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Google forced to reveal users' search histories in Colorado court ruling
(www.techspot.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Privacy Guides
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Forced? Not at all. Google happily complied.
Stop using Google products, people. There are alternatives for every service they offer. They haven't invented anything new in over a decade
I used to believe that, but what's the alternative for a phone keyboard with swipe typing and speech recognition that actually works?
Or a phone that gets reliable push messages and also works for banking?
Cause I hate Google, but these are things I actually need in my life.
So, I have a few solutions for this.
First, I use GrapheneOS, so I can continue using Gboard and a few other Google products that do not warrant or require an internet connection, with network access disabled.
Alternatively, the next best keyboard is grammarly (also with network access dsiabled) and you can also use https://voiceinput.futo.org with that one.
Understanding that you probably paraphrased for brevity, it's hard to respond with anything helpful because only you know where the goalposts of, "actually works," are -- same thing with, "reliable push messages," and, "works for banking." I've used swipe input on the native Samsung keyboard and SwiftKey and found that they work just fine, but not as good as GBoard. If you're going from a Google-invested product to pretty much anything else, it's likely going to be a worse user experience, so you just have to set your expectations appropriately and keep in mind that what you're getting in return for that is intangible but important.
What have you tried so far, and how have they failed you with respect to the metrics you've stated?
Swiftkey isn't a real option for me, it just sends my data to another one of the big 3 tech megacorporations.
What I've tried:
How feasible is it to interact with your bank or other necessary services in a browser vs using the play store app? I can see LineageOS being viable if you can make such a transition.
Impossible. I either need a phone or buy a TAN generator for 2FA.
I'm currently thinking about that, or just leaving a spare phone at home with no data on it and location disabled. But the banking app is also used to verify bigger credit card payments. And without having it on me, I would have been unable to pay for plane or train tickets while traveling more than once.
honestly, having a spare phone that sits at home is a great solution. Your main phone can be a native pixel/grapheneos (not lineage, graphene has no issues with feature comparability). And the spare phone at run all the apps for, idk, your robot vaccum, smart home, etc. At home you have more control of data and connectivity.
we all have old phones that can be used as spares. My 8 yr old phone is the "remote control" for my house. Using accounts that don't tie to me, on it's own vlan, pi-holed, etc
for speech recognition there is "futo voice" which not only works better than Google's speech talk-to-type by allowing the user to fluently speak, but it also works offline and doesn't upload voice recordings anywhere. You won't be able to use it with gboard because google will not allow the use of another talk-to-speech engine with gboard, you'll have to download another keyboard first.
mobile banking is an unnecessary luxary. Moving money around/paying CC biils often takes days to go through anyway so the urgency of "doing it now" mobily can wait until you're at your desktop.
Push notifications, I'll give you. Without any services some apps cannot recieve push notifications. As the other user suggested, using a pixel with grapheneos, you can install sandboxes google services or microG and then have full functionality.
On grapheneOS you can choose which apps have access to internet/data much more fine-grained that what google allows you.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
futo voice
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sounds like you're on Android but there are still options. I am no subject matter expert but there are many who are and they are just a quick duckduckgo search away. Good luck!
Which only supports Google phones
Only because those are the phones most consistently open to modification
It's actually because the Tensor chip is the most secure one available, and because Google promises several years of software updates, with a solid history to back it up.
https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
You mean the Tensor chips that don't appear until 6th gen, even though the project supports 5th and 4th gen?
They also literally state:
And
This pretty much rules out 99% of smartphones. I would argue this even rules out non-Pixel favourites such as the OnePlus lineup, even though I'm writing this on a Lineage-loaded OnePlus 7T. Support for other ROMs is there but it's quite fucky. Add in what you said about firmware support and yeah, only the Pixel lineup would apply.
Yes, thank you for pointing that out
Is there a good alternative, maybe locally hosted, for location history?
While I've recently disabled it for Google, it actually was helpful for going back in time and remembering where I was on X day, on numerous occasions. Would be cool if there was a locally hosted, open source alternative.
https://liberateyourtech.com/alternatives-to-google-maps-and-other-location-tracking-apps/
Unfortunately many of the products they offer are a requirement for daily life.
It's been my experience that for most people, Google services are not a requirement, but a luxury... especially for daily life. Now, most Google-esque services are a requirement for daily life, but as they said, there are alternatives that you can use that work.
If we aren’t committing any crimes, why should we care?
Good thing that laws are perfect, huh?
@knexcar @throws_lemy @Clent
If you didn't commit a crime, why should be part of the line up of suspects?
I guess it could sometimes be an unfortunate coincidence that you do something suspicious where a crime just occurred. But surely you’d be proven innocent after looking at other evidence.
In a perfect world, sure. This is not a perfect world. The justice system wrongly convicts people every day.
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Privacy, freedom, and corruption? Like Trump banned international travel from how many Muslim countries? The fact that that happened at all is insane. You don't think these tools will be abused? Like the UK banned fetish porn (which has been thankfully overturned). You would be fine if say.. these tools were used to monitor your sexual habits?
if you're not doing any weird shit at home, why have blinds in your windows?
@knexcar @throws_lemy Ask this guy if he cares or not.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230823123658/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-location-tracking-police.html
That was confounded because his mother’s ex boyfriend seemed to be the murderer and used his car. Am I the only person on Lemmy who DOESN’T obsess over privacy, demand FOSS, and refuse to use Windows? My mother doesn’t have a shady ex-boyfriend, and it seems like a pretty fair exchange otherwise to give up my data in exchange for great free services that generally work pretty well — it’s not like I could sell my data myself. Nor am I paying my own money to use them. I don’t feel like getting a worse experience for e.g. maps (saw another post about it) just for the sake of data that (for most intents and purposes) doesn’t affect me directly.
@knexcar @throws_lemy @Clent Maybe you won't face a problem with law enforcement caused by some company sharing your data with the law enforcement. On an individual level, yeah sure, you probably won't get affected. But on a societal level, do we accept having some people's lives ruined by these techniques? I don't think so.
In general, is it acceptable that we give some for-profit companies full access to our data so they can manipulate our buying behaviors with their targeted ads?
That’s fair, we as a society are probably manipulated quite a lot. though I feel like law enforcement getting cases wrong is a somewhat separate issue from the “targeted ads” one. The alternative would be to use shittier evidence, potentially racism, or just let it go unsolved. I hate ads too and I block them so I don’t have to see them. I guess I’m tired that 1/3 of Lemmy posts seem to be about privacy/FOSS, I wish there was more variety like the R-site.