The Chrome team says theyâre not going to pursue Web Integrity butâŚ
it is piloting a new Android WebView Media Integrity API thatâs ânarrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps.â
They say its because the team âheard your feedback.â Iâm sure thatâs true, and I can wildly speculate that all the current anti-trust attention was a factor too.
K, Iâm still not using Google search engine anymore. And once I find a replacement for any other Google services and devices I have, itâs out with those as well.
Both leaving reddit and leaving google s.e. were two things that I thought would be harder than they were.
Just need to install Linux as your primary OS and your transition to software freedom will be complete.
Doing so on the desktop is easy enough. Getting rid of Android appears to be a much harder challenge, though.
I use it for work but at home with gaming and stuff itâs just not sustainable
Leaving google isnât hard.
Leaving YouTube specifically, however⌠Well, itâs been getting easier as content seems to be less and less frequent or quality.
Maps is the last one to replace. There are so many ads now that Iâll tolerate a lower quality alternative.
This is true, I still use youtube and I donât see it changing soon since there are no viable alternatives.
Leaving YouTube specifically,
Iâve been using it. Itâs actually pretty great.
I still worry that leaving Reddit is going to make it tilt to the right. I spent a decade posting there in the hopes that it would nudge people towards sanity.
The right use it and all other social media sites for coordinated disinformation. No matter how much you try to combat it youâre going up against people/ideas with deep pockets and a lot of resources meaning your voice is just a drop in the bucket.
The hard part is the cost difference (I havenât looked terribly deeply yet) Family Proton (3TB) is 395 AUD (when you sign up for 2 years)
2 TB, 125 AUD per year for google drive, and itâs per year.
Pro-rata thatâs literally twice as expensive, and you have to sign up for 2 years to get that rate, which makes moving my stuff a hard pill to swallow :(
Is there a plug and play service thatâs as good as proton without the hefty premium?
(The single plans are even more steep, 24 months, 158 AUD per year for only 500 GBâŚ)
This is something I wrote in another thread earlier but itâs relevant here too
A security guy popular in the internet, Ollam, recently left Deltaâs program because they are changing it to be more pay to play vs miles traveled or something. Delta walked it back but heâs sticking to his guns. In his rant, he said something poignant. Something to the effect of âif your significant other raises their hand like theyâre gonna hit you, but they donât? The time to leave is now.â (Video)
(Quote)
I replaced gmail with protonmail and everything else with nextcloud. Couldnât go back.
Their docker stack is pretty simple to setup
After a lot of privacy switching I finally did try NextCloud, but I couldnât get port forwarding to work on my Internet and gave up⌠For now
You are probably behind a nat. I contacted my isp and they disabled it, since it works perfectly!
Yes, they even have a walk through on how to do it.
Honestly. Off the back of this debacle I switched to Firefox and duckduckgo. Previously I used to use the shit out of incognito because I hated that when I searched for something once that I then get that thing popping up everywhere else in ads etc. Since the switch I no longer get the feeling of being stalked.
NoScript helps a lot, too. I suppose other extensions also. Itâs horrifying how many sites embed Google and Facebook tracking, including ones that really shouldnât like medical sites and banks.
My concern is saving my email and photos before my account is randomly banned one day with no customer service and no recourse. God only knows what data they already harvested from when I used to back up my photos with their service.
Just grab a copy using Google Takeout, then after that use Syncrify, FolderSync, Resilio Sync or something else to automatically copy your phone media to your computer.
On the topic of this, what is the best alternative out there? A few years ago Iâve tried a couple options, out of curiosity, but the search quality was super poor for anything thatâs not in English, and the accuracy of found content wasnât always there
I adjusted my entire digital life so I can do everything without ever connecting to Google services. I block them in my self-hosted Pi-Hole, on NextDNS and in my OPNsense Firewall.
https://ecosia.org as a search engine :) Uses bing in the background (and newly also google), but your data isnât sold (AFAIK).
If you want opensource thereâs YaCy
Iâm on Kagi but I did the one time payment and am unsure about whether Iâll extend. Results are good but 10 dollars a month isnât insignificant (cheap plan is orders of magnitude less than what I need in searches)
I tried kagi and wasnât impressed. For all but one or two queries the results were exactly the same as ddg. Not to mention they had that stupid metric stating 78%+ unique kagi results for every search, even though that was blatantly untrue. They seem pretty dishonest as a company.
I used Ecosia for a long time (almost 5 years) but the search results are pretty bad. Often I had to use another search engine to actually find what I was looking for. DuckDuckGo is pretty good, Brave Search is OK as well but SearXNG is my personal favorite.
Theyâre just starting it smaller scale. Within a year itâll be pushed out to everyone broadly.
This is literally going to be what they did for FLoC. Basically release it as topics.
Google absolutely cannot stop tracking everyone at this point. Iâm pretty sure theyâve put the entire house on the bet to track people more and do everything to ensure that Google Chrome tracks every aspect of your web browsing experience.
So while WEI is dead, I think Googleâs boat is so far out to sea now that itâs either try this again a bit more gently or watch the ship sink. Everyone said FLoC was dead and they absolutely put it into the web browser with Topics. Nothing convinces me this is any different, they are absolutely going to, and I dare say have an existential need to, put this shit in everyoneâs browser.
Iâd like to believe that enough of us actually stopped using chrome and switched to Firefox the day they made that announcement that swayed them⌠But in reality Iâm sure it was just the bad press and theyâre going to try to find a different more sneaky way to do the same shit.
I was born a decade after Netscape navigator was launched. Iâm legally an adult. Wow, youâre old!
Can you actually stop using chrome on android? Because every link I click it opens in their webview app which is chrome
Dunno if this is what you mean, but you can definitely set another browser as default. Any context menus will change too: âOpen with Firefoxâ, or w/e youâre using.
No, Iâm not talking about default browser but the WebView app. For example Iâm using Voyager for Lemmy, and if I click on this postâs link it will open the website in the WebView, then I can click to Open with firefox.
But WebView itself is still chrome as you can see
Yeah there is a setting and now when I click links it opens in Firefox. But if you use the Google search widget it still opens in chrome, which is to be expected I guess.
To be fair I still think Google services, Microsoft, etc and all that jazz is great, Iâm no corporate shill or some free software nutter, but the issue however is the consistent anticompetitive strategies and vendor lock-in used to compensate for a lack of innovation.
Imagine if you could, for about a month, up to a year long period, where you just use a de-googled phone, a live USB and a portable hard drive, youâll actually have a different perspective and appreciation for what works with computers, printers, etc and our use of technology as a whole
Not proceeding for now.
âHeard your feedbackâ is becoming the death flag of future fuckery these last few years
more like they realised that the Irish data protection officer looked like they were gonna side with privacy advocates over anti-adblock, which is a precursor (and main usecase of) this API
Irish data protection office
I had to look this one up.
https://www.digitalguardian.com/blog/irish-data-protection-puts-google-notice-data-privacy-again
edit: thatâs from 2020 about google, not chrome
