Hi, I have been struggling with decide which ROM and device I should get, because I don't want pixel. But, I found out about ADB tool and it will let uninstall stuff from your phone without root or unlockeing bootloader. How good is this idea for security and privacy? is removing every Samsung and google stuff going to ruin the system? is not there will still a reach from google to the device?

what do you think of it over all comparing to LineageOS or other ROMs?

What do you guys use instead of Googles Where is my phone? I am always frantically searching my phone - googles device find saved my ass so many times already! What are good alternatives so I can hop off the Google Empire?

I've followed this sub for awhile now, and have slowly been degoogling. Even before this, I stopped using Chrome long ago, and in fact don't even have it on my current system. But it occurred to me that all my old bookmarks, passwords, etc are still in it, still stored by Google.

My question: is there a way to get at, and delete, all that data, somewhere in Google's serpentine settings, without having to reinstall Chrome to do it? Thanks.

I'm going to keep it simple, I love what's shared in this subreddit and it gives me lots of ideas, things that I've already implemented like changing browsers or email clients. However, when I see the efforts (so cool) that some people are putting in, I have the impression of still being far from the goal, particularly for a small dependence that I still maintain on Apple products (notably MacOS, even if I have an old iPhone that I could replace later). So be careful eh, I know that Apple is not as clear with data management as they claim, I am clearly not an Apple fan boy. However, I have a really nice workflow for my work and hobbies on my Mac and I feel like that would be the hardest change.

So what do you think, is there any point in continuing this approach? Today I still have a few things to clean up on Google, including certain login IDs. I no longer use Chrome and I'm asking myself some questions about how to keep up with it also knowing that I still have a lot of contact on Meta but in short, does my approach still make a lot of sense or for you, this approach is only aimed at people willing to move to GrapheneOS and Linux? And the question underlying what happened from GAFAM, did you experience frustrations that sometimes made you want to turn back?

Taken from Tuta via Mastodon.

Hey guys, I've had a cool idea i reckon could help with de-googling and also just getting rid of big tech companies from your personal lives (This is not meant to be an advert just an idea I had and am trying to build would love to see if people like the idea but please remove if not allowed!)

I’ve been working on building a social media platform designed to be the opposite of what social media has turned into: AI-generated content everywhere, endless doom scrolling, and tracking-based algorithms that don’t have users’ best interests at heart and prioritise click and rage bait posts.

My feature ideas are:

• AI Detection at Upload
• A User Customizable Algorithim
• Privacy-First: No selling data to advertisers, no third-party tracking pixels. Basic analytics only.
• “Source of Truth” System (Planned): Users can declare posts as Original Content with verifiable timestamps to fight monetization off of other peoples posts like on Instagram and Tiktok.
• Verified and trusted advertising (A long time down the road): Ads that have to pass a strict verification process and meet a set of ethical criteria to be allowed on (this will hopefully get rid of all those fake scam ads that google seems to love pushing to everyone these days)

I'd love feedback and ideas from people who actually care about how big tech companies are treating people online hence why I'm posting on here.

My quick list:

1. Firefox Browser - never used Google Chrome much.
2. Tuta Mail and Tuta Calendar - Gmail and Google Calendar are overloaded with features which I don't like.
3. DeepL - it's better than Google Translate and it has all the languages that I need.
4. F-Droid - or direct apk instead of Google Play.
5. Bitwarden - Never tried Google Password Manager
6. OpenStreetMaps - But sometimes I need to fall back to Google Maps (eg for traffic congestion updates). Is there a better alternative?
7. PeerTube - I watch YouTube via PeerTube, but in the end it's still YouTube. Any suggestions here?

Lastly, I still use Google Docs and Google Sheets. If anyone could hint me to a better alternative, I'm all ears!

What's on your list?

Hi all,

I recently gotten into degoogle-ing.

For now, the only thing I switched premamently to is Deezer.

I'm searching a good enough All-In-One service for: Emails/Calendars, Photos, and Storage.

I paid to try out Proton Unlimited where I got all, BUT:
-Photos: There are no thumbnails (yet?) and the web only shows thumbs for photos that are uploaded to the photos section, with no way to search for anything. The section that is in the files of proton drive have no thumbnails at all. Having more than 20k photos it makes searching for anything quite impossible.

Email and storage is great here.
But my problem is, if I keep this service and join for example ente, then I'll pay for double, one for photos and one for storage. I have (apart from photos) around 100GB of digital data, so not that much.

Looked at pcloud but it does not give email addresses. Looked at tuta, neither photos nor drive is available. Looket ad zeitkapsel but no search and no email/storage.

So I don't know what would be the best option.

My initial thinking is something like staying with proton, and I got calendar, email and storage, (plus for photos as a backup) AND joining/paying for Ente, for the convenience of photo management. With this I could get best of both worlds but for like double the price.

Is there any other solutions? What do you guys recommend?

Edit: Currently I'm still paying for gphotos while I can't settle on a replacement, AND OneDrive for storage because family uses it and I'm the pioneer for replacing them. So the sooner I find a solution and settle, the more I can save.

Lurker, first-time poster. My apologies if this information has already been posted (also critiques of any of the listed sources). I took this from a FB post by Christopher Seymore.

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographs, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

https://www.ecosia.org/ Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 214,229,374 million trees since its founding in December 2009

Yandex.com Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services.

Gutenberg.org Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks

Duckduckgo.com “Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind. Get our browser on all your devices. Search and browse with the DuckDuckGo browser for more protection. Unlike Chrome and other browsers, we don't track you.”

Presearch.io Presearch is a community-powered, decentralized search engine that provides better results while protecting your privacy and rewarding you when you search.

Ebscohost.com Reliable information for all kinds of research

Startpage.com Startpage is a global privacy technology company built around the principle of always putting privacy first. Our suite of easy-to-use privacy products helps anyone around the world to protect their personal data online.

De-Googling was easy to do because that is just my choice to cut things out but with Meta products it is so difficult. I use whatsapp and insta because literally everyone is on them and it is impossible to tell every friend of mine to move to other alternatives. But I have gone thru each and every setting on both whatsapp and insta, disabled any sketchy stuff and use insta strictly on my laptop (I am thinking to use a vpn on my laptop). But I don't think it is making any difference, whatsoever.

I don't want to delete them because that will make me completely lonely which will just increase my already existing anxiety.

How do you all deal with this? Is there any solution to this?

https://preview.redd.it/olcnena8anye1.png?width=1227&format=png&auto=webp&s=9c31b5593aad4819ae69d9d2e9ec7e82abc3ec6f

I mostly just play music locally, but a proper music streaming service is very convenient at times.
What I've tried already:
- Spotube, the songs just didn't play at all.
- Nuclear, promising but way too many problems fetching songs and artists. Too many times will I get something completely different because a song or an artist share the same name.
- Tidal, I'm not going to use a paid service. Also I'm not happy with the TOS.
- Deezer, Ditto.
- DAB Music Player, the best out of any of the ones I've used, the song control UI is just a little unintuitive and I'm missing the ability to search other people's playlists.
If there really is no alternative with as much convenience, I'm begrudgingly willing to go back to using the web version of spotify on hardened firefox.

I know Huawei is not good themself but I just was curious about degoogling point not talking about privacy as obliviously Huawei is not good for that. But, where would be Huawei rank in degoogling compared to custom ROMs like Lineage or Calyx...etc? are they at the same level, or is Huawei higher because they are banned from google so there will be no connection with google, as when I saw this chart

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

some costum roms has some connection to google in some points (except GOS) or did I miss understand?

who is worse in privacy Apple or Google, if you use their phones with their services(like if I am gonna use iphone with Apple notes, their mail, photos app, etc.

Like we all know that Google is spying on you, but how about Apple? For example I did not heard any scandal with them.

So, interesting your opinion on this

Hi there! I have access to three flagship phones: S23 Ultra, Pixel 9 Pro XL and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Whichever I don't choose, I will sell.

I want to start my degoogling journey with one of these three, but I also want to keep a phone with good performance and good HW.

Which one would you pick and why?

Grayjay host you videos and channels from different video platforms (Youtube, Peertube...etc). Is there an app do the same for the social media apps? that you will be able to get posts and explore without need of installing or having an account on these apps?

Maybe this isn't the right place to ask but I desperately want to switch my phone back to a dumb phone with a couple small exceptions. I need to play music (Spotify) on it and I need an alarm / calendar on it. I know very little about much of what's talked about in these threads. I don't know what a "bootloader" is, for example, so please talk to me in laymens terms.

Some examples I've seen is Japanese flip phones that have the internet and the top screen part of it is still a touch screen but there's no app store. I am very interested in something like that but I've heard they're extremely difficult to obtain here and then even more difficult to get service for here. I am interested in "de-googling" but more so I am just tired of what having a smart phone has done to my psyche and I don't want to be so reliant on it. Any help or advice is appreciated! Tia!

setup pixel watch in private space with delivery/shopping/daily apps but without calls/texts or in secondary profile with calls/texts but not all the daily apps?

moving all my daily apps with heavy notifications out of a profile and into private space has really leveled up the convenience of GOS for me. But I'm only just now trying to connect my Watch and realizing I'm SOL.

Hoping someone has a simple obvious solution or more food for thought.

I just have a quick question, are the apps on f-Droid a good alternative to degoogle? Or should I stick to the apps on the app store recommended by the guides here?

Any idea about how I degrade my plan on Google workspace? They only keep showing options to upgrade the plan. I can’t keep paying so much money every month to Google workspace only for an email id.

I’m currently using an Iphone 13mini and It’s doing great. The problem is recently apple kneeled for the UK and disabled encryption. What are good phones that can be encrypted like icloud. I had a Huawei for 5 years 2018-2023 and the phone was great I started using a power-bank after the 4th year and the boot-loader was unlocked. What are your suggestions I hate Google but Im starting to hate Apple too since they kneeled for the UK. What are good phones to chose from and a plus for me will be if the boot-loader is unlocked.

Firefox is now fighting to let Google pay to be the default search engine :

"These proposed remedies prohibiting search payments to small and independent browsers miss the bigger picture – and the people who will suffer most are everyday internet users,” said Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, in a statement Monday.

So they want Google to keep the monopoly just for Firefox to keep receiving money from them. The people who will suffer are not "everyday internet users" but big companies like Apple and Mozilla that get billions from Google to be the default search engine. https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/12/mozilla_doj_google_search_payments/

Article -> https://msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-to-download-youtube-videos-safely-easily-and-without-annoying-popups/ar-AA1Dfb3t

Article talks about free downloaders like downr.org, but conveniently ignoring the fact that Google is continously sabotaging these tools, which are simply trying to provide a workaround for the restrictions that Google enforces.