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SOLUTIONS TALK #4: How to de-Google, de-Apple, and de-Microsoft your life!
276 Plays2 years ago
How to start untangling yourself from Big Brother. Topics covered:
- GrapheneOS phone operating system
- Protonmail
- Browsers
- VPNs
- Word/Excel/Googledocs alternatives
- Online storage
- Google translate alternative
- F-droid and Aurora store
- Youtube alternatives (parsers) - forgot to mention alternative platforms like LBRY/Odysee and others...look into it!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: The Privacy Challenge
00:00:01
Speaker
All right, solution stock number four, let's get right into it because I got a pot of soup on the stove and I don't have much time. I've been running around all day. I am already destroyed and it's barely noon. So today's topic, how to de-Google, de-Apple and de-Microsoft your life as much as can be done being the small caveat.
00:00:31
Speaker
You know, you may have been living under a rock in normie land, but, and if you are, you know, all the best, I wish you well. But, um, if you are starting to, or already have woken up to the fact that these companies are not providing you free products and products in general that are
00:00:59
Speaker
to benefit you, okay? There's multiple agendas at work. If you're starting to wake up to that and you want to reduce your usage of their devices, services, and so on, operating systems, I'm going to give you some tips of what I've been doing over the last few years, right?
Why Care About Privacy?
00:01:20
Speaker
You should know that your phone is recording your every move everything you say everything you do on it it's getting sent back. On a constant basis on a regular basis to headquarters being that analyzed and look if you're okay with that. Whatever that's your choice right.
00:01:40
Speaker
You know, that they say, I'm not doing anything wrong. Why should I care? Well, why should you care about the fundamental fucking rights of privacy, bodily autonomy? Why should we care? Well, you should care. Oh shit, I got the bearing and I'll be back in a sec.
00:02:00
Speaker
Okay. Good thing this thing has a pause feature. Okay. Where was I? Yeah. So fundamental rights. If you don't care about your fundamental rights, you don't exercise them. They will be taken away by technocratic tyrant bastards, right? You have to understand these companies are egregiously violating our
00:02:30
Speaker
personal rights of privacy and so on, for profit and more. But anyway, of course, in order to talk about a solution, we need to first define the problem. So if you're listening to this, you know what the problem is. So let's just focus on the solution.
00:02:57
Speaker
So, okay, sorry about that. Just had a lot of coffee today. I've been running around like mad. Let me calm down.
The Influence of Tech Giants on Privacy
00:03:03
Speaker
Let me caveat the whole episode by saying that you will never be 100% off the grid, quote unquote, right? These guys got Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, they own the infrastructure to a great extent, right? The internet infrastructure, the, you know,
00:03:28
Speaker
cloud hosting infrastructure, right? So you might, you can do a lot, but you will always have some element of exposure. So it's not about going fully dark or whatever. Like we're not that freaking paranoid, but to like, for example, if you, if you get in your car and you drive to the supermarket,
00:03:50
Speaker
why should they track your every single goddamn move? Why should they be able to do that? You agreed, you basically agreed that they can do that, but you were, most people were ignorant, ignorantly agreed by using the devices, using their services, and you know, you've accepted the terms and conditions, right? So we, most of us have not read those and we ignorantly are, so you are kind of,
00:04:19
Speaker
you accepted the bullshit. But anyway, so why should they, every time you open an app on your phone, why should they know every single fucking thing you do? Why should they? They shouldn't. They shouldn't, right? So here's what I'm going to discuss today. I'm going to discuss alternatives to Android and Apple
00:04:44
Speaker
operating systems, alternatives to Windows and macOS, alternatives to Chrome, Agent Safari browsers, some plugins you can use for purposes I will state later, alternatives to Gmail and whatever email Apple has, alternatives to Google Drive, Google Translate,
00:05:09
Speaker
alternatives to YouTube and alternatives to Microsoft Office. And I'll give you some of what I've done and what I do, basically, to just use other services and products. And again, there's still exposure, but you know what I mean? Like, we're not freaking dark net lords that need fully, you know, anyway, I won't belabor the point. Let's get straight into it, because as I said, I don't have much time. So
The NitroPhone and Graphene OS Solution
00:05:39
Speaker
First up, you think that the only choice nowadays is Android phones with the Android operating system that is owned by Google or Apple iOS. You think that. However, for more than a year, I've been using what is known as a nitro phone.
00:06:03
Speaker
And it has, NitroKey, I believe is a company, NitroKey, I think they're a company in Germany, that's where I got the phone from. And it's a Google Pixel phone, but it has an operating system called Graphene OS, G-R-A-P-H, Graphene, like Graphene Oxide. That was a bit dark.
00:06:27
Speaker
some of you will get that. Graphene OS is the operating system and ironically this so Graphene OS let me actually I should I should just read straight from their website what it is it's an operating system that works on Android phones basically right so this is from the website the private and secure mobile operating system with Android app compatibility so this is developed as a non
00:06:57
Speaker
Profit Open Source Project. And you can go on grapheneos.org and download this. And if you have an Android phone, you can install it. And they have instructions. It's not rocket surgery, per se. And there is plenty of information and stuff like that.
00:07:17
Speaker
But what i did is i went to this nitrokey.com website, like i said, they're german companies specializing products for security professionals, journalists and stuff, people that obviously, you know, dissident thinkers, let's say, and they have various kind of security related devices, so you can get the phone
00:07:40
Speaker
like they have two or three options of a phone like they're usually I think Google pixel phones and they have been de googled with this operating system so that's what I did it it was a 500 euro roughly at the time with a pixel 4 which is not like phones are pretty cheap now you get a
00:08:01
Speaker
very cheap nice phone now so it was a little bit i guess pricey but i just i just had we just had the baby and it was two months into it so i didn't have time to tinker around with
00:08:16
Speaker
uh, installing stuff, but you can do this yourself. So, and it won't cost you much. It will just cost you some time and effort. Now, not everybody can do that. If you don't take savvy, you can find someone who is like a friend or a, or a child or cousin, family member, whatever, or you can find, you know, you can, you can just buy it pre-installed. And so that's what I did. There's also a couple of other,
00:08:45
Speaker
D googled phone phone operating systems for Android. I honestly Don't remember their names But you can just you can if you if you're so inclined to do this you you you will do the research yourself and you will find out right but I'm just telling graphene OS in fact Edward Snowden and
00:09:08
Speaker
That would be his operating system of choice for what that's worth. So I've been using that for more than a year. Obviously, it's not as good and sleek as iOS and Android, but it does the job.
00:09:25
Speaker
There is fDroid store, which is like a open source app store where, for example, I got my telegram app and you can use that to download apps. And there's another thing called Aurora store where you can basically install any app from the Google play store, right? So any app you want, including Jesus, if you want Gmail or if you must have Instagram or whatever, you can actually install it. But this Aurora store.
00:09:56
Speaker
When you open the description of the app, let's say you search for the Facebook app if you really want it.
00:10:05
Speaker
it will show you what trackers the app has when you install it. So there's a bunch of trackers that most of these apps have. Some have like 10, 13, whatever trackers. And you can see is Facebook, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, all sorts of stuff like that, right? So you can then on a case by case basis vet an app if you want to have it. For example, I have a couple of apps. Let me just open the phone and tell you what I have. So I have
00:10:35
Speaker
Actually, none of the apps at the moment that I have have any trackers, right? I have like ProtonMail, FreeMail, I have a podcasting app. So there's tons of things you can do. There's not many of the apps in the Aurora store as you will see if you ever do this. Not many of the apps actually have no trackers.
00:11:01
Speaker
So it's up to you. But here's the thing. With this Graphene OS, you can sandbox apps. They get sandboxed. So if it has trackers and you give it a ton of permissions,
00:11:19
Speaker
The app, for example, if you have Facebook, you give it all those permissions, it scans your phone, Jesus Christ, from top to bottom, what apps you're using. It scans your files, uploads, uploads your files, like it can do anything. And it does, trust me, it does. But with this, with this graphene OS, they get sandboxed. So they, they spread out their crawlers.
00:11:46
Speaker
due to the permissions, file storage, permissions, photos, permissions, all that jazz. But because they're sandboxed, they can't really get to your files and other apps. So that's a really awesome feature. And there's a
Choosing Ubuntu for Privacy
00:12:02
Speaker
lot of good stuff about this. Again, it does the job great. I have a calendar app.
00:12:10
Speaker
Obviously, I have my, like I said, my email and my telegram. I don't have WhatsApp. I haven't used WhatsApp in more than, I think, a year and a half. I haven't logged into Facebook for longer than that, or Instagram.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, so that's what I would recommend. GrapheneOS, and generally, they recommend these several devices on the website, but those are the ones that they know it works well, like a Google Pixel, blah, blah, blah, like I said already.
00:12:46
Speaker
It should work on any later model, Android phone, right? So look into that. It's a game changer. Really, really game changer. The hardest part for me was, like I said, I've been off the stupid social media
00:13:07
Speaker
services for a long time now, so I couldn't give a rat's ass about those. The hardest thing I'll tell you honestly was Google Maps. There are alternatives, but they're just not as good, right? So when I know I need Google Maps, I will take my old phone that I use for some stuff and for work and some apps on there that have a ton of trackers that I still need sometimes. And Google Maps, like if I need it,
00:13:35
Speaker
I will take that phone with me, share my hotspot off of my graphene OS and use it. But I carry that phone in a Faraday bag, which you can get if you search on Amazon, Faraday bag.
00:13:52
Speaker
it it's basically blocks signals coming in and out of the bag so if if the internet's off it's it's completely dark in the back so it's not taking pic you know i mean it's not taking pictures and tracking you and all that shit right so far that bag 20 30 40 euros or dollars great little investment to put your phone in if you if you don't decide to because most people won't do this
00:14:17
Speaker
Unfortunately, but if at least get the Faraday bag, which is something I did want to discuss. If you won't use a D Googled operating system on your phone, at least put your phone in a Faraday bag when you're not using it, right? Okay. You can't receive calls. So if you want to receive a call, then obviously don't, but most of the time,
00:14:45
Speaker
Well, I shouldn't say most of the time, but a lot of the time you're not using your phone. So, you know, stick in the bag, put in a fucking drawer. It doesn't need to be in the middle of your room next to your testicles or your uterus, giving you freaking testicular cancer or uterine, freaking cysts or God knows what with the radiation and constantly spying on you and listening to all your conversations. It doesn't need to be there.
00:15:15
Speaker
I have mine a meter away most of the time. It's out in the open because it doesn't fucking spy on me. It's super awesome. Anyway.
00:15:27
Speaker
Next up is macOS and Windows. Simple, simple solution. Linux. I'm sure most people know about Linux. Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the operating system. Free. It's free. You go to search for Ubuntu. You get Ubuntu. All you need is a pen drive. I think a couple of gigabytes is enough.
00:15:50
Speaker
You download that sucker. There's another program called Rufus you download and install. And that image of Ubuntu, you download it, you open that Rufus app, you find the image on your file system, and then you select the pen drive that you plugged in, you select it, click start, and it kind of puts the Ubuntu operating system installer on the
00:16:20
Speaker
pen drive. Now you turn off your computer, stick the pen drive in, start your computer and the install instructions start. Now at this point you have the option of completely removing your previous operating system or keeping them together with a boot menu so your computer starts and you select, do you want to use Windows or Ubuntu?
00:16:44
Speaker
that will allow you to continue to use your, let's say, have apps that only work on Windows or Mac OS or whatever. For example, I use video editing software on Windows. That's one thing I use and a couple of other things. And yeah, I only use that machine with Windows when I need to do something that my Linux and the Wuntoo Linux for surfing the web, various
00:17:13
Speaker
sort of just work work in using the web and stuff like that you can watch movies you can you can do anything because the brow you know most of the stuff we do nowadays is through a web browser so web browser works perfectly easy you can do that in in a couple of hours you could be set up and go and going with that boom get off windows full of spyware man
00:17:38
Speaker
Full of fucking spyware.
Privacy-Focused Browsers
00:17:41
Speaker
Okay, next up, alternatives to Chrome, Agent Safari browsers. This is actually not hard, but listen, I cannot believe people are using Chrome. Just download Brave. There's other browsers. Chromium. Chromium is based on the Chrome browser.
00:18:01
Speaker
And it's de-googled. So chromium and brave are what I would recommend. Not sure, 100% about brave.
00:18:08
Speaker
But there's a couple of others, Opera. So there's plenty of decent browsers. And for example, Brave will do a ton of cool stuff like block various scripts and stuff. And it just really, really, really takes a lot of the work off your hands. Like you won't have to install specific plugins in your browser to block Google Analytics and stuff like that, right?
00:18:38
Speaker
but you can. There's also a few plugins right now. I won't go into them, but you can do a quick web search and you can find those. But there's stuff that will block Facebook pixels, Google Analytics and stuff like that. So this is what I was talking about. If you're
00:18:56
Speaker
If you de-Google yourself in your life, but you go to websites, many, or I should probably say the majority of websites now have Google Analytics and many have the Facebook Pixel stuff. So you, you're getting tracked still. And there's waste, they aggregate all that data from
00:19:19
Speaker
hits to websites so they can still profile you and target you with ads and stuff like that. So there now are better
00:19:33
Speaker
browser extensions and plugins and stuff like that, that will block those scripts for Google Analytics and various other tracking and analytics scripts. So look into those. Not hard. But again, Brave does a lot of this stuff. I actually can't really, I haven't really deeply looked into what it does, but it does block. Here's what it does. It blocks trackers and ads.
00:19:59
Speaker
You can set it to block scripts, block fingerprinting, block cross-site cookies. These are cookies that multiple sites use. This is how you get profiled. You go to one website, look at jackets or whatever, and then you go to another website and you get Google AdSense for those jackets and stuff like that. Plenty of options to help with that.
Switching to ProtonMail and ProtonDrive
00:20:27
Speaker
Next up, I'm going to talk about Gmail. Oh my God. This just really grinds my gears. It's the people that still using Gmail, which I know is probably most of the world, but even like guys, conspiracy researchers, guys that are really respect for their work and stuff like that. I, you know, they're doing amazing work and then I see they're still using freaking Gmail.
00:20:50
Speaker
grinds my gears to no end. Listen, Gmail, I know it's a great app, but proton mail is what I use. I've been using that for, geez, I want to say,
00:21:06
Speaker
four years now, maybe more. So I started using it. It took me about a year to fully transfer over all my bills and stuff like that, subscriptions. So it does take time. But look, go to protonmail.com.
00:21:22
Speaker
You can get a free account and it will be at protonmail.com and then slowly start. Next time you need to sign up for a service, use that as your email. And then next time we get like a, an email from, let's say from electricity company, every time you get a new email or you can do it every second month, you know, this, this, basically every time you get an email to the Gmail,
00:21:50
Speaker
Take that opportunity as a reminder all I need to change this one go and click login if it's nice and quick And then move it off the proton right it takes a while. No nobody can do this in a day. I'm fairly confident of that unless you have like five things that you're subscribed to but if you start today and
00:22:12
Speaker
over the next few months to a year, you can completely move over to proton mail. And here's what you can also do. And this is what I do for five literally do the listen, five euro a month, five euro. Okay, you get to use your own domain. And you get five email addresses. So let's say you create a domain, your first name,
00:22:38
Speaker
yourlastname.com so joeblow.com for five year a month with protonmail you will be able to have your email now be instead of joeblow at gmail.com or joeblow 765 million 522 at gmail.com you will be joe at joeblow.com and you get five of those you can be
00:23:08
Speaker
joe at joeblow.com. You can be high at joeblow.com. You can be inquiries, whatever you can use for your small business, your site hustle. It's awesome. And with ProtonMail, you get secure storage.
00:23:22
Speaker
And they have now, they recently got the calendar working and have a VPN. So there's a ton of cool products to help you improve your privacy. Jesus, I forgot to write down to talk about a VPN. I'll cover that quickly at the end. So that's protonmail.com and your emails are encrypted on their servers. Now, whether or not
00:23:46
Speaker
proton mail or a honeypot for all the dissidents and whatever to use it it's hard to say but they at least the on their servers your stuff is encrypted so theoretically that nobody can read it right
00:24:05
Speaker
Anyway, I'll continue. Check it out. ProtonMail is super awesome. Lots of people are already using it. People that, you know, are awake to the scam. Google Drive and Dropbox and this Office 365. Alternatives to that, actually, I already mentioned it. ProtonMail also has ProtonDrive now, so you can use that. Boom. Easy.
00:24:29
Speaker
One that for me is quite an important app is Google Translate. I really use that quite often and it, I'll tell you, it's a great app, but there's an, I believe equally great of an app called Depot. So D E E P L depot.com. I believe. Yeah. If you just search for Depot.
00:24:58
Speaker
It works really well. You just paste in the text, it detects the language, boom. It works really well. In fact, on my Graphene OS phone, if I select in the browser, if I select text, the context menu allows me to directly open it in Depot's app that I have installed and it translates in a second. And fun fact, the Depot app,
00:25:26
Speaker
in the Aurora store that I was talking about earlier has no trackers. That's why I haven't have it installed. So super these guys are super cool. No trackers. Next.
00:25:41
Speaker
Microsoft Office and Google's suite of tools. They're awesome. Again, like Office, the Office app, Microsoft Office app, desktop app, they're pretty good now. It took them a couple of decades, but they're decent now. They're really useful. And Google's online suite, very good. I have used it. So yeah.
00:26:05
Speaker
There are alternatives search for them for your computer for like for let's say if you have if you get one to Linux or you continue using Windows you can get open office and Libre office. So these are two options again, not as good not as polished but they do the job for most things.
00:26:29
Speaker
So there you go. The other thing, so I just wrote down, let me cover. So we covered browsers, but we also need to talk about search engines. Now, a lot of people just use Google and when you go to your browser settings, you can choose other options, right? So a couple of options like DuckDuckGo, not sure about these guys anymore.
00:26:54
Speaker
I still use them a little bit, but my my go to is pre search. And there's a couple of others. I forgot the name of them right now. But pre search is what I use. They're privacy centric. But point is, stop freaking using Google. It just really pisses me off. People are like, they get a new phone, they log in with their same email address. So
00:27:22
Speaker
You know Joe blow at gmail.com and then every they're constantly logged into their All their devices so it's it's just profiling every single thing you do They got an amazing profile of you to know you better than your spouse your mother and yourself you know, they know you better than you know yourself and
00:27:43
Speaker
Then they search for everything on Google. So it's constantly aggregated. Then they're logged into YouTube and they're searches, you know, like why, why are you giving away all your information? Is it not valuable? Shouldn't it cost something? Like if people used to pay or still pay good money to survey people, like there's survey companies that businesses pay good money for those
00:28:09
Speaker
companies to do research by calling people up and surveying them or their interests and likes. Now, Google are getting this data for free by providing you a service, you know, or an app, and they're selling all this data to every time Dick and Harry, including governments, including foreign governments, right? That basically the highest bidder or number of bidders, not even the highest bidder, whoever will give them money, you know, that's not good. That's not, that's not okay.
Enhancing Privacy with VPNs
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, VPN, virtual private network is another thing you can get. They're quite cheap.
00:28:49
Speaker
PIA is one, Proton has one, there's a few, research them. They cost a few bucks a month, like 60, 70 euro a year, or dollars, whatever. So that's like a few bucks, six, seven bucks, the price of a couple of coffees or whatever, or a beer or two. So that's another way to
00:29:13
Speaker
Increase your privacy and there are some of them you can you can like pia Private internet access you can install that on ten devices so your whole family your phone your desktop computer your laptop your Tablet they can all have
00:29:34
Speaker
virtual private network. So then your IP address is obfuscated from when you browse the internet, they're not tracking everything you do and associated to your specific IP address. So look into that if you haven't yet. And last, I'll cover because I really do have to go half an hour. That's what I wanted to keep it at.
Balancing Utility and Privacy on YouTube
00:29:55
Speaker
Last but definitely not least, I will cover YouTube. I'll tell you this
00:30:01
Speaker
YouTube is awesome. And as much as Google or bastards of the highest order, YouTube is an awesome app. They can find so much information there, right? Here's what I do. I'll tell you what I do. I use, there's three apps that you can get from the fDroid
00:30:22
Speaker
Oh, open source. It's like a platform to download apps. You can download it on your Android device even today. And it works obviously with Graphene OS, which I should say is a derivative of Android. So it has that same feel as Android. So there's three apps. There's one called Newpipe.
00:30:47
Speaker
another one called libritube and another one called skytube and these and i'm sure there's others but these are the ones i've used and use
00:30:55
Speaker
So I started, basically they kind of parse YouTube. So they look and feel like a video app, similar to YouTube in many ways. You search, you subscribe to channels, and you watch videos and stuff like that. But it's through this app, not through YouTube. So they kind of get it off of YouTube and they parse it. And YouTube is not tracking you, you don't have to log in, blah, blah, blah.
00:31:21
Speaker
So new pipe was great. I used that for months and months and months, but then it suddenly broke the guy. Cause it's like usually one or two guys or whatever building these things. And they're awesome. But like if, if YouTube changes something and the guy's like busy with other projects and he doesn't have time to fix it, for example, new pipe, something happened.
00:31:43
Speaker
And then the video stopped playing, the playback stopped. And he fixed it a month later or something. It worked for a while and it broke again. So now it's not loading the feed of the channels I'm subscribed to. So it sucks because Newpipe was working great. You could create playlists. And the best part, you could just download videos. I could download a ton of tutorials and
00:32:08
Speaker
stuff about like woodworking that I want to like stuff like I want to do and you know it's gonna have the videos now I can don't even need to have internet in my garage to to watch so it's really awesome but yeah now it's all working so there that made me look for a couple more apps that you can by the way you can get these apps
00:32:34
Speaker
even on your Android phone. So if you do some of these things, it will be better than doing none of them, right? Get LibreOffice for your instead of Microsoft Word and Excel, and then you get LibreTube or SkyTube as an alternative to YouTube now. Get Brave Browser instead of Chrome Edge or Safari. So there's Depot Translate instead of Google Translate.
00:32:58
Speaker
proton instead of gmod there's a ton of shit you can do without going whole hog and you don't have to even install linux ubuntu you don't have to get a de-googled phone but do something man like do something every week or every month just decouple yourself from your enslaver they this is where it's hitting otherwise anyway
00:33:20
Speaker
LiberTube was pretty shit. It was crashing on me. But I persevered. At one point, I was even using the web YouTube just to watch some things because the app was working so bad. But anyway, the guy did an update recently. Now it's working much better, not crashing and loading everything really well. And SkyTube is another one that's also like a YouTube parsing sort of app. Really good.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. These are the big things at least that I could quickly, I just threw this list together yesterday or the day before, I wanted to quickly talk about it. There's so many things you can do. You don't have to just accept it.
Taking Incremental Steps Towards Privacy
00:34:04
Speaker
If you want to accept it, that's totally fine. But chances are, if you are listening to this, you want
00:34:12
Speaker
You want a little bit you want to decouple yourself a little bit because we think that's that's all there is These are the only options left to right one or two Apple or freaking Android or Windows or Mac it's always Trump or Hillary or
00:34:36
Speaker
a pedophile or a murderer. No, God damn it. You have a choice, you have the power, and it's not that hard. It's not hard. You just have to do a little bit. You don't have to do it all in one day.
00:34:50
Speaker
No, I didn't do it in one day. He, it took me months and months and months. But, uh, the important thing is to start like, look, what to do, what to do now, if you're at the computer or even if you're on your phone, whatever, download proton mail, create an account, it's free. It takes five minutes, less than five minutes. If you're at the computer.
00:35:18
Speaker
just log in and register or go to LibreOffice and download or OpenOffice and download and install it. Now you have something to use instead of Word, Microsoft Word. It's that simple or
00:35:34
Speaker
I mean, look, or download a VPN app, like the Proton VPN is free. There you go, boom. You can use the same account, same email to use the Proton email or the VPN and that's it.
00:35:50
Speaker
You are set with that. So yeah, there you go. Something to get you started. Thanks for tuning into Solutions Talk on the Connecting Minds podcast. I will talk to you soon.