De-Google Your Life - Part 1

Google just killed your favorite service again but what are you going to do about it it's not like their ominous calling card is wrong hundreds of millions of people use Google products every day and why not they're super convenient and many are even free but that's the thing is it convenient to have services that you rely on pulled out from under you on a regular basis and free is not free they monitor literally everything that you do to train machine learning algorithms and to sell your data to advertisers a function that they've built right into the world's most popular web browser I mean it's no wonder that people feel trapped in the ecosystem how do you divorce from the world's third largest tech company they're everywhere but it is possible and we're going to show you how in a series that we're calling de gooogle your life and we're going to show you our sponsor pulseway pulseway it monitoring and management software lets you keep an eye on your systems from anywhere try it for free today and secure 40% off any plan including month-to-month options unlike Google most of the Alternatives that we've dug up have both strong privacy policies and endtoend encryption because I mean privacy might not be your main reason for deg Googling but if you're putting the work in anyway we feel that you might as well minimize the personal information that you're handing to data brokers who are going to turn around and sell it to everyone from insurance companies to World governments let's start with the product that you're most likely to be using right now Google Chrome thankfully there are alternatives and I'm not just talking about Firefox though that is a good alternative it's gotten really fast in recent updates and is one of the few remaining browsers not related to chromium and therefore Google this matters because chromium based browsers are moving to the new manifest V3 standard which seriously limits certain typ of extensions in the name of security notably ad blockers Firefox and its privacy first descendants like Tor Browser and mulad have no plans to drop manifest V2 anytime soon there are still some chromium based Alternatives that are worth checking out though brave for instance is also retaining support for manifest V2 extensions it's got built-in content blocking support and includes a number of other cool features of course it also has some web 3.0 stuff like intend Ally viewing ads but their ads to earn crypto tokens which personally I'd turn off but that's a matter of taste but one thing you can leave on are the surprisingly robust sync options they're endtoend encrypted so they're only used on your devices another browser with encrypted sync is Arc which started its life on Apple devices just last year and is just now available on Windows 11 it boasts high performance and a minimalist UI with split view vertical tabs and sharable tab groups called spaces this minimalism looks fantastic and with the sidebar collapsed websites even look kind of like dedicated apps but it does take some getting used to and unfortunately it requires a login to use it also hides a lot of settings up front and as of writing the windows version is missing a lot of features that Mac users enjoy like the library shelf the max AI assistant and boosts webpage customizations for something a little more familiar feeling ungoogled chromium is exactly what it sounds like offering a very stock experience while stripping out practically everything related to Google including even the web store for getting extensions thankfully there is a setting that streamlines installing extensions and an extension you can download that allows you to still use the web store like normal but you get to choose when those extensions get updated ungoogled chromium also includes a number of extra features like fingerprint resistance to foil tracking and extra customization for ey Behavior though its anti-tracking does fall short of Braves capabilities it's a community-driven product with no ties to a particular company which may be attractive to you now there are many many others out there with particular focuses but we don't have time to go over all of them in this video so I'd recommend taking at least a handful of them for a test drive before committing to fully switch cuz it can be a little bit of a chore for example Firefox can import your history autofill and your bookmarks which will get you most of the way moved in but it can can't directly copy your Chrome profile so you're going to have to install your favorite extension separately from there you can just open both of them side by side and match your settings or you can see if you can find the option to export your settings to a file and then import them to your new browser going between chromium based browsers is both easier and more difficult at the same time first you need to close your browsers and figure out where your profile folder is here are a couple of examples next copy the user data folder to your new browser and you're done you will need to relog into some of your websites but your extensions bookmarks history and everything else should come along for the ride there is one small problem still though your new browser probably still defaults to Google for the task that you do most often search Google's longest lived and most recognizable service to date has degraded to such a point that it is now arguably one of their least usable services but we put up with it because who else do you turn to when you need to Google something well there are competitors the next biggest ones in North America would be Bing and Yahoo but that feels a little like saying I'm giving up craft dinner to stay healthy and then switching to the house brand mac and cheese from Walmart luckily there are many lesser-known search engines available some of which even offer results from major search indexes so if all you want is to Google without Google start page or ecosia provide exactly that both of them claim to anonymize your search history and claim to not build a profile based on your usage and start page was one of if not the first such search engine with root daating back to the 9s doc Dogo meanwhile tour browsers default search engine is another old name in the space that in this case uses results from Bing and offers a bunch of Handy extras like bangs which let you search via other engines or websites all three of these have strong privacy protections showing only ads that are related to individual search queries and iosia is kind of cool they use their proceeds to plant trees a powerful and increasingly popular alternative is brave search it uses a well-regarded engine with strong privacy protections and offers features that Google currently lacks like an AI powered answer engine that summarizes results for you the ability to drill down into subtopics with goggles and anonymized local area search results unlike duck Dugo Brave does collect analytics by default but you can opt out in the settings page and turn off any of the extra features that you don't use Brave also offers premium ad free search for $3 a month speaking of Premium kagi is a subscription only search engine besides speed they offer the most comprehensive privacy policy of any of the engines we're discussing and they have a robust Suite of machine learning tools including assistants that interact with popular machine learning models and the ability to summarize basically anything lenses is a feature that works similarly to Braves goggles for drilling down into subtopics and you get direct control over page rankings with helpful information like domain age and tracker count to guide your decision- making they offer 100 searches for free and then you'll need to decide whether it's worth opening up your wallet duck Dogo Brave and kagi all claim to run their own search indices in some capacity allowing them to do their own page ranking and serve original search results but only Brave claims to have a completely independent index now of of course there are a whole host of other options available including cirs which you can even host yourself so don't take what we've highlighted as the only options but getting off of Google even to a search engine that uses Google's results is a huge step toward becoming less dependent on the alphabit company's whims the easiest way to wean yourself off is by changing your default search engine unfortunately that is super easy Firefox heard you like search so they made a search for searches so you can search for your search if you're using a chromium based browser though it's usually right there under settings and will automatically populate with engines as you use them once you found one that you like click activate if necessary then the three dots and then make default it's that simple that is unless you're a safari user because Apple knoweth best or at least gets payeth best so you'll need to download an extension if your search engine isn't on the short list that Apple gives you by default now let's talk about email not only is Google inserting ads into your Gmail inbox now but to Target Those ads they are analyzing your habits and okay no one is reading your email obviously but that doesn't mean that they won't anonymize it and then use it to train the machine learning algorithms that power features like smart compose and help me write now most of your mainstream options to escape Gmail happen to also be big Tech and while some of them are better than others none of them are squeaky clean so in the spirit of deg Googling we're going to be avoiding those and we're going to focus in on a couple of privacy Centric providers that also happen to be free I mean not entirely free they pay well some of their features after all if you're not giving them money or your data then they're just taking a loss on you but their free tiers aren't that bad offering a gigabyte of data to go along with their improved privacy and those paid tiers are not just paying money for nothing they give you access to cool features that Google doesn't offer like the ability to use a custom domain outside of work spaces obviously extra email addresses and this is cool quick to create hide my email aliases that can help you manage spam and prevent one website security breach from spreading across all of your accounts now while Tuda is primarily focused on email proton is cool because they have a suite that is basically the Privacy focused equivalent to many of Google's core Services they've both been independently audited and everything is end to-end encrypted meaning that neither of them could read your email even if they wanted to much less Target ads from it Tuda claims to go one step further encrypting more of your emails metadata than proton does but realistically I don't expect that to make much of a difference and when it comes to law enforcement requests both of them provide biannual transparency reports and detail the number and type of requests that they respond to migrating to either of them is easy since all of these options support the ability to import your mail from popular services so just find one you like settle in and give Google The Finger by nuking your Gmail inbox oh and by the way yes we are aware that you can run your own email server but that is well beyond the scope of this video and honestly not something that we would recommend for most people photo backup on the other hand is something that you could realistically self-host and let's be real a huge part of Modern Life Google photos has a lot of people locked in and for good reason not only is it cross platform unlike iCloud but it's sharable and searchable with cool features like the ability to create fun little slideshows for you but wait hold on a second how do they do that unless they know what you look like know where you go and know who you spend your time with unlike browsers and email there aren't a ton of players in the photo backup game but two of them stand out for being both open source and self- hostable the first ente has the more expensive cloud storage Serv service with no free tier but they offer on device secure facial recognition that never makes it to the server machine learning categorization and Maps integration it's an experience that's pretty close on paper to what you'd expect on Google photos with the caveat being that you need to enable those extra features on every device you use and since it's all generated locally it probably won't be as accurate or powerful as Google's super computer powered Mega models stingle meanwhile offers better pricing for cloud storage than ente plus they have a complete breakdown of how they secure your photos but that's about it they don't offer much more other than albums and secure sharing and their development blog is eerily quiet still if all you need is back up and you're cool with manual organization like the good old days it's less expensive and it's very transparent now if you just want to back your photos up to cloud storage no matter which one or maybe even spread them across multiple varietes then you can use phot sync not all of its features are free but the majority of backup targets including to a PC or a Mac running the companion software don't require a premium subscription another self-hosting option is image this came up a lot in the comments on our recent video on building a DIY Nas to avoid costly monthly Cloud subscriptions and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention them here like ente it offers facial recognition map integration and automatic backup but it also offers Google like features like memory memories slideshows and a scrubbable timeline just follow the docker compos steps to get started on your desktop or your Naas of choice you are going to want to use a VPN tunnel like openvpn or tail scale to access it on the go unless you have a Dynamic DNS name and are comfortable with port forwarding which reminds me not every Google service that you use is obvious but even the invisible ones can be used to track you DNS is the service that devices on the internet use to convert domain names like LTT store.com to an IP address and commonly the one that you're using is Google's and even if you're using the DNS server from your internet service provider for example they might still be using Google's DNS somewhere Upstream so it's not super intuitive to avoid thankfully there are free Alternatives many of which claim not to log your requests at all such as quad 9 and nextdns both of them offer some extra goodies to help protect your browsing sessions including rules to block malware and tracker domains meaning you don't need to do it in the browser making some of that manifest V3 stuff less of an issue and another feature they support that's becoming more common is DNS over https or TLS which will prevent your internet service provider or a wireless hotspot from snooping on what sites you're visiting quad 9 offers easier setup while nextdns provides full control albeit with a limited number of blocking requests for free free the main downside to using an alternative like these is that responses can be a little slower and you can check out our cloudflare DNS video for more information on that who by the way is also a viable option for spreading your data footprint around while being arguably even more widespread online than Google cloudflare has a pretty good reputation for not being evil so far and they offer optional malware blocking just like quad 9 and nextdns as long as you don't want any customization whatsoever beyond that you can set up an alternate DNS service in a few different ways in your browser in your operating system or in your router and while I would recommend using a secure DNS option where you can I would not recommend stacking more than one of those methods unless you know what you're doing setting it up inside your browser tends to be the more tedious option since it'll need to be done not only on every device you own but on every browser you use and it only really works on desktop thankfully it doesn't take long in Chrome descended browsers you can find the setting here and it's here in Firefox just toggle it on paste the address in the box and you're good to go a better approach for most people though is probably operating system level DNS overrides Windows 11 fully support secure DNS just go to the network and internet settings page choose the interface you'd like to configure and click edit on DNS server assignment set it to manual paste in the values you got from your provider and you're done for everyone else I'm unless there's an app or you're running Linux and you want to set up a DNS proxy you're not going to use secure DNS OS wide but that's fine we're not going to go through every OS since the major providers realistically have step-by-step instructions on their sites that you can follow based on your needs as for the third option configuring it on your router well this is cool because it automatically applies to every device that's connected to your network that is unless they have their own overrides which makes it a great option if you want to set it once and forget it forget it until you run into a random issue on some app on your smart TV that's not working you spend two hours fighting with the thing until you remember oh right I'm using custom DNS as for how to do it if you want to do it the actual configuration changes a lot depending on which router you have so we're not going to get that deep into it but what I will say is you probably would want to set this one up in addition to one of the other options so that let's say your phone for example is still using your preferred DNS settings if you leave the comfort of your Wi-Fi range because it will only affect those devices when they're connected to that router it's great though for making sure that non-configurable gear like the aforementioned Smart TV gets the right DNS settings though and in general you'll find it under internet setup then under DNS by default it will probably be your isp's DNS but you should be able to change it to a manual override some routers also offer secure DNS here but I wouldn't count on it now now I know right now you are in the middle of typing up a Manifesto about how we missed your favorite alternative not to mention that we haven't even covered the majority of Google services but guys that's why this is just part one okay our plan for part two is Maps pirate I mean ad blocking uh password managers cloud storage and yes YouTube but before we can do all that hey I got to pay the team that worked on this and since most of you aren't on lg. g/ flat plane yet where you can find great extras and exclusives that means hearing this message from our sponsor pulseway pulseway is an excellent tool for it monitoring and management from quite literally 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 104,155

Keywords: google, search, web search, ai, dns, photos, photo backup, cloud storage, email, e-mail, electronic mail, privacy, encryption, end-to-end encryption, e2ee, DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS, DoH, DoT, gmail, google photos, google search, google dns, google chrome, chromium, firefox, librewolf, floorp, vivaldi, opera, chrome, mozilla, mozilla firefox, brave, brave search, brave browser, duckduckgo, ddg, searxng, ecosia, startpage, tailscale, nextdns, opendns, mullvad, ente, immich, photo sync, default browser

Id: YnSv8ylLfPw

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024