Sean's Blog

Google & Co Ejector

December 7, 2020
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Is closed source, centralized, privacy invading software still part of your digital life? Eject now and start using user privacy respecting software. This is a small curated collection of awesome FOSS and privacy respecting services, capable of replacing many popular, centralized, privacy invading software services so you can sleep better at night. Stop feeding giant invasive data kraken like Google and Meta - export your data and delete your accounts to stop feeding them your personal data.

Awesome Software

Software that treats you as a human - respectful.

Messenger

Web Browser:

Firefox, Brave etc. also track their users (with default settings). Test here how trackable your browser is.

Search Engine:

E-Mail Provider:

Global Maps:

ChatBot:

Shared Docs:

  • Fileverse (Code) - end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing, self-hostable
  • Cryptpad (Code) - end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing, self-hostable

File Sync:

  • Syncthing (Code) - decentralized, self-hostable, fast & unix aligned

Calendar / Contacts:

Social Network:

Video Platform:

  • Invidious - privacy respecting YouTube frontend
  • FreeTube - privacy respecting desktop client
  • PeerTube (Code) - decentralized, federated, self-hostable

Music:

Multi-Factor Authenticator:

HTTP(S):

  • IPFS (Code) - decentralized, self-hostable

Source Code:

Mobile OS:

Operating System:

Export All Your Google Data

...using https://takeout.google.com/ (optional for Google Photos: GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper) and delete your account.

Converting Google Docs files to Markdown

  1. Install Pandoc to convert docx to markdown
  2. Change dir to your Google Drive export: Takeout/Drive
  3. Create a lua script named fix_underline_links.lua with this content:
function Link(el)
  local content = el.content
  if #content == 1 and content[1].t == "Underline" then
    content = content[1].content
  end
  return pandoc.Link(content, el.target)
end
  1. Run this bash command to convert:

$ find . -name "*.docx" -type f -exec sh -c 'pandoc "$0" -o "${0%.docx}.md" --extract-media=./images/ --lua-filter=fix_underline_links.lua' {} \;

  1. Remove all docx files: $ find . -type f -name "*.docx" -delete

Export Your Twitter (X) Data

TODO: Replace Instagram

How to remove your data from Zuckerberg and backup it up to host it privacy focused.

Glossary

End-to-end encrypted means your data is en- & decrypted only on your machine, resulting in maximum security with maximum responsibility (password loss equals data loss).

Self-hostable means anyone can run the software by themselves and thus maintain control of their data independently of any central authority.

Decentralized means the software does not need to communicate over the internet with a central server in order to work, instead it is capable of communicating independently via peer-to-peer based networking (very useful when dealing with limited internet availability or censoring governments).

Federated means instances of the software build a so called "fediverse" allowing users to communicate across instances.

More Resources

#tutorial #privacy