De-Google Your Life - Part 1: Start With Chrome

Google just killed

your

favorite service again, but what are you going to do about it? It's not that

your

sinister calling card is wrong. Hundreds of millions of people use Google products every day and why not, they are super convenient and many are even free, but that is The thing is, it is convenient to regularly have the services you rely on and free removed. it's not free. They monitor literally everything you do to train machine learning algorithms and sell your data to advertisers, a feature they've integrated directly into the world's most popular web browser. I mean, it's no wonder people feel trapped in the ecosystem.

How do you divorce yourself from the third largest technology company in the world? They are everywhere, but it is possible and we will show you how. in a series we call

google

your

life

and we will show you our sponsor pulseway. Pulseway it management and monitoring software allows you to control your systems from anywhere. Try it for free today and get 40% off any plan that includes month-to-month options Unlike Google, most of the alternatives we've unearthed have strong privacy policies and end-to-end encryption because I mean the Privacy may not be your main reason for searching Google, but if you're working anyway, we think you might as well minimize the personal information you're handing over to data brokers who will turn around and sell it to everyone from companies from insurance to world governments.

Let's

start

with the product that is most likely to be. using now Google Chrome fortunately there are alternatives and I'm not just talking about Firefox, although it is a good alternative, it has become very fast in recent updates and is one of the few browsers left not related to chromium and therefore Google this It's important because chromium Chrome-based browsers are moving towards the new Manifest V3 standard, which severely limits certain types of extensions in the name of security,

part

icularly ad blockers. Firefox and its early privacy descendants, such as Tor Browser and Mulad, have no plans to remove Manifest V2 anytime soon.

There is still some

chrome

. Based alternatives worth checking out, although brave, for example also retain support for V2 manifest extensions, have built-in content blocking support and include a number of other cool features, of course they also have some web stuff 3.0, like Ally's ad display, but their ads to earn crypto tokens, which I personally would turn off, but that's a matter of taste, but one thing you can leave on is the surprisingly strong sync options, they are end-to-end encrypted extreme, so they are only used on your devices, another browser with sync encryption is Arc, which

start

ed

life

on Apple devices last year and is now available on Windows 11.

It features high performance and a minimalist user interface with vertical split view tabs and groups of sharing tabs called spaces. This minimalism looks fantastic and with the collapsed website sidebar. They even look like dedicated apps, but they take some getting used to and unfortunately require logging in to use them, it also hides many settings from the start and at the time of writing the Windows version is missing many features that Mac users enjoy like the library shelf, max AI assistant, and boost web page customizations for something a little more familiar. Sensation that un

google

d

chrome

is exactly what it sounds like, offering a very common experience and removing practically everything related to Google, including even the web store to get extensions, fortunately it exists. a setting that makes installing extensions faster, and an extension you can download that allows you to continue using the web store as usual, but you can choose when those extensions are updated.

Ungoogled chromium also includes a number of additional features such as fingerprint resistance for foil tracking and more customization for ey Behavior, although its anti-tracking does not reach the capabilities of the Braves, it is a community-driven product with no ties to a company in

part

icular that you may find it attractive now that there are many others with particular approaches, but not us. I have time to go over them all in this video, so I would recommend taking at least a handful of them for a test drive before you commit to switching completely because it can be a bit complicated, for example, Firefox can import autocomplete from your history . and your bookmarks, which will get you most of the way, but it can't directly copy your Chrome profile, so you'll have to install your favorite extension separately, from there you can simply open both 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 into your new browser.

Switching between Chrome-based browsers is easier and harder at the same time, you need to close your browsers first. and find out where your profile folder is here are a couple of examples then copy the user data folder to your new browser and voila you will need to log in again to some of your websites but your extensions bookmark history and everything else should appear. For travel, there's still a bit of a problem, although your new browser probably still uses Google by default for the task you perform most frequently. Google's most recognizable and longest-running service to date has been degraded to such a degree that it's now arguably one of its least usable services, but we're sticking with it because who else do you turn to when you need to Google something?

Well, there are competitors, the next biggest in North America would be Bing and Yahoo, but that feels a little like saying I'm giving up. Make dinner to stay healthy, then switch to Walmart's own brand macaroni and cheese. Fortunately, there are many lesser-known search engines available, some of which even offer results from major search indexes, so if all you want to do is search Google without the Google homepage or ecosia. provide exactly that both claim to anonymize your search history and claim not to create a profile based on your usage and the home page was one of the first, if not the first, search engine with roots dating back to the 9s Dogo document, while Therefore, it cycles through the browsers default search.

The engine is another old name in the space that in this case uses Bing results and offers a lot of useful extras like bangs that allow you to search through other engines or websites. All three have strong privacy protections that only show ads related to individuals. search queries and iosia are great, they use their profits to plant trees. A powerful and increasingly popular alternative is brave pursuit. It uses a well-known engine with strong privacy protections and offers features that Google currently lacks, such as an AI-powered answer engine that summarizes. results for you, the ability to drill down into subtopics with glasses and anonymized local area search results, unlike duck, Dugo Brave collects analytics by default, but you can opt out on the settings page and disable any of the additional functions that you do not use.

Brave also offers ad-free premium search for $3 a month. Speaking of Premium, kagi is a subscription-only search engine, in addition to speed, it offers the most comprehensive privacy policy of all the engines we are reviewing and has a robust set of machine learning tools including wizards that interact with models popular machine learning and the ability to summarize basically anything, lenses are a feature that works similar to Braves glasses to drill down into subtopics and you get direct control over page ranking with useful information like domain age and tracker count to guide your decision making, they offer 100 searches for free and then you'll have to decide if it's worth opening your wallet.

Duck Dogo Brave and Kagi claim to run their own search indexes in some way, 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 course, there are a host of other options available, including cir that you can even host yourself, so don't take the ones we've highlighted as the only options, But getting Quit Google even for a search engine that uses Google results is a big step toward becoming less dependent on the whims of the Alphabit company. The easiest way to go offline is to change your default search engine.

Unfortunately, that's too easy. Firefox heard that you like to search. They made a search search so you can search your search if you're using a Chrome Bas browser, although it's usually there under the settings and it will automatically populate with the engines as you use them once you find one you like click activate if necessary. then the three dots and then set the default value it's that simple unless you are a Safari user because Apple knows better or at least pays better so you will need to download an extension if your search engine is not in the short list. that Apple offers you by default, now let's talk about email, not only is Google pushing 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 they won.

Don't anonymize it and then use it to train the machine learning algorithms that power features like smart writing and help me write now. Most of your top options for escaping Gmail are also great tech, and while some of them are better than others, none of them are squeaky clean, so in the spirit of googling, we'll avoid them and stick to them. We'll focus on a couple of privacy-focused providers that are also free, that is, not entirely free, some of them pay well. Their features after all, if you're not giving them money or your data then they're just losing you, but their free tiers aren't that bad and offer a gigabyte of data along with their enhanced privacy and those paid tiers.

Not only do they pay money for nothing, but they give you access to cool features that Google doesn't offer, like the ability to use a custom domain outside of workspaces, obviously, additional email addresses and this is very quick to create. Hide my email aliases that may help. you manage spam and prevent a website security breach from spreading to all your accounts Now while Tuda focuses primarily on email, proton is great because they have a suite that is basically the privacy-focused equivalent of many of the core Google services that both have had. independently audited and everything is end-to-end encrypted, meaning none of them could read your email even if they wanted to, let alone target ads from it.

Tuda claims to go a step further by encrypting more metadata from your emails than Proton, but I actually don't. I don't expect that to make much of a difference and when it comes to law enforcement requests, they both provide semi-annual transparency reports and detail the number and type of requests they respond to. Migrating to any of them is easy as 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 attacking your Gmail inbox. Oh, and by the way, yes, we're aware that you can run your own email server, but that's way beyond the scope. scope of this video and honestly it's not something we would recommend for most people, photo backup on the other hand is something you could realistically self-host and let's face it a big part of the modern life.

Google Photos has a lot of people on lockdown and for good reason, not only is it cross-platform unlike iCloud, but it's shareable and searchable with cool features like the ability to create fun little slideshows for yourself, but wait a second, How do they do it unless they know what you look like and where you are? Go and know who you spend your time with, unlike browsers and email, there aren't many players in the photo backup game, but two of them stand out for being open source and self-hosted. The first has the most expensive cloud storage.Service with no free tier, but offers secure on-device facial recognition that never reaches server-side machine learning categorization and Maps integration.

It's an experience that's pretty close on paper to what you'd expect in Google Photos, with the caveat that you need to enable those extra features on every device you use, and since everything is generated locally, it probably won't be as precise or powerful. like Google's super-computer-powered Mega models. Meanwhile, they offer better prices for cloud storage than anyone else, plus they have a full breakdown. about how they protect your photos, but that's it, they don't offer much more than albums and secure sharing and their development blog is eerily quiet if all you need is a backup and you're okay with manual organization like the old Nowadays it is less expensive and it is very transparent now, if you just want to backup your photos to cloud storage no matter which one or even spread them across multiple drives then you can use phot sync, not all of its features are free, but most backup targets, including a PC or Mac running the companion software, do not require a premium subscription.

Another self-hosting option is image. This came up a lot in the comments of our recent video on how to build a DIY Nas to avoid expensive monthly cloud subscriptions. and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention them here, as it offers facial recognition map integration and automatic backup, but also offers Google-like features like slideshows of memories and a erasable timeline. Simply follow the steps in Docker Compos to get started. your desktop or your Naas of choice, you'll want to use a VPN tunnel like openvpn or tailscale to access it on the go, unless you have a dynamic DNS name and are comfortable with port forwarding, which reminds me that not everyone the Google services you use The usage 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 you are using is Google's and even if you are using your Internet service provider's DNS server, for For example, they may still be using Google's DNS somewhere Upstream, so it's not very intuitive to avoid it, fortunately there are free alternatives, many of which claim to not log your requests at all, such as quad 9 and nextdns, both They offer a few extra benefits to help protect your browsing sessions, including rules for blocking malware and tracking domains, which means you don't need to do it in the browser makes some of that V3 manifest stuff less problematic and another feature they support and which is becoming more common is DNS over https or TLS, which will prevent your ISP or a wireless access point from spying on the sites you are visiting quad 9 offers easier setup, while nextdns provides full control , although with a limited number of free blocking requests.

The main disadvantage of using an alternative like these is that responses can be a little slower and you can watch our Cloudflare DNS video to learn more about this. who, by the way, is also a viable option for distributing your data footprint and at the same time is arguably even more widespread online than Google. Cloudflare has a pretty good reputation for not being evil so far and offers optional malware blocking like quad 9 and nextdns always. Since you don't want any customization beyond that, you can configure an alternative DNS service in different ways in your browser on your operating system or on your router and while I would recommend using a secure DNS option where you can, I would do so.

I don't recommend stacking more than one of those methods unless you know what you're doing. Setting it up within your browser tends to be the most tedious option, as it will need to be done not only on every device you own, but also on every browser you use. use it and it really only works on desktop, fortunately it doesn't take long in browsers descended from Chrome. You can find the setting here and it's here in Firefox, just turn it on, paste the address in the box and you're ready to take a better approach. However, for most people, operating system-level DNS probably overrides Windows 11.

It fully supports secure DNS. Just go to the network and internet settings page, choose the interface you want to configure and click edit on DNS server mapping, set it to manually paste the values. you got it from your supplier and ready for everyone else. Unless there is an application or you're running Linux and you want to set up a DNS proxy, you're not going to use secure DNS across the entire OS, but that's okay. We're not going to review every operating system, as the major vendors realistically have step-by-step instructions on their sites that you can follow based on your needs.

As for the third option, setting it up on your router, this is great because it applies automatically. to every device that's connected to your network, unless they have their own overrides, making it a great option if you want to set it once and forget it, forget it until you run into a random issue in some app on your smart TV that is not available. working, you spend two hours fighting with the thing until you remember, sure, I'm using custom DNS as to how to do it, if you want to do it, the actual configuration changes a lot depending on which router you have, so we won't go into this further, but what I will say is that you probably want to set this in addition to one of the other options, so let's say your phone, for example, is still using your preferred DNS settings if you leave the comfort of its Wi-Fi range because it will only affect those devices when connected to that router.

However, it's great for making sure non-configurable equipment like the aforementioned Smart TV gets the correct DNS settings, and it will usually find it. in internet settings and then DNS by default it will probably be your internet service provider'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 that now. I know he is right now. in the middle of writing a Manifesto about how we missed your favorite alternative, not to mention we haven't even covered most of Google's services, but guys, that's why this is just the first part.

Well, our plan for part two is Maps pirate, I mean. ad blocking, password managers, cloud storage and yes, YouTube, but before we can do all that, I have to pay the team that worked on this and since most of you are not at LG. g/ flat plane still where you can find great extras and exclusives, which means listening to this message from our sponsor Pulseway Pulseway is a great tool for monitoring and managing it from literally wherever you are if something goes wrong, like a server is overheating , Pulseway will alert you or even fix it automatically thanks to its multi-level automations with self-healing technology.

They are your one stop shop for everything IT related. Server monitoring. Network monitoring. Automation and backup, and all from one place on flexible terms, whether it's a single computer or an entire building full of them, Pulseway can handle it for you and even keeps running in the background, allowing you to enjoy the things you want to enjoy. for our viewers. Pulseway is offering 40% off all their plans until the end. of the month, including its pay-as-you-go option with no obligation, so try Pulseway free for 2 weeks at the link below and experience the true meaning of its power if you enjoyed this video and are looking for another fun and not a deep dive. but take a moderate dive into a technical topic, how about the time we showed how to set up a pie hole?

It's not as dirty as it seems.