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Search Risk – How Google Almost Killed Proton Mail

Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.

The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.

Greg ,
@Greg@lemmy.ca avatar

Google has become an awful company. I’m in the process of degoogling but it’s not easy given all the monopolies they have created

pooky55 OP ,

There is nice tutorial here - simple steps how to get rid of the Google on Android Phone: jumagazin.cz/How-to-protect-your-self-on-Internet…

homesweethomeMrL , (edited )

It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.

For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.

Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it’s not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).

sunzu2 ,

Well... Tech nerds lead the charge on making Google who they, gonna need toead the charge on unwinding this clown as corporate regime.

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

My one holdover is YouTube. There’s just no good replacement for it.

pooky55 OP ,

What about Rumble or Odysee?

greenshirtdenimjeans ,

Rumble is trash and should be avoided. It’s just right wing jerkoffs

pooky55 OP ,

It’s not so bad and you can follow some normal people or channels - there is whole spectrum of channels and the video upload is not bad and you can listen to videos in background but they don’t have any mobile app.

homesweethomeMrL ,

Rumble CEO was in the news for something recently. I’m feeling avoid-y of it at any rate because of the Qanuts and “Libertarians” on it.

Ullallulloo ,
@Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com avatar

Ironically, Odysee doesn’t have enough censorship for me. Like any fledgling community, the main inhabitants of any alternatives are people who aren’t welcomed on mainstream social media. And I don’t mean the modern “every person right of me is a Nazi”. I mean a lot videos have comments calling for killing all Jews, one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.

Technically, it’s fine, but who wants to post good videos or interact in a community of crazies?

Alphane_Moon ,
@Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world avatar

one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.

This is actually pretty funny. I am glad I am staying away from Odysee.

In general, I am rather skeptical of “free speech absolutism” and what have you, comes off a little parochial to me.

homesweethomeMrL ,

In general, I am rather skeptical of “free speech absolutism” and what have you, comes off a little parochial to me.

Yeah it’s almost always a front for batshit right-wing nutjobbery.

rottingleaf , (edited )

Not in Retroshare or Freenet or I2P. They do have such people, of course.

My free speech absolutism would be in separating community moderation from actual physical instances.

Say, a P2P system where you subscribe to a community (somehow identified) and the “deleted” comments and “banned” users are that because of there being a “delete” record signed by that community.

With distributed storage, but storage a user contributes being used only by communities they subscribe to, so not like Freenet with every user probably storing one or two blocks of CP files.

EDIT: That would allow everyone to verify moderators’ honesty and fairness, which would be beneficial to moderators themselves, but at the same time in practice you’d have easy moderation.

deathmetal27 ,

Use piped or invidious instead perhaps.

Alternately, disenshittify YouTube using addons like DeArrow, Sponsor Block and uBlock origin.

IllNess ,

Is piped or invidious working for you?

The popular servers are down. Google put some kind of limit on them. I’m going to guess bandwidth limit.

homesweethomeMrL ,

I search “invidious instances” and pick some from the list - one of them will work.

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.

The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn’t like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.

I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.

Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

I follow over 1000 creators on YouTube, many of them niche creators who don’t often upload content. There are a very small percentage who are on another platform.

The main app that I use (Tubular) also supports PeerTube, but PeerTube has a big issue when it comes to both content discovery and delivery. YouTube hosts not only the “full” quality video, but they also host many different versions of the same video at varying resolutions/bitrates. This is unfeasable for basically anyone but a big tech company. YouTube also has a very effective (albeit very flawed) recommendation algorithm that smaller platforms struggle to compete against.

Korkki ,

The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.

sunzu2 , (edited )

They need to be broken up. ESP YouTube should be its own service

Korkki ,

Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.

sunzu2 ,

YouTube is not competitive?

noodlejetski ,

Last update on July 10, 2023 Published on October 26, 2016

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