Welcome to /r/DeGoogle!

If you're on the new reddit, please check out our rules in the sidebar or use the following link https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/about/rules/

Ever seen some information on the web where you thought.. "That should not be public, that shouldn't be visible. How do they know that?!" That's what we're concerned with, we're /r/DeGoogle and want to keep personal information just that.. Personal. Over the years many companies have proven to take more data on users than necessary and in turn save and potentially leak that data. Many times it is 'unintentional', but once the leak happens, personal data is out there for the world wide web to access. Data breaches happen quite often Many breaches happen behind closed doors and might never be released to the public, here is a list of over 40 known breaches of 2020. That list includes Tmobile, Facebook, Nintendo, GoDaddy, Zoom, Microsoft, health care providers, pharmacies and more.

Why should I care?

Do you act the same in public vs in private?

Once your data is out there, you no longer have control over it. It was said best during this Ted Talk by Glenn Greenwald - Why Privacy Matters - Peertube Link Secondary Peertube Link

From Glenn Greenwald's Ted Talk, "You're giving up your rights. Your saying hey, 'I don't think I'm going to need them so I'm just going to trust that, Let's get rid of them it doesn't matter. These guys are going to do the right thing'. Your rights matter because you never know when your going to need them.

"People should be able to pick up the phone and call their family. People should be able to send a text message to their loved one. People should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering how these events are going to look.. To an agent of the government, possibly not even your government. Years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions. We have a right to privacy."

Google: a walk down privacy lane

Ted Talk - Edward Snowden, Here's how we take back the internet

To start, google is one of the digital advertising companies. PDF Link to a study done on: Google Data Collection by Professor Douglas C. Schmidt

Here are Richard Stallman's reasons not to use Google  

A few highlights are

Nonfree Software Required, Closed Source. What's going on behind the scenes? Where do they send our data, what else do they use it for?

Surveillance. Google is everywhere on the web. Ever get annoyed by clicking on pictures of buses, signs, crosswalks, etc in those ReCaptchas? That's helping Google's AI learn. They track mouse movements, typing, response time, and ping your captcha box to determine your location.

Source1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5

Google also records any voice data given by users from Google Voice to text, nest, Google Home and many others. It was discovered that Google's nest listens. If you were logged in, you can find all recordings from voice to text here

Just take a look at the following links to see what type of data Google may have and store about you;

Note: in Google Takeout you will notice they still saved any long supposedly deleted emails from your account.

https://google.com/takeout

https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions

http://www.google.com/settings/ads/

Google is not the only one doing such things. Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, PayPal, Microsoft and many other corporations do very similar.

Article - My phone is spying on me, so I decided to spy on it  

Ted Talks - Finn Myrstad, How Tech Companies Deceive you into giving up your data and privacy Peertube Link

Just a few of previous incidents:

In 2019 by October, there were over 104 data breaches

One Of The Biggest Leaks Ever Exposes Data On 1.2 Billion People

Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales Alt: Source

MasterCard is mining Facebook users' data to get consumer behaviour information it can sell to banks

Wikileaks dump shows CIA could turn smart TVs into listening devices

Samsungs warning our smart tvs record your living room chatter

Lawsuit against 4 Major wireless carriers on selling location data

Smart TV Data Collection

Amazon Alexa - Conversations shared

Verizon Pays $1.4M for selling storing and selling customers' info

6 Million Verizon Customers' Info ''Leaked''

Facebook: Your Personal Info for Sale

Facebook - Some of the data they collect and sell

Smartphone apps Requesting unneeded permissions for data collection

Amazon accused of secretly recording kids with Echo Dot speakers

An Amazon employee might have listened to your Alexa recording

Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users

PayPal reveals it shares customers' data with more than 600 companies

How PayPal Shares your data

How CloudFlare and ReCaptcha are ruining the net, and what to do

Facebook Quizzes: Sharing Your Private Data

Amazon Ring stores your doorbell and home video feeds unencrypted and grants broad "unfettered" access to them

Vizio admins modern tv sets are cheaper because they're spying on you

Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever

Jeremy was fired for refusing fingerprinting at work. His case led to an 'extraordinary' unfair dismissal ruling

Millions of Instagram influencers had their contact data scraped and exposed

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made

You still can’t turn off Windows 10’s built-in spyware

Windows is spyware

Microsoft's Software is Malware

"But why should I care? Why do I need to do anything? I'm happy with X company. I don't care if they release my data."

Why you should care about and defend your privacy

Tech Crunch - Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’

Article - Read this if you have nothing to hide

Compared to the days before the internet, these days everything is readily available. Such as your email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, family & relatives, and much more. How far is far enough?

Majority of these large corporations do not care about users' privacy. Since they don't, there is only one person that can make the change. You are your own data controller.

How to get Started

First determine your threat model, or how far you want to dive. It's okay to change this goal at a later time if you feel you want to go further into repalcements or go lighter if you realize there's that one tool that can't yet be replaced. Everyone will have their own pace, objectives and goals in mind. So while we see some extremists here zero google products, we will see the opposite side of the spectrum with users needing to keep a few google applications. Please be nice to users on all levels and a reminder to all degooglers, that degoogling even a little bit is better than nothing.

After determine how far you want to take this you can look into the next application that applies to you;

Search Engines

One of the best ways to starting freeing yourself is to choose a more user respecting search engine. A few options out there include https://duckduckgo.com, https://www.startpage.com/, https://www.qwant.com/, https://metager.de/en, and https://searx.me/. Please visit our wiki for further details. By using an alternative search engine, you're already loosing the grip google has on you as a user and disallowing google to gain that much more data on you.

Browsers

Another fantastic step is to change browsers if your using chrome as it is run and owned by google. If you don't want to step too far away from chrome, you may want to look into ungoogled chromium, icecat, or (brave*)[https://brave.com/]. Side note for brave: While they have good built in ad blocking, tracker protection, and give users a chrome like feel, they have been discovered to some minor shady activity. Source 1, Source 2. Since discovery, it is said they have fixed this practice and no longer add affiliate links. However they are not to be fully trusted and should be watched closely, the main reason we mention brave is because some folks still consider a good stepping stone as out of the box it has better tracking protections than firefox.

The best browser you can switch to is firefox. To get it privacy oriented, it will involve some add-on installations and about:config page changes. A few basic add-ons that are good to start with are; firefox multi-account containers, invidious redirect, terms of service; didn't read, and ublock origin. Some more advanced add-ons like noscript or umatrix really give good insight of how much google and facebook tracking scripts are really out there on the web. We recommend checking https://privacyguides.org or /r/privacyguides for the latest firefox recommendations. The reason firefox is the most recommended as it is the most configurable and customizable browser option at this point.

Lately we have seen tor recommended more than usual. Please only use tor if you're browsing .onion webpages or if you have a need for the tor network on clearnet. Using tor for everything, ie when it's not essential slows down the tor network for all users. So please don't recommend tor in place of using a VPN and be kind to others, use the proper service for the proper job.

Browser Addons

Above we went over a few different browser add-ons, this section gives a brief summary of what they do and how they may help us.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs that preserve your privacy. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.

Invidous redirect - redirects all YouTube links to Invidous. Previously hooktube-redirect, but changed since hooktube is no longer allowed to use the YouTube API, apparently. Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube without ads and doesn't require a Google account to save subscriptions

Terms of Service; Didn't Read - This extension informs you instantly of your rights online by showing an unintrusive icon in the toolbar. You can click on this icon to get summaries from the Terms of Service; Didn't Read initiative.

Ublock origin - an efficient wide-spectrum content blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.

Noscript (advanced) - The best security you can get in a web browser! Allow potentially malicious web content to run only from sites you trust. Protect yourself against XSS other web security exploits.

Umatrix (advanced) - Point & click to forbid/allow any class of requests made by your browser. Use it to block scripts, iframes, ads, facebook, google, etc.

Email

This may be big for some people, to switch away from gmail/microsoft mail. This is one of the most crucial steps if your in it for the long haul. Services like gmail scan all users emails for tracking, receipts, ad personalization, who you talk to, when you talk to people, attachments, message details, and much more. In combination of email, search, voice to text and tracking scripts across the web companies like google can build a complete file on each individual user. Their likes, dislikes, secrets, hobbies, political stance, preferences, locations, driving habits, moods and much more. It's quite scary to realize how much data they actually store and why they would ever need some of that data.

Two of the most recommended email providers in the privacy community are protonmail /r/protonmail and tutanota /r/tutanota. They both offer free plans as well as upgraded paid plans with additional features.

A few other great alternatives include https://mailbox.org, https://posteo.de/, https://disroot.org/en/services/email, https://startmail.com/, and https://fastmail.com. You may need to test a few to find which provider works best for your usage.

Video Sharing Platform

This may be one of the hardest for most folks. Youtube has been around many years, has amassed a huge library of content and in turn has the largest amount of users of any video sharing service. The best alternative would be to switch into a federated video sharing platform such as peertube. If you still need that youtube content, you can easily import the video into most peertube instances with just the url, use newpipe on android or use invidios on desktop. Both newpipe and invidous retrieve content from google video servers without you having to deal with their UI, tracking, or the need of a google account.

Wrap up

We've talked about a few of the alternatives in browsers, add-ons, email providers, and search engines. But there is much more information out there. You can replace your google maps/waze, cloud storage, note taking apps, fitness trackers, domain registrars, hardware, operating system, google forms, recaptcha, google photos and much more. All of those have google run projects which we should try our best to use an alternative when feasible.

While this guide can be a great starting point, it is not meant to be the end all be all, things change constantly or your preferences may differ from the recommendations above. We have the entire /r/degoogle sub for more research! There's also our wiki, using reddit's search function or if you didn't find your question asked, you can create your own post. Please be sure to check all rules first to ensure your post has all required information. The more the information in your post, the more other degooglers can help you so be sure to give a descriptive title.

Happy DeGoogling to all!

I wanted to also say a quick thank you to all on the moderation team for keeping our sub helpful, clean, and informative /u/IHAVESEEN /u/PiratusInteruptus /u/thisdodobird. And a special thanks to /u/CDr0m for all his hard work in recent days on the style sheets, revamps and other back-end tasks for /r/DeGoogle & /r/Corpfree

Additional helpful resources:

The Complete Privacy and Security Podcast

https://youtube.tracking.exposed/ & https://facebook.tracking.exposed/

https://theytrackyou.com/

https://myshadow.org/

https://privacyheros.io

/r/pihole & https://pi-hole.net - useful for blocking Google and other conglomerate/unwanted domains

An easy way to switch from Google to Nextcloud

F Droid App Store

Aurora Store

Hello fellow Degooglers!

We are growing and reaching more and more people wanting to get Google out of their lives!

We need your help. We are going to be updating the sidebar and the wiki as some of the services are now defunct. Unfortunately, this is the way of the opensource world sometimes.

We want to let the r/degoogle community decide what we should update the sidebar and wiki with. Please remain civil and post your services that you would like to see advised to new degooglers. We prefer opensource projects, but we understand sometimes there are options outside of opensource. We are willing to look but opensource is king and will have priority over closed source recommendations.

You are the reason we are here and we want your choices to be showcased.

Thanks

edit1: Thanks for all the great replies so far! We will leave this post up until this Friday and we will then begin to tabulate all of the recommendations to add to the sidebar and the wiki.

edit2: Thanks for everyone's input. We will all make the world a more privacy secured place together. I will begin sorting through the responses this weekend and start updating the sidebar hopefully this next week. Thanks everyone!

We've had a lot of new DeGooglers come over lately, so the mod team would like to say, Welcome to /r/DeGoogle! Glad to see new users here!

If you're on the new reddit, check out our rules in the sidebar or use this link https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/about/rules/

So you're here, you've heard about /r/DeGoogle, interested, or would like some more information on what we are and what we do. Here's a quick run through of some basics along with a few helpful links:

Why you should care.

How to get started.

Why should I care?

Do you act the same in public vs in private?

Once your data is out there, you no longer have control over it. It was said best during this Ted Talk by Glenn Greenwald - Why Privacy Matters

From Glenn Greenwald's Ted Talk, "You're giving up your rights. Your saying hey, 'I don't think I'm going to need them so I'm just going to trust that, Let's get rid of them it doesn't matter. These guys are going to do the right thing'. Your rights matter because you never know when your going to need them.

"People should be able to pick up the phone and call their family. People should be able to send a text message to their loved one. People should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering how these events are going to look.. To an agent of the government, possibly not even your government. Years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions. We have a right to privacy."

Ted Talk - Edward Snowden, Here's how we take back the internet

To start, google is one of the digital advertising companies. PDF Link to a study done on: Google Data Collection by Professor Douglas C. Schmidt

Here are Richard Stallman's reasons not to use Google  

A few highlights are

Nonfree Software Required, Closed Source. What's going on behind the scenes? Where do they send our data, what else do they use it for?

Surveillance. Google is everywhere on the web. Ever get annoyed by clicking on pictures of buses, signs, crosswalks, etc in those ReCaptchas? That's helping Google's AI learn. They track mouse movements, typing, response time, and ping your captcha box to determine your location.

Source1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5

Google also records any voice data given by users from Google Voice to text, nest, Google Home and many others. It was discovered that Google's nest listens. If you were logged in, you can find all recordings from voice to text here

Just take a look at the following links to see what type of data Google may have and store about you;

Note: in Google Takeout you will notice they still saved any long supposedly deleted emails from your account.

https://google.com/takeout

https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions

http://www.google.com/settings/ads/

Google is not the only one doing such things. Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, PayPal, Microsoft and many other corporations do very similar.

Article - My phone is spying on me, so I decided to spy on it  

Ted Talks - Finn Myrstad, How Tech Companies Deceive you into giving up your data and privacy

Just a few of previous incidents:

In 2019 by October, there were over 104 data breaches

Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales Alt: Source

MasterCard is mining Facebook users' data to get consumer behaviour information it can sell to banks

Wikileaks dump shows CIA could turn smart TVs into listening devices

Samsungs warning our smart tvs record your living room chatter

Lawsuit against 4 Major wireless carriers on selling location data

Smart TV Data Collection

Amazon Alexa - Conversations shared

Verizon Pays $1.4M for selling storing and selling customers' info

6 Million Verizon Customers' Info ''Leaked''

Facebook: Your Personal Info for Sale

Facebook - Some of the data they collect and sell

Smartphone apps Requesting unneeded permissions for data collection

Amazon accused of secretly recording kids with Echo Dot speakers

An Amazon employee might have listened to your Alexa recording

Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users

PayPal reveals it shares customers' data with more than 600 companies

How PayPal Shares your data

How CloudFlare and ReCaptcha are ruining the net, and what to do

Facebook Quizzes: Sharing Your Private Data

Amazon Ring stores your doorbell and home video feeds unencrypted and grants broad "unfettered" access to them

Vizio admins modern tv sets are cheaper because they're spying on you

Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever

Jeremy was fired for refusing fingerprinting at work. His case led to an 'extraordinary' unfair dismissal ruling

Millions of Instagram influencers had their contact data scraped and exposed

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made

You still can’t turn off Windows 10’s built-in spyware

Windows is spyware

Microsoft's Software is Malware

Tech Crunch - Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’  

You may still be skeptical. You say, "Okay, I see the articles you posted.. But why should I care? Why do I need to do anything? I'm happy with X company. I don't care if they release my data."

Have a look at these links if your still on the edge;

Why you should care about and defend your privacy

Article - Read this if you have nothing to hide

Compared to the days before the internet, everything is readily available. Such as your email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and more. How far is far enough?

After seeing what these some of the companies can and do store on their users, it's up to you to decide on moving further. Majority of these large corporations do not care about users' privacy. Since they don't, there is only one person that can begin to make the change.

Check out our wiki for replacements. Don't see it listed? Post a new thread asking the community.

Additional helpful resources:

The Complete Privacy and Security Podcast

https://youtube.tracking.exposed/ & https://facebook.tracking.exposed/

https://theytrackyou.com/

https://myshadow.org/

/r/pihole & https://pi-hole.net - useful for blocking Google and other conglomerate/unwanted domains

What was your last straw? Anything you may have found out recently about your own privacy that has you concerned?

Hello degooglers!

​

Getting google out of our lives is the first and most important goal. The toxicity is not going to help newcomers want to degoogle and that will affect everyone's product and services.

Recently we have received reports of harassment, bullying, brigading, stalking, etc from both sides of a few products and services. Although many users have many different opinions on a subject, product, or service, the conversation should ALWAYS remain civil.

If you want to reply to a post just because you happen to be on the "other team" and see it as better, don't. Make your own post about the product or service that you believe in without calling out the other product or service. Users will be able to search the various posts and weigh the pros and cons themselves. If someone ask for a product or service recommendation, give them a recommendation without trashing another product or service. We will be introducing new tags to help new users sort through the posts.

Getting google out of our lives is the first and most important goal. The toxicity is not going to help newcomers want to degoogle and that will affect everyone's product and services.

If you have a specific question regarding a service or product, look for their respective subreddit first and ask the question in the corresponding community. This will unfortunately remove some traffic to r/degoogle, but it is apparently needed at this juncture.

We are currently trying to confer with affected parties about the issues. There will be new rules implemented shortly in regards.

Getting google out of our lives is the first and most important goal. The toxicity is not going to help newcomers want to degoogle and that will affect everyone's product and services.

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us in Modmail.

Going forward all posts on the sub must include either

A) A cat

or

B) Sundar Pichai

Bonus if you post a picture of a cat and Sundar Pichai. Memes, pictures, photoshopped, anything and everything as long as it is a picture including a cat or Sundar Pichai.

Hay DeGooglers

Time for a quick story. So recently we had this submission(mirror) show up in the mod queue to do with Project Veritas and Google. The submission was a link to a BitChute video. Naturally we (the mods) reviewed the video and deemed that the content was appropriate for /r/degoogle and so we approved the post. However, this was not the case as when we looked at the mod queue the next time, the post was still there. /u/bluejaymordecai made this test submission to see if it was that particular link that was dodgy or if there was a wider site problem with BitChute links. Our suspicions were confirmed when the same happened to /u/bluejaymordecai's submission in that it was in the mod queue but could not be approved by us mods. This lead me to make this submission to /r/bugs to ask the admins what was happening with BitChute links. We have not had an admin response yet but /u/timawesomeness who is an esteemed colleague of mine from /r/slideforreddit explained to me that their is a tiering system for all posts on Reddit. BitChute is in tier 4 as it apparently has a large mass of copyrighted material hosted on it. (How this is any different from YouTube, I don't know.) You can read more about the system in the /r/bugs post above but the point is this. We as mods, can no longer approve submissions linking to BitChute so we suggest that when posting videos online you use PeerTube. PeerTube is a federated video hosting platform that uses peer-to-peer streaming between instances and users to create a reliant and efficient online federated video platform. So yeah. Hope that helps clear up a few things. Just so you know, the /r/degoogle mod team is not affiliated with PeerTube or any instance of it. I just like that idea and think it has potential.

Also, I'm a full mod now so that's pretty cool!

Have an amazing day!

↳ T54   ^{/u/tensouder54}

P.S. (Post Script) Please feel free to correct my spelling/grammar/formatting as I am dyslexic and so am not good at these things.

Edit 1: Fixed typos and added explanation as to why BitChute is in tier 4.

Hi, folks. This is the thread to discuss the API protest. I strongly encourage people to talk about their decisions here: a signed vote carries more weight than an unsigned one.

​

To vote directly, please visit the voting thread here

​

NOTE: anybody who wants to comment can comment, but if I don't recognize your name, I will be checking your post/comment history to see whether you've actually participated here, and for those of you who have never contributed at all, I will be pointing that out.

Degooglers:

We originally planned to go dark only for Monday and Tuesday in support of the protest against Reddit's API price changes, which seem crafted deliberately to destroy third-party clients. But Reddit CEO Steve Huffman raised the stakes considerably when he distributed a memo which included the following text:

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.

Personally, I probably wouldn't have given much attention to the API price increase until I realized how it affects the disabled communities. I am disabled myself and I, like millions of others, know how it feels like to be marginalized in the name of profits or inconvenience to the powers that be.

This underhanded methods (raising "prices" to the point that they're utterly unaffordable) and then the characterizing widespread user protest as "noise" to ignore until it "blows over" has hardened my resolve to see this to the end. I don't intend on backing down.

However, I don't own this sub. I love it, I contribute to it, and I moderate it, but I don't own it. We all, as /r/degoogle contributors, own the sub collectively. So we're opened up again in Restricted mode for 24 hours (2023-06-17 01:00 to 2023-06-18 01:00, GMT+3) to get direct community input.

I sincerely hope that Reddit's management publicly acknowledges its debt to Reddit's users and starts taking their issues seriously, in which case we can simply reopen the sub and go back to business as usual. But it seems foolish to ignore the possibility that Reddit management will continue doubling down, so it's time to start talking about long term options.

Below, you'll find comments with our options moving forward, so long as Reddit management continues to ignore and belittle widespread user protest:

• Return to blackout (Private mode) indefinitely
• Remain in Restricted mode (no new posts) indefinitely
• Reopen r/degoogle immediately
• Close the sub permanently, and create a new home for the community elsewhere

Please upvote whichever option(s) you prefer—and/or you may also use downvotes to express disapproval of options you want no part of. If you feel strongly about the topic, please talk about your decision in the talk thread here as well: your comment in the talk thread is, essentially, a "signed" vote, and the opinions of folks who have been active in the sub mean the most.

Regardless of what happens with the sub, I will not personally continue to moderate or participate if Reddit management stays as arrogant as it is right now. My days as a moderator and user of this platform will come to a permanent end along with many others who have decided on the same.

Thank you all.

Good Morning DeGooglers!

We've seen a lot of off-topic or close to DeGoogle/DeConglomerate topics that may not fit here.

We decided it was best to go back to previous rules and strictly have all posts in /r/Degoogle specifically regarding DeGoogling. Going forward anything not in the following categories may be removed.

This includes the following;

• How to DeGoogle
• Google Replacements
• DeGoogling News
• DeGoogling Resources
• DeGoogling Discussions
• DeGoogling Help needed
• DeGoogling Tutorials
• DeGoogling Questions

We have created a new sister sub /r/CorpFree which is for anything that may not belong in /r/DeGoogle.

/r/CorpFree is for intrusive or invasive companies/corporations/conglomerates. Posts can be regarding similar to DeGoogle such as finding replacements, asking for help going CorpFree, discussions, tutorials, and questions.

Example; Looking for a Facebook or Microsoft replacement? /r/CorpFree is the place to ask and discuss.

Example 2: Huawei, Open Source Programs, Apple, etc discussions or questions

On to our next section! Recently, we've had to say goodbye to one of our mods for their own personal reasons.

Thank you for your hard work /u/allnutty! You will be missed and certainly are welcome back anytime.

That being said, we are in search of a new mod, for /r/CorpFree and/or /r/Degoogle. If interested reply here or mod message us why you want to join, why you think you will be a good fit and links to any recent topics/posts you've created in /r/DeGoogle. This decision will be made by everyone on the modteam and will not be done hastily. So it may or may not take some time before we name a new addition to the team.

Enjoy DeGoogling!

Good Morning DeGooglers!

After seeing the feedback from everyone in the comments and messages we've decided to change what we originally stated a day ago here: https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/bzqiub

The new guidelines for posts in DeGoogle allows;

• How to DeGoogle
• Google Replacements
• DeGoogling News
• DeGoogling Resources
• DeGoogling Discussions
• DeGoogling Help needed
• DeGoogling Tutorials
• DeGoogling Questions
• DeGoogling Progress
• News Articles / Information updates relating to practices on conglomerates/invasive companies.
  • This includes; news on facebook, apple, microsoft, verizon, amazon, paypal, etc. Companies that have cornered a market to work in their favor while abusing the power. Examples of an allowed article:
  • https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/privacy-technology/how-google-and-amazon-are-spying-you
  • https://www.naturalnews.com/046009_Amazon_Fire_TV_audio_surveillance_perfect_spying_device.html
  • https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/google-play-store-ad-fraud-du-group-baidu
  • https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/25/17160944/facebook-call-history-sms-data-collection-android

Google includes all of the subsidiaries such as youtube, google portions of andorid, google maps, google's waze, anything that falls under the alphabet inc umbrella.

What is not allowed; discussions or questions on the above mentioned companies, application alternatives that are not related to google, advertising alternative services for non google products, news not relating to practices on invasive companies, etc.

For this content, there is already /r/Privacy and while we do want to allow more in /r/DeGoogle. We want DeGooglers to feel this place as it's own unique group and not just a clone of a larger subreddit or a copycat. We will still be keeping open /r/CorpFree which has much broader allocations of what's allowed as /r/CorpFree is not just for google alone.

We look forward to DeGoogling with you all along with seeing the mod applications come in. Keep them coming!

Original Post:

We've seen a lot of off-topic or close to DeGoogle/DeConglomerate topics that may not fit here.

We decided it was best to go back to previous rules and strictly have all posts in /r/Degoogle specifically regarding DeGoogling. Going forward anything not in the following categories may be removed.

This includes the following;

• How to DeGoogle
• Google Replacements
• DeGoogling News
• DeGoogling Resources
• DeGoogling Discussions
• DeGoogling Help needed
• DeGoogling Tutorials
• DeGoogling Questions

We have created a new sister sub /r/CorpFree which is for anything that may not belong in /r/DeGoogle.

/r/CorpFree is for intrusive or invasive companies/corporations/conglomerates. Posts can be regarding similar to DeGoogle such as finding replacements, asking for help going CorpFree, discussions, tutorials, and questions.

Example; Looking for a Facebook or Microsoft replacement? /r/CorpFree is the place to ask and discuss.

Example 2: Huawei, Open Source Programs, Apple, etc discussions or questions

On to our next section! Recently, we've had to say goodbye to one of our mods for their own personal reasons.

Thank you for your hard work /u/allnutty! You will be missed and certainly are welcome back anytime.

That being said, we are in search of a new mod, for /r/CorpFree and/or /r/Degoogle. If interested reply here or mod message us why you want to join, why you think you will be a good fit and links to any recent topics/posts you've created in /r/DeGoogle. This decision will be made by everyone on the modteam and will not be done hastily. So it may or may not take some time before we name a new addition to the team.

Enjoy DeGoogling!