Google Removes ‘Pirate’ URLs from Users’ Privately Saved Links::undefined
Man, they really want you to use Firefox
I can’t imagine depending on Google to store anything. They shouldn’t be able to even see what links you save.
As someone who just converted from Chrome to Firefox 1-2 months ago: what alternative can you recommend to Google Drive? I wouldn’t miss everything from it, but being able to easily share data (so that they can play videos, audio files or documents without having to manually download them) is one of them.
EDIT: and maybe Google Photos. Mainly for syncing.
Nextcloud has most, if not all, of the features of drive in my experience.
(Don’t everyone hit me) the snap version of nextcloud is dead simple to stand up. But if you are adamantly opposed to snap, the docker version is semi-easy to get going. Or you could just spin up a linode instance with it on there for like $5/mo.
This is all a self-hosted/self-responsible option though. So back it up etc.
This.
I invested in my personal infrastructure a bit. Bought an old retired Dell R710 server for $100, installed proxmox on it. Nextcloud is basically a one-click install using a Turnkey Linux container.
My setup clearly isn’t for everyone, but if you’ve got $100 to spare for some hardware and aren’t afraid of running your own server, proxmox is free and crazy powerful.
For storage, for free options I’d recommend filen.io, which gives you 10GB free. If you’re open to other paid options, proton drive and infomaniak drive seem alright.
Just skimming the alternativeto entries for google photos, the open source alternatives to Google photos look like they tend to be either paid or self hosted. Stingle Photos has a free 1GB tier you could try out. Otherwise, paid options include Stingle, ente, and seafile, and self hosted options include immich and Nextcloud (which is also a drive alternative).
Depends on how much effort you want to put into it. Nextcloud is the closest in terms of features but you’ll need to set it up.
I have a ProtonDrive account and I like it but it doesn’t have auto upload of photos. You need to manually upload them. I’m personally fine with this since 90% of my photos are receipts and junk.
I use Sync.com for years (since 2015 after my very privacy heavy swiss cloud service shut down). It’s Canadian, the end-to-end encryption (on device,upload and cloud) is the highest I encountered and it’s extensive zero-knowledge policy was my reason to sign up.
They added some nice sharing features with quite the extensive control and easy Setup. So might be worth checking out.
And obligatory referral link for a free account 🙃:
I’ve switched over to Proton for email, calendar and drive. I still haven’t found a replacement for Google Photos but I’m looking for one.
My work, which is supposed to keep things private for customers, stores so much on Gmail and Google Drive. It’s comical to me.
What type of company? I, too, find it comical. There was a lot of cloud resistance due to privacy and control issues in financial services years ago. Concerns were justified. Nothing changed except managements’ attitudes because “everybody else is doing it”.
D I T C H
C H R O M E
And stop using chromium browsers too!
No point in ditching chrome just to use chrome with a different coat of paint.
This feels like a corporation complying with their obligations under the DMCA.
To maintain their safe harbor status, companies have to remove allegedly infringing content in response to a properly filed takedown notice. This does include links stored in google’s search results. This is what a company like google has to do when storing user data on servers in any country that signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty.
They don’t seem to be doing this in a malicious way. They have done their duty and removed the offending links from their service. But they quite kindly chose to notify the user by email, including the exact URL that was removed. The user can store that link elsewhere.
It would have been far easier to remove the link silently.
They shouldnt be reading and playing with things privately stored. Are they going to go through all my documents to replace any swear words? It’s completely inexcusable. Private doesn’t mean private until some big company asks about it wtf.
It’s not on bookmarks. Is on collections(a different thing) that are public, shareable and technically hosted by Google. This whole thing has been overblown by not fact checking.
It deleted them from public and private collections.
If google was taking out mentions of Tiananmen Square at China’s request, would you be okay with it?
What do you mean by privately stored if you’re saving it in some google application?
I don’t think something becomes public just because it’s saved in a Google app. I consider the contents of my gdrive private and my own. There’s ethics to consider that go wildly beyond “if it ends up on Google’s hardrive, it automatically belongs to them”.
If that’s the case (what OP mentioned), I think it’s still the responsibility of who made those effing laws. You cannot ask a corporation to break the law to protect your privacy. But you can definitely ask your representative to protect it
It’s not an order from the president, they could easily say no and fight it.
This is google we’re talking about, there never was any privacy to begin with, and what you believed was there was always just an illusion. This was always their interpretation of the ideal and power of the internet with its “free sharing of ideas and knowledge” - they literally went with including personal data in that much like facebook and both have yet to be stopped or held accountable to start treating it as such.
Please contact your congressperson. Having dealt with shit like this, a company’s other option is fines approaching infinity and jail time for those who don’t comply. We elected the people who did this.
We should be angry at corporations for monopolistic behavior, using profits from one business to prop up another and drown competitors (Bard), cross-business-unit offerings that smaller companies can’t compete with (Prime shipping, video, music), not this. This is a company complying with a terrible law.
And yet, I can still google torrent sites
