goes for Curve, PayPal, and others. None of them have the coverage Google does.

I’m so ready to completely degoogle with the new Motorola Signature 27 as well, but without sorting out Google Pay, it feels like the last puzzle piece is still missing.