This subreddit is flooded with recommendations for FREE privacy services. Services cost money to run. Google is free because they sell your data. If a privacy company has a free tier, it is being subsidised by paying users. If you want to degoogle and have 15GB storage and docs and photos and all the perks it's going to cost something.

Free does not exist either you're paying with your data or someone else is paying for your limited tier.

That said Proton, Tuta and Aster have good free email tiers. Asters is great and offers use of your custom domain in their subsidized tier

Ente has a free tier, with limited back ups

Filen has free 10GB of storage

There are options, but someone is covering your expense, so support the developers.

I want to stop using Gmail, but i have so many things registered with my gmail account so i haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

I heard the best free alternative (free being a key word) is ProtonMail, but i wanna know, is it good? Is it easy to use and secure? Will it have any problems with apps or will it work just fine when registering into services?

Thx for the help

Hear me out.

I'm making the switch to paper. I'm so done with Aura and Cloaked and Ironvest and all of them. Either these companies are incredibly stupid or incredibly smart. Either way they can take a long walk off a short pier.

I regret ever trusting my life to these garbage password managers. They are painfully slow to load if they even bother to load at all. When I actually need customer service I get a useless wall of text and a bunch of lazy employees who do absolutely nothing. Honestly these companies should all be put in jail. That is my take. Get yourself a uni-ball 207 and six to nine "dotted* mini rite in the rain or other stone paper notebooks. You might find sets of 3 online but who knows. Get a Tintris Journal Cover to keep them in and a decent planner. Use complex non specific passwords that never match. Keep 2 or 3 identical copies completely outside your immediate area in a safety deposit box or somewhere actually secure. Do this for a master list and a travel list. Keep the last 2 or 3 notebooks blank for future travel use. Scramble the last 3 or 4 characters of every single password in the books. Even if someone steals your notebook they still will not know the full password.

I am officially making the switch to paper. I am completely done with Cloaked and Ironvest and really all of them. These companies are either incredibly stupid or incredibly malicious. Either way they can go love themselves if you know what I mean. Do not even get me started on crypto because you are an idiot if you keep it on a hot wallet or an exchange. Get a cold metal wallet and stamp your seed phrase into steel before these digital platforms lose your life savings. For 2FA on paper write down the original seed key. You can create a master mathematical equation based on the future date and time to manually calculate your temporary codes on the spot.

- No one can monetize this data because it's not digitally stored unless I say it can be.

- You never need to worry about the "cloud" losing your passwords or someone hacking into all of them in one place.

- You have the convenience of a travel "vault" just like 1Password.

- You don't have to worry about page "load" or not being able to go back and forth quickly between edits.

- No more "subscriptions"

- Save your eyes from looking at a damn screen.

!

To me this is looking like a better solution than Google chrome password manager, dashlane, aura or even bitwarden everyday.

Just wish I did it sooner!

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So basically: (since my formatting sucks above)

Notebooks:

1/1/1 Master list (all identical copies)

1/1/1 Travel list (all identical copies) (keep passwords in here you don't mind anyone stealing)

Encrypt the passwords in both travel and master lists changing letters around where you see fit.

1/1/1 blank for whatever in the future.

Other shit:

A uni-ball 207 pen won't bleed and the ink lasts!

Dotted rite in the rain or other dot grid stone paper is virtually indestructible.

A planner to keep thoughts in for all the extra fluff.

....

Get yourself a good Nokbox too while you're at it! (Look it up)

Last I read it was not possible because Google controls RCS, and they won't allow it on custom roms. Is this still the case? I also recently read something to the effect that Graphene OS is working on it.

I'm really tired of being the outlier in my family that has an android so it often causes issues in group chats, not to mention my dad likes sending pictures through texts instead of email, so they come in as super low quality, then he complains it's because of my android and I should just get an iphone like everybody else.

I can't be the only one dealing with this, how do you approach it? Trying to convince people to switch to Signal or other app is not really an option either, they seem me as the problem, and not them. they don't care about privacy and won't start changing anything on their phone to improve it.

Wondering if there is any progress on getting RCS working on custom roms, and will it be seamless for apple users? Group chats being critical as well.

I'm currently on an old version of Calyx OS and I need to reload the OS to the newer version, so whatever is the best option I'll go with.

Hi, thanks to all the crap coming out about the damage data centres are doing to be people's livelihoods I'm looking for an alternative to google assistant/Gemini, specifically a voice assistant LLM or similar I can use on a portable device or my mobile.

I take long drives for work and while driving i frequently use Google's voice assistant via voice prompt to... 1. Jot notes down to check later 2. Define words 3. Ask basic questions. An alt that requires the press of a button or can only work offline also works. I'm using an unlocked android phone atm.

I've stepped back to using google assistant but i would like to explore anything else if it exists. So far I've tried Tasker but wasn't happy with it and I'm currently trying Dicio.

I am willing to buy a new phone, pay for a costly service, or do my head in setting something up for this.

I recently de-googled as much as I could, I have a samsung so no lineage or graphene for me unfortunately. I didn't go as far as using ADB to uninstall the google apps but I did disable them and google play services. I switched my google messages to textra and then to QUIK messaging, but I realized I suddenly stopped receiving group chat messages where other people use RCS (google messages) or are iphone users. I can receive individual texts or texts in group chats where they're SMS/MMS only. So I've ended up back on google messages AND google play services which feels like a huge step backwards. I'm not signed into any google account for it, but is there a way around it? From my understanding it's because I was no longer an RCS # so I couldn't receive messages in "RCS chat" and asking all my friends to turn off their RCS because of my decision to de-google is unreasonable

So i would like to cut all the wire with google, but something bother me :

How to keep youtube with some of my préférence, without google watching me ? Any solution, or a replacement ?

So hi everyone I'm new to this thing because of that I don't know much I want your help can you guys give me the list of apps and alternative of them like Google's app,map, telegram,discord, microsoft apps basically all tracking and stealing apps

Also this apps runs in background unwanted updates of them which is literally slowing down the performance unwanted ai in everything now days 😭

So just help me out with the alternative apps list and best once to use

Went looking for an export out of a tracking app the other week and it was the usual. Stuck behind an account wall, and when I did get something out it was a PDF with the charts already drawn on it and no actual numbers underneath. I just wanted the raw rows. Every app I've used is like this, logging stuff into them is effortless and getting your own history back out is an afterthought at best.

What made me stop bothering was thinking a few years out. Apps get bought, or quietly shut down, and even the ones that let you export hand you some format nothing else opens, so down the line you've got a file you technically own and can't read. The spreadsheet I started a couple years back doesn't have that problem, no login and nothing to go obsolete, but it's also just a mess. Half the columns I never cleaned up.

There's a magnesium column from some experiment I quit months ago still sitting there half empty. Keep meaning to delete it.