Googlepocalypse

[melannen]

I have been trying to minimize my dependence on Google for years now, but none of the other search engines out there are as good at just plain finding stuff as Google is, even with all the ways that Google has made itself worse lately, and Gmail is still Gmail, and Youtube is pretty much necessary, and sometimes people send me things on Docs or Calendar that I have to be able to access.

So in preparation for Googlepocalypse tomorrow - beyond deleting a couple of my extraneous accounts, and making sure my fannish-youtube account has nothing whatsover to link it to my RL-gmail account - I have gone the low-effort way, and just used my browser's javascript options to block all the Google-owned domains from downloading cookies or using javascript on my main browser.

While I'm not giving up my gmail account (which I only used for RL stuff anyway) this means that I physically can't log into Google things with my main browser, which I find satisfactory - granted my backup browser is where I do most of my banking, my torrenting, my workstuff and my kinkmemeing from, but all the *important* stuff is over here.

And you guys, you guys, OMG, if you block javascript for google.com, it suddenly starts working again. No pop-up previews! No infinite scroll! You can still get to "advanced search"! Image search actually shows you information without annoying popovers again! It doesn't try to search while you're typing! And all actual functionality - that is, finding stuffs on the internets - still works perfectly, just like it did a couple of years ago before they broke it all. It is brilliant. I recommend doing this even if you don't care about the security issues or you have them covered other ways, I love it so much.

(I have no idea if blocking javascript prevents any/all of the creepy altering of search results they've been doing lately, but it should stop most of the tracking short of using a proxy server to hide your IP address, and frankly just killing all the popovers was worth it.)

(Note: this does break Maps pretty comprehensively, but Maps is full of privacy heebie-jeebies anyway.)

Also to celebrate the intercalary day I went to the beach! In northern hemisphere February. In the rain. It was fun! I recommend that, too.

Comments

[dingsi]

For speakers of German I always recommend web.de - their interface is shitty (in the sense that their homepage is full of ads and celebrity gossip) and you can only download your email in 15-minute intervals, but that are the only drawbacks I can think of. They also have a pretty good anti-spam feature that you can fine-tune to filter out specific adresses. Don't know if it's to your liking but I thought I'd put it out there.

[kaz]

I've been somewhat bitter about web.de ever since I got suckered into a "free trial of premium account" which turned into 1 year of having to pay, buuut that was really my own fault and a while back. Also, they had the maximum limit of 500 e-mails for free accounts - is that still around? because it made getting e-mails via anything but POP3 kind of pointless, which is not good for a web-based service.

Although... at this point I would actually be WILLING to pay for my e-mail if it meant I was guaranteed privacy/people not e-stalking me and selling my information to the top bidder. The DW model, essentially.

(...now I am imagining the OTW creating a fannish e-mail service.)

[dingsi]

Ugh, yeah, their "check out our free trial!" ads are annoying. I'm not sure about a 500 emails thing, but there's a 12 MB limit for your online storage. As I only use them to get my emails via POP3, it wasn't something I considered. :/
Fannish email service... how awesome would that be?