Peace and data security be upon you all, people.

These are the Google services I added under 'My Filters'. More information on my German-language Codeberg website:

https://aurora-shine.codeberg.page/no-google-track/uBlock-Origin.html"

||googleapis.com^$important

||gstatic.com^$important

||google-analytics.com^$important

||googletagmanager.com^$important

||www.google.com^$important

||youtube.com^$important

||ytimg.com^$important

||googlevideo.com^$important

||googlesyndication.com^$important

||doubleclick.net^$important

||googleadservices.com^$important

||googleads.g.doubleclick.net^$important

||pagead2.googlesyndication.com^$important

||fonts.gstatic.com^$important

||apis.google.com^$important

By @AuroraShine@lemmy.ml

Google wants its AI to see all the photos of "you and your loved ones." Billions of users must now decide.

--

Kinda creepy. I was about to migrate to Immich, fortunately I'm not in the US, so I don't get that update yet. It does seem like a lost battle, anyway :( Even if I migrate to a privacy-respecting FOSS solution, my friends, family, acquaintances and random people around me will not (well, some may). I will still be featured in their photos out of my control.

I just had an encounter of the turd kind with a banking app that I want to share.

I'm in the process of migrating to a new degoogled phone (GrapheneOS) and upon installing the app in question via Aurora Store, it gave me an error message, saying it had not been installed from a "trustworthy" source. It would, therefore, refuse to start and tell me to install it from the Play Store. (For anyone curious: it's the Consorsbank app, and the issue is well-known at this point.)

In spite of being on GOS, I was faced with the prospect of

• installing Play Services Framework (sandboxed or not, I don't want that shit)
• installing the Play Store (sandboxed or not, I don't want that shit)
• logging in to the Play Store (I definitely don't want that shit!)

only to run a damn app.

I eventually used USB-debugging and ADB to trick the app into thinking it had been installed from the Play Store.

So even though everything is running fine now, this doesn't feel like a victory. For the first time in a long while, I feel I have come head to head with a piece of tech that was not just maladapted for my janky way of running things and just needed some tinkering. This was outright malicious, refusing operation and trying to force me to use services I want nothing to do with. It only gave me the option to either give in or walk away and stop using their services. Now, I don't mind doing that for non-essential things. I don't have big tech-owned messengers, I don't have social media (save Lemmy) and all the other stuff people these days feel they cannot live without.

Banking, however, is a different kind of beast. Banking is essential. Second factor authentication is usually done via apps these days. And if this kind of thing becomes normal for banking apps, and Google keeps locking down Android so hacks like the above won't be accessible any more, things are looking grim.

Tonight has left me with more questions than answers. Is Android still the 'right' ecosystem? What are the alternatives if this thing becomes more wide-spread? How do we combat this? Put pressure on banks to keep technologies open? Revert to physical TAN generators? (Until those become phased out by banks as well...)

# Push APK file to /data/local/tmp/
adb push app.apk /data/local/tmp/app.apk

# Install APK via package manager (pm).
# Set installer as "com.google.vending", i.e. Google Play Store.
adb shell pm install -i "com.android.vending" -r /data/>local/tmp/app.apk

Author @IratePirate@feddit.org

**

90% of the time right means 10% of the time wrong, huge deal when you deal with billions of queries! **

This is a shoutout to the app QuickTiles and the developer and contributors thereof.

While at first glance it may not seem like a privacy focused app, however, ultimately, improving digital privacy is more often than not a balance between convenience/ease of use and, well, privacy^[There will always be know-it-alls and above-it-alls in the privacy community who trashtalk normies and/or beginners, acting like this and that is never a tradeoff. If you happen to be one of those, think about whether your attitude helps or hampers our efforts.]

I was almost about to let out a big sigh, thinking do I have to learn kotlin and java for this...? and then I found this app. It has some neat "add-ons" for the quick tiles panel on Android systems. Personally, I was looking for a quick setting to enable/disable data saver. This app had a "data usage" tile, which reduces the amount of requires "clicks" from 5 to 2.

This is only the beginning

Google steals people's content through AI summaries, trains off their work and now is looking to rewrite their articles

The good news is that there are legitimate alternatives

SWITCH TODAY!

All resources you need 👇

• Kagi -> For a paid ad-free premium experience
• Ecosia -> Similar experience to Google while supporting a good cause
• Qwant -> Building its own results based in the EU
• DuckDuckGo -> Privacy-focused search

Detailed guide: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/search-engine/

My friend who uses google wants to share their calendar (read-only). I don't use google. How can they do that?

First of all hi all! I am a software engineer and in my free time I develop self-hostable alternative to big tech products (see Jotty and Cr*nmaster for example), been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there's no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do.. pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server and from /c/selfhosted have been testing it fairly successfully and i've been on top of bug fixing). Last BIG thing to do is coming up with a good name for the official release, I'll create a community poll for it and ask opinions on the repo discussion tabs too.

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

By Developer @fccview@lemmy.world

Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone.

So, I just learned about this the very, very hard way. After buying a second hand S10 and finding american ones can't be unlocked, traveling 4 hours to buy another one after much research, much annoyances to unlock it (samsung requires you to be online, which I didn't know) and testing multiple ROMs, I finally read this page more properly https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/beyond1lte/ which says "known quirks: IMS". I thought it was just something like dolby sound.

What it means is that it doesn't suport VoLTE and most currently used phone systems. Samsung made their proprietary mess, unlike most other developers, which means it will probably never have an open source version.

And that applies to ALL modern samsung phones. I had samsung phone before with a custom OS, but didn't realize because VoLTE wasn't mandatory back then. Now it is here in Australia, and many countries. So if you ever plan to buy a samsung phone to degoogle it, know that it won't make phone calls. SMS and mobile data also doesn't work.

I don't know how I missed this. It should be talked more often given how popular samsung is. There should always be a warning "YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO MAKE PHONE CALLS IN THE FUTURE IF YOU CONTINUE".

S10 was the last decent phone ever made (for me). Not too big, SD card, headphone jack (one of the most important things for me), good camera, etc, etc... That's why I was so persistent to find one to degoogle.

So I'm stuck with my amazingly shitty pixel 5 (and other ones are even worse for me). And considering the possibility of a life without smartphones at all, since this is a losing battle. Mainstream doesn't care and evil companies have every incentive to kill freedom. It has been getting really bad and it will just get worse. But anyway... this post is not about this.

Be warned, if you care about freedom don't ever buy samsung again. Not because they are evil (they are), but because you won't be able to make phone calls on your "phone".

OC writeup by @guismo@aussie.zone

Your daily reminder that by supporting Big Tech, you are contributing to the insane wealth disparity.

Rather support smaller businesses, where your money helps create actual jobs and grow the working class.

If you haven't started your journey, please check out: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/

There are so many excellent choices out there that give you a similar or better experience.

Interesting article from a generalist magazine. According to it:

• Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
• Best for Pixel Phones: GrapheneOS
• Best for Non-Pixel Phones: /e/OS
• For the DIY Tinkerer: LineageOS

Like Google Docs, also with permissions for Owner, Editor and Viewer, and can be linked. I know making websites exist but I'm not sure if I could access buying any relevant hardware in my city and idk how to self-host.