For reasons that boggle my mind, I am required to keep a Google account for work (ties into some proprietary software the company uses)
Earlier today, I got the following -
Yes, I’m certain people under the age of 16 are known for their use of very specific EHR software that requires professional license to subscribe to in the first place. Makes perfect sense.
Anyone else get one of these “for you protection” msgs from Big evil?
Google tried for 3 months to get me to respond to their mail messages every day, now 1 year later I am glad I took the step to degoogle.
As a search engine I usually use No Ai DDG, searX,swiss cows,startpage. Browser is vanadium, ironfox,cromite on phone .
Librewolf or zen on linux laptop.
Filen as cloud storage.
Posteo.com as a mail provider
Lmao at specifying no ai ddg
Tell me, I want to laugh too, I’m still learning every day
I mean to be real, every search engine in the world has or will implement an AI quick search feature.
I feel so bad for ddg getting absolutely reamed for simply trying to innovate. They have one of the best most private ai implementations yet, and for that innovation they got nothing but hate.
If you don’t like quick search whatever, but ddg’s implementation of it is great.
I’m de-Googling right now, and I’m trying out Kagi for search. It’s paid, but so far I’m liking it. No ads, and very customizable in that you can boost or lower results from specific sites, among other things.
Honest question: if you’re paying for Kagi, how is that different than using a credit card for verification with Google? It would seem to me that you’re willingly connecting your identity in either case. Maybe i’m wrong.
Cheat code: Have your employer pay for it. ;)
A more serious answer is, you could use an anonymous payment card, or apparently crypto as well, if that’s your threat model. I’m not looking for total anonymity, but theoretically paying for the service means you are a customer and not the product. No ads/paid search rankings, no tracking, no selling your data to third parties. Yes, I do use uBlock Origin, I could block ads on DDG or whatever, but that doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model. I’m kinda rethinking the services I use and how much they are worth to me. I’m not here to sell you on it, I’m on day two of my Kagi subscription, but so far I like what I see.
Edit: I don’t think I really answered your question. Kagi isn’t in a position to be an identity verifier, and it doesn’t look like they have any interest or requirement to do that. It is looking more and more like Google/Meta/et al will be policing the Internet, and I just want no part of it. Google will absolutely sell your data to third parties. Kagi says they will never do so. I don’t know how they’d prove that, but I hope they are true to their word.
I’m a proponent of privacy for the sake of privacy and as a right. Anonymity is the only way to ensure privacy. Seeking privacy does not inherently imply nefarious intent (not that you explicitly said it does). Sounds like Kagi wouldn’t be a good choice for me. And that’s OK. Thanks for answering my Q!
I added some more context in an edit to my comment.
I agree with you about privacy being a right. It’s extremely difficult to have 100% anonymity, and I think that’s part of the calculus when deciding who we trust our data with. Google 100% already knows my identity, and therefore they shouldn’t need to collect any further identity verification documents “papers, please”-style. Maybe it’s more of a protest on my part, and I’m sure it’ll be just as effective as one, but I don’t want to participate in this identity police crap.
Thanks for the heads up about the edit.
Certainly 100% anonymity isnt possible, even with a VPN. Best practice is always dont do anything online that you wouldnt want attached to your real identity/life.
It sucks, there’s inherently a trade-off between anonymity and participating on the Internet. Here’s my step-by-step plan to staying anonymous on the Internet:
Edit: I don’t know how to format.
Man I don’t know if this is a parody but you’re inconveniencing yourself to an extreme that doesn’t make any sense especially when the EU is in negotiations to happily hand out all our biometric data to the US anyway.
I am all for privacy but let’s be honest it is a total sham nowadays. Go de-google to your hearts content, i did the same and I couldn’t be happier (you just get treated better when you’re not the product, funnily enough), just understand you’re not really protecting yourself from anything when governments can, and do, just negotiate your data behind your back anyway.
You can pay with bitcoin
I’ve been using Kagi for a couple years now and it’s been terrific.
Good luck on your degoogle journey, transfer gmail account piece by piece to new provider and test every login, Don’t do it automatically
Thank you. It’s a long process to migrate all these accounts, I have hundreds of accounts listed in Bitwarden, and I’m going through them one at a time. I’m moving my email to my own domain that I’ve had email hosting setup on for a while now. At least I shouldn’t need to do this again as I “own” the domain.
Another filen and posteo user here. Both are great