Removing yourself from the big-tech corpo sinkhole is a great move, and I want to show you some feasible alternatives for big services that you can use to harden your privacy and security.
You may ask... why would I use any of these alternatives? The answer is because big tech companies are slowly pushing us into a draconian surveillance state. They use your data to profile you based on your interests, places you visit, the kind of devices you use, etc. All of this information is then handed to intelligence agencies without question, and could be used against you. For example, if you are concerned about digital security, then you may be "flagged" as being potentially suspicious depending on the kind of services you use. Want to stop spam emails and use something like Guerilla Mail? This could be seen as a red flag by LEO, effectively a way to unfairly categorize and profile you.
This could also introduce multiple surfaces of attacks for bad actors. With all of this data exchanging hands, and all being tied to your identity, certain pieces of information could be leaked to malicious individuals or groups. Maybe you are staunchly anti-fascist and assisting anti-fascist journalists... this could lead to small scale attacks being led against you, and could threaten you. Maybe you once made a joke while drunk that was a little too edgy and now regret it... this could be used to put labels on you. Maybe you've downloaded some copyrighted material because you have fell on financial hardship... this is flat out illegal and could put you at risk. There many other examples of how data breaches, and the leakage of private activity into the hands of potential threats could put you at jeopardy. Even if the chances are slim, why take the risk? Do you want the feds to monitor everything you do, using AI and algorithms to sort people into categories to determine who is sus and who isn't? Sounds pretty authoritarian to me.
Anyway, let's look at some ways to escape the corpo matrix and start being privacy conscious about your online activity.
One more thing about why you should revolt against the surveillance state. Do you like freedom? Freedom for all people no matter what they look like? What music they like? What kind of software they use? Do you believe some laws are unethical? Unfair? Do you think federal agents actively work against the interest of the people and are designed to serve the rich and prosecute the poor? Do you think corporations only serve the interests of intelligence agencies? Do you think that profiling people is unethical? Do you think that software should be free and open for all people to inspect and contribute to? If you found yourself answering yes multiple times, then you should start actively pushing back against the corporate oligarchs, and all it takes is a little bit of patience... and sometimes a sacrifice of convenience.
Browsers
One of the biggest ways that the corpos spy on you is by tracking your internet activity, specifically your browsing habits. There are few ways to truly stop this from happening, but it boils down to "blending" in. You either blend in, or muddy the waters so much that you cannot be tracked, the ladder of which is much more difficult.
This is why using strange hardware, bizarre fonts, and a bunch of FireFox extensions actually makes you easier to spot across different sites - it becomes easier to connect the dots back to you the more unique your footprint is. It is best to simply blend in.
Full stop: Chrome is spyware. This is not controversial, it is simply US spyware that is actively being abused by intelligence agencies to spy on global citizens. It becomes even worse when you connect your google account and put everything into their little ecosystem. And no, incognito or private browsing does nothing to stop any of this, in fact, those modes are borderline useless. The only way to stop this fully is to detach yourself completely from Google. Now, if you must use google for work or some other necessary reason, then please: only use google for that one specific purpose and nothing else.
Other corporate browsers are just as bad; Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, etc. These large browsers dominate market share for a reason: They are corpo tracking devices that sell your data for profit. Instead, you should opt to use a browser and search engine that is not directly tied to the large corporations.
Personally, I use two main browsers: Qutebrowser and LibreWolf.
For the average user, I would not recommend Qutebrowser. It has no extension support, and is designed to use VIM keybindings for operation (Basically keyboard only, with its own command-line interface and scripting ecosystem), if that sounds interesting then definitely check it out. However, for the average user I would recommend one of the following:
Librewolf - A hardened firefox fork with telemetry and other questionable items removed. It comes with uBlock origin by default, which is an excellent extension. Basically, it is a non-corpo version of firefox.
Ungoogled Chromium - I have not used this one personally, but I hear great things. It is what it says on the tin: Chromium with googles malware removed. I believe chrome extensions work with this one which is a + for many users.
Search Engines
Now that you have some options on browsers, what about search engines? Librewolf isn't all that great if you're still using Google search to browse! The thing about most free search engines is that they still rely on the tech corpos to provide some sort of back-end for the internet. This means that no matter what, if Google or Microsoft were to be deleted tomorrow, a very large portion of the internet would simply die. Despite the fact that the internet is essentially a monopoly now, there are some benefits to using alternative search engines.
Aforementioned privacy and security concerns are the biggest reason. Most of the alternative search engines are practically front-ends to Google or Bing, and they will still cop your data, however the front-end will attempt to obfuscate some of this data and anonymize your browsing. They will also filter search results in different ways - you also have to keep in mind that many search engines will actively filter search results to skew towards a particular bias, this is unfortunate, but is how it works. This all goes hand in hand with big tech being in control of most digital publishing, television, and radio - it is all about controlling what public masses see, a few slips here and there is no threat to them.
DuckDuckGo used to be the go-to until a scandal that happened a while back. This scandal was pretty devastating to many in this community, especially those who value information exchange and the freedom of expression. I do still believe that this is a better option than Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any of the other big tech engines, however it should be kept in the back of your mind that these guys cannot be trusted with your data when they engage in deception.
Search engines to avoid:
DDG - already mentioned read above paragraph
StartPage - This one is straight garbage. It gives you ad results that may or may not be malware and likely has googles grubby fingers all over it.
Ecosia - great mission statement but not privacy respecting in the slightest
Yandex - Russian state influence all over this one, it is also just plain garbage and barely works.
Brave - These guys are whackjobs that need to stop developing software, do not trust these guys at all
Bing/Google/etc. - Any of the big corpo search engines are just not going to respect user security or privacy at all. They only care about tracking, data collection, and whatever else to keep an ignorant customer-base that they can milk for cash from the highest bidder.
Search Engines I recommend:
SearxNG - The best all around option. Lets you select what sources you get results from, does not collect data, and is free and open source. You can even self-host it.
Whoogle - Similar to degoogled chromium, it is like google but tries to keep your data safe from corpo hands (This is one that must be self-hosted, public hosted versions of stuff like this is only fine if you KNOW the origin point, never trust strangers who self-host stuff)
Kagi - This one is not free IIRC, but is pretty good AFAIK
Mojeek - This one does not touch google or bing at all, and has its own indexing solution. Is fully private and AFAIK does not track anything. Obviously, without Google indexing, the results aren't going to be as GOOD as google, but great option if you want to fully stick it to the corpo oligarchs.
Hopefully this was helpful, and/or informative! In the next part of this, I will talk about other services like email, word processing, cloud storage, and more!
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fly-day
Keep making quality posts. Google is horrible and I've already made sure to remove all google services from my devices.
It'd be great to suggest Amazon alternatives as well. That'd be very useful.
Thanks for the comment! Amazon alternatives is a whole rabbit hole lmao, that will likely be a post on its own, since I have personally opted to never engage with Amazon services and have a lot to say about that company.
by arc0; ; Report
Looking out for that post my guy!
Will part 2 of this series be about frontends!?!? Perhaps... Degoogling your android phone? 👀
Excited for ur next post!
by fly-day; ; Report
Both of those topics will be soon enough! The next one is going to be on general online services that google has a big grip on like cloud storage and document editing, and email which is a big one. After that, I will likely talk about frontends since a lot can be accomplished with many of the frontends out there, and many of them rival that of big tech!
by arc0; ; Report
Good to find a technology-conscious brother out here! Keep speaking your piece!!
by fly-day; ; Report