Tagged "privacy"

Long time no see! I’ve been cooking something in the kitchen lately and it is finally ready.

Well, this is a bit of a bummer. Recently, Signal added a blog post announcing that it would close off one of it’s server-side components in order to “protect us” from spam.

After reading the first part of the series, you might be compelled to think about ditching Google and going on a more privacy oriented route. I fully support this and in this post, I will present to you my own experiences and the issues and rewards I ran into. Before going into details, I want to make two disclaimers: I am still using Google products, but either all of them are open-source (Android, Kubernetes, Angular and Go to be more precise) or are being used behind some kind of a proxy and that I am not an expert in any case and you should not take my word as gospel, other solutions may work for you better than they did for me.

I will split this section in two parts: main products (alternatives to the search engine, Drive and so on) and mobile products.

Google is in almost everyone’s lives more or less nowadays. This is normal, as they are one of the largest corporations on the planet and their products are being used by billions of people. They have a monopoly on the mobile phone market (through Android and their Play Store), the search engine market, the content creation market (YouTube), the browser market, the smart wearables market and many more. As their primary business is connected with data, this monopoly turns out to be a danger to the privacy of users as they become targets for data harvesting. In this two-part article, I will explain my motives to decide to remove Google from my life and how I did so.