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It feels weird coming from LTT.
A surprise for sure, but a welcome one.
In what way? There are tech savvy people on the team, so obviously many of them are well aware of the privacy concerns. Besides, they don’t live in a vacuum, so they see the same posts and videos we do.
Probably they just noticed that now is the right time to talk about this.
I agree and I still have my doubts that he would personally use many of these alternatives. Still, we should not gatekeep the message. Anyone this big discussing the positives of de-googling will certainly push it further into mainstream society.
That’s besides the point. LTT is a corporation at this point so they’ll use whatever corporations use. The video provided genuine value for its audience so they deserve praise for that.
They did a video about alternatives to Adobe a while back. And while they generally liked and praised programs such as Affinity, they did conclude that as a company, even minor losses in productivity (e.g. for their editors) quickly add up.
So yeah, it would not be the first time they present and praise alternatives even of they don’t end up using them.
The decision to use Adobe suite is more likely to be a company wide decision. Part of Adobe suite lock-in is also familiarity making things faster. By promoting others, that may help future generations avoid at least part of the problem.
Google services may be much more piecemeal. Even if the boss personally happens to think there’s a productivity benefit to using a given search engine, it would be unusual to block others.
Practicing what you preach is sometimes important, but I’m not sure how much it bears on these issues. A single company eschewing either won’t make a difference. Getting the public to slowly consider alternatives may.
I thought I should comment to highlight that LTT has not improved and has doubled down in their attempts to cover over sexual harassment in recent days putting out the following statement earlier in the week:-
There were a series of accusations about our company last August from a former employee. Immediately following these accusations, LMG hired Roper Greyell - a large Vancouver-based law firm specializing in labor and employment law, to conduct a third-party investigation. Their website describes them as “one of the largest employment and labour law firms in Western Canada.” They work with both private and public sector employers.
To ensure a fair investigation, LMG did not comment or publicly release any data and asked our team members to do the same. Now that the investigation is complete, we’re able to provide a summary of the findings.
The investigation found that:
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Claims of bullying and harassment were not substantiated.
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Allegations that sexual harassment were ignored or not addressed were false.
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Any concerns that were raised were investigated. Furthermore, from reviewing our history, the investigator is confident that if any other concerns had been raised, we would have investigated them.
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There was no evidence of “abuse of power” or retaliation. The individual involved may not have agreed with our decisions or performance feedback, but our actions were for legitimate work-related purposes, and our business reasons were valid.
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Allegations of process errors and miscommunication while onboarding this individual were partially substantiated, but the investigator found ample documentary evidence of LMG working to rectify the errors and the individual being treated generously and respectfully. When they had questions, they were responded to and addressed.
In summary, as confirmed by the investigation, the allegations made against the team were largely unfounded, misleading, and unfair.
With all of that said, in the spirit of ongoing improvement, the investigator shared their general recommendation that fast-growing workplaces should invest in continuing professional development. The investigator encouraged us to provide further training to our team about how to raise concerns to reinforce our existing workplace policies.
Prior to receiving this report, LMG solicited anonymous feedback from the team in an effort to ensure there was no unreported bullying and harassment and hosted a training session which reiterated our workplace policies and reinforced our reporting structure. LMG will continue to assess ongoing continuing education for our team.
At this time, we feel our case for a defamation suit would be very strong; however, our deepest wish is to simply put all of this behind us. We hope that will be the case, given the investigator’s clear findings that the allegations made online were misrepresentations of what actually occurred. We will continue to assess if there is persistent reputational damage or further defamation.
This doesn’t mean our company is perfect and our journey is over. We are continuously learning and trying to do better. Thank you all for being part of our community.
As you can see, they hired an outside legal firm to declare that they did nothing wrong in enabling said sexual harassment because there wasn’t a paper trail, despite them admitting that the victim was told to talk it out with the abuser.
They followed up by threatening the victim with a lawsuit for continuing to speak out.
I feel that, as a woman and a victim of sexual harassment myself, its only fair that I must stand by other women that the patriarchy attempts to silence and ensure that those who wish to uphold a safe space for sexual harassment are held to account and not given an unopposed platform.
As you can see, they hired an outside legal firm to declare that they did nothing wrong in enabling said sexual harassment because there wasn’t a paper trail, despite them admitting that the victim was told to talk it out with the abuser.
You are assuming intent, and ignoring the false statements made. What I see is them hiring a third party to do an investigation, exactly what the public called for. Would you rather the former employee pay for it?
They followed up by threatening the victim with a lawsuit for continuing to speak out.
There was no threat, only a statement of fact that the evidence was strong enough for a defamation case, and that they did not wish do go down that path.
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I appreciated his comparison charts for various alternatives and the features they offered. I’m going to check out Ente and Stingle for self-hosted photo backup.
posts on youtube
Well, you’re sure to reach tons of Google users there
Where else would he post it, that would not be preaching to the choir?
LTT has social media accounts everywhere. They could’ve uploaded to floatplane and posted that link instead.
Not that I blame him for using YouTube but it’s the same chicken and egg problem we’ve had for awhile. No one uses alternatives because the creators aren’t there, and they’re not there because viewers aren’t either.
I’m sure this was posted to floatplane though, considering they upload all of their videos there
For the lazy like myself
This video is about how to degoogle your life, czyli [in Polish] to minimize your reliance on Google products and services.
In the first part of the video, the speaker discusses why you might want to degoogle your life. They mention that Google collects a lot of data on its users, and that this data is used to target ads and to train machine learning algorithms. The speaker also argues that Google’s services are becoming less and less usable.
The speaker then provides a number of alternatives to Google products and services. Here are a few examples:
- Search engines: DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia, Brave Search
- Email: Proton, Tuta
- Photo backup: Ente, Stingle, PhotoSync, Image
- DNS: Quad9, NextDNS, Cloudflare
The speaker acknowledges that there are many other alternatives available, and that this is just a starting point. They also recommend checking out the sponsor of the video, Pulseway, which is a monitoring and management software.
The video ends with a call to action, encouraging viewers to watch part two of the series.
Uhm.
Thanks, AI?
See this should be what AI does. Not screenshoting my activities.
Google’s 😂
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al whoa thats neat! I often wish a YouTube video were just a blog post or forum thread … how can I do something like this myself?
I used Google Gemini. Just asked it to summarise and pasted the link and voila.
Oh the irony!
Google services I still use before being unGoogled:
- Voice: I have to make like 1 or 2 calls within the US a year & not worth a SIM
- Maps: for when OSM isn’t cutting it & I’ll contribute the missing data after I found it
- Translate: for when Yandex Translate doesn’t cut it (everything ‘free’ only works with European languages)
- YouTube: no real alternative here that isn’t limited to just a piece of its scope, but viewed thru Librewolf+uBlock Origin+SponsorBlock or PipePipe
… and the last one is just basically every employer I have worked with puts all their company data on Google & it can’t really be avoided with them >:(
Can’t help but mention Yandex is 100% as evil as Google is.
Out of popular choices, DeepL is probably least evil. Reverso is often a nice pick, too, especially Reverso Context.
There are also things like LibreTranslate, though the quality is generally lower (but can absolutely come in handy for simpler requests)
I want to get off Google photos, but I also don’t want to pay a subscription. And I don’t really want to self host. A pay once service I’d accept, but I haven’t seen one with an extremely cursory search. I don’t need any fancy features. Just store the photos, let me see them online, and let me put them in albums.
If its free, then you are the product. Can’t really expect to switch to another free product and expect any form of privacy. You could try Microsoft’s One Drive but it isn’t much different. I’ve been recommending Ente Photos which is a subscription but it’s worth it for me. About 3 or 4 bucks a month for 50GB.
If its free, then you are the product
Right. I get that. But I’d like to just pay once. I don’t like subscriptions. But since file storage has ongoing costs, it seems unlikely anyone would offer a pay-once-and-we’ll-host-your-files.
There is pcloud and filen.io both have lifetime plans but I’m not sure how close you can get to something like Google Photos or Ente Photos with these providers.
Brave has an openly homophobic founder, it’s weird to me that they’d mention the crypto issues and not this
Yes, I did it oftn. But main reason to avoid Brave is the somewhat fishy Crypto Policy and the betrayal of users in the past, redirecting searches to related crypto companies, which shows dubious business ethics regarding the user. For me Brave is simply not trustworth.
My main issue with it is the fact that the company has shown it is willing to cross boundaries.
Much better reasons than insinuating a piece of software is homophobic.
Homophobic the CEO Eich, but for the user it’s more important the ethics of the company, questionable in Brave.
And Microsoft has a habit of interfering with democracies and bribing governments. Let’s not pretend any big tech is a saint. The difference between dumb billionaires like Eich and Musk and others is that they have bad PR.
I don’t like Microsoft either and I’m not sure the relevance of you bringing this up, is this trolling?
It’s not trolling. Eich is a scumbag but if you ditch Brave, right now your only real options and Microsoft Bing and Google. And I think MS and Google do way more bad to the world than Eich. How many MS nd Google executives do you think are right wingers donating to anti gay groups? Definitely not zero.
I disagree that those are the only options, even in the video we are commenting on they name some others
who cares
I’ve degoogled apart from:
- Google photos - I have shared storage with my family and I really can’t be doing with sorting out the mess when I cancel my 200GB subscription. I do however back all photos up to my server.
- Pixel phone - I try not use any Google apps/search but the phones are updated regularly and are reasonably good value for money. Other brands have the Google tracking with the OEM tracking on top.
I have half of what you have. Did away with Google Photos and moved to self-hosted Immich. No regrets. My case could be somewhat different though, since I only share my pictures and videos with my wife (almost 1TB between pics and videos).
I’m sold on Pixels, mainly because they are basically the only phones that can be seamlessly deGoogled (the irony).
Give GrapheneOS a go on that Pixel!
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De-google your life when they post on YT, a Google service.
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Get that narcissistic mofo outta here. The Madison situation blew everything over the water.
If they post it on a non-google platform, they only gonna reach people that already don’t use Google…
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