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 is it
monitoring and management software lets you keep an eyee 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 De 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
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it power if you guys enjoyed this video and you're looking for another fun not
deep dive but moderate dive into a techie topic how about the time we
showed how to set up a pie hole
it's not as dirty as it sounds