Alternatives to Google

Google has fallen out of favor with many web users, due to their tracking and sale of user data,^[1] and liberal activism and polices.^[2] This article gives some alternatives to their services. In the early 2020s, several bipartisan attempts were made to break up Google's Monopoly.^[3] Ultimately, the courts forced a few concessions from Google,^[4] but decided not to break up the company even though they ruled that it was a monopoly.^[5]^[6]

Search engines

DuckDuckGo - a privacy-focused search engine that says it does to not track users. They also offer "Privacy Essentials" on Firefox and Chrome, and "Privacy browser" on mobile.
Brave Search - Privacy-focused web search provided by Brave.
StartPage - another privacy focused search option
Result Hunter - a search engine that favors conservative results, as opposed to Google which favors liberal results.
Mojeek - a search engine that doesn't track people and uses a proprietary page ranking engine as opposed to PageRank, and is intended to give unbiased search results.
Seek Find - a Christian search engine. Cannot be used for a general search, but a search over the Internet for information from Christian sites.
Worthy Christian Search - A similar Christian search engine.

Email

Tutanota.com - A robust service with paid and free tiers, which offers end-to-end encryption for sending messages, and encrypted mailboxes.
ProtonMail - another service which offers "trust no one" encryption.
Fastmail - a paid, but good service. Friends with DuckDuckGo.

Alternative browsers to Chrome

Mozilla Firefox - uses its own ("Gecko") engine instead of Chromium's "Blink" engine. Best used with a quality ad-blocker, such as uBlock Origin.
Brave - Based on Google Chrome, but with some privacy improvements and an adequate ad blocker built-in. Good for privacy, but enables tracking for Facebook and Twitter by default. Uses Google's Blink engine.
Microsoft Edge - better on power usage than Chrome. Although it is basically Google chrome under Microsoft labeling, some Google trackers seem to have been removed, or replaced with Microsoft trackers. Also includes some UI changes from Microsoft, intended to be a value-add.
Slimbrowser and Slimjet - have built-in ad blockers and don't report back to Google and Chrome. They are versatile and customizable. Slimbrowser originally used the Trident engine (but may have switched to the Firefox engine), and Slimjet uses the blink engine.
SRWare Iron - uses the Blink engine of Chrome. Doesn't report activity history to the publisher or anyone else. Purports to be open source, although they have been inconsistant about actually releasing their source code.
Internet Explorer (discontinued) was a feature-rich browser. Many sites used to work well with this browser, including Yahoo! and Bing. However, it suffered from many security issues over the years, and tended to run slower than the alternatives. Microsoft ended support for IE11 (the last version) in 2020. Many sites no longer support Internet Explorer, especially graphics-intensive sites, and services which require modern DRM support.

Alternatives to Android

iOS for iPhone and iPad - the most popular alternative. Although closed source and collecting/sharing some private data, Apple's default settings are more privacy respecting than Google's.
Ubuntu Touch - open-source, Linux operating system. Not based on Android.^[7]

Android derivatives

Based on Android, but modified from the original Google release, these systems support Android applications, but come with various improvements.

GraphineOS - A hardened Android fork, focused on security and privacy.
LineageOS - Designed to keep older devices supported and usable, this system provides updates for devices which their manufacturers have abandoned, as well as numerous newer devices.
CalyxOS - A privacy focused fork
/e/OS - A "degoogled" system which removes Google's proprietary code, thus reducing privacy invasions.

Abondonware and unsupported options

Windows Phone - arguably more powerful than either Android or iOS at the time, some thought it was a superior option, but Microsoft killed it off in 2017 due to failure to penetrate the market. The latest is Windows 10 Mobile.
Symbian OS - discontinued some time ago, but some think it was good, and it featured Opera.
Blackberry 10 - used a microkernel for better reliability, and also allowed direct filesystem access (unlike Android and iOS), but restricted other actions (unlike Windows and MacOS). Newer blackberry devices now use Android.

Alternatives to Google Drive

Cloud-based

Just like Google Cloud, these services keep a copy of each file on a cloud server, and synchronize that with user devices, as desired.

Sync.com - Functions similarly to dropbox, but offers end-to-end encryption (and thus far superior privacy)
Proton Drive
Mega.io - offers end-to-end encryption
Dropbox - Although not very private, this is at least not known to sell user data to commercial entities
Box.com - good collaborative tools for working with others online

Peer-to-peer synchronization

These services do not utilize cloud storage, instead performing automated synchronization directly from one user device to another.

Syncthing
Resilio Sync

Self-hosted cloud-type services

These services operate from a server which the user sets up. This can be a leased commercial server (such as a VPS), or a spare computer kept at home. The setup process is more complex, and this requires a little ongoing maintenance. However, the user has a great deal of control, and typically a wide array of features.

NextCloud - hosted on a private or leased server - somewhat complex to set up, but feature rich and very simple to use once installed.
OwnCloud - Very similar to NextCloud, as the original software from which it was forked. The license model is less preferred by some.

Other options

Amazon S3 - Somewhat complex to set up, best left to tech savvy users. There is no built-in file synchronization feature, but technical users can develop ways to to accomplish their goals for a relatively low cost.

Alternatives to Gemini

Cloud-hosted models

Proton Lumo - A strong option for privacy
Grok - A very capable model with a slightly rocky past in regard to privacy

Cloud-hosted proxies

These services still utilize cloud-hosted AI-models, but proxy that connection to improve user privacy.

Venice.ai
Duck.ai

Locally-hosted models

Locally-hosted AI models run on the user's own hardware, without needing a connection to the internet. This offers the user vastly improved privacy, since their data never leaves their own devices. This can also be a more cost-effective option for some users, since they are using their own hardware, rather than purchasing and using tokens with a cloud provider.

LM Studio - A multi-LLM manager for locally hosted models.
Ollama - A multi-LLM manager for locally hosted models.

Alternatives to YouTube

Rumble
Vimeo
BitChute
Daily Motion
GabTV
DTube

Alternatives to Google Play Music

Spotify - available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, and the discontinued Windows Phone.
Amazon Music - available on Amazon Echo or Fire. It's also available for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.
iTunes and Apple Music - the latter has grown in popularity. The former is buggy, especially on Windows, and all songs released before circa 2010 are protected by Fairplay DRM and stored in M4P (MPEG-4 Protected) format and cannot be played on any media player other than iTunes or iPod and cannot be legally transferred to other music platforms such as Amazon or Groove Music.

Alternatives to Google Meet

Proton Meet - Easy-to-use, privacy-focused meeting system, provided by a reputable company
Jitsi Meet - Privacy-focused, open source meeting system, which does not require user account registration
Whereby - A zoom alternative which makes broad claims about respecting user privacy
Zoom - A popular choice, with a rich feature-set, but a rocky past in regard to privacy and security.

Alternatives to Google Hangouts

Signal - A very feature rich and capable chat system. Protects conversations and metadata using end-to-end encryption. Supports text, voice, and video chat.
SimpleX - A newer offering, supporting text, voice, and video chat without a need for a phone number. Less thoroughly tested and audited compared to Signal, but uses all open-source code.

Alternatives to Chromebooks

Chrome OS is marketed as being just a browser on bare-metal, although it did recently add Google Drive and a Debian subsystem so one could install Android and Linux apps. But given Google's interest in harvesting private data, it still causes some people concern that it may be engaging in unwanted behavior. Some lightweight alternatives are:

GNU/Linux (such as Mint or Ubuntu) on a "thin-and-light" laptop. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all work well on Ubuntu. The thin client edition is Ubuntu Core.
Windows 10 Core
Windows Lite (upcoming, rumored) - Windows with the Linux kernel. Windows 12 Lite is not from Microsoft. There have been many hoaxes of Windows 12 especially on Youtube.

References

[1] â https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and

[2] â https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/10/31/five-times-google-was-caught-red-handed-on-bias-and-censorship/

[3] â https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-big-tech-bills-facebook-google-apple-amazon-antitrust-2021-6?amp

[4] â https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-significant-remedies-against-google

[5] â https://www.adexchanger.com/antitrust/google-wont-have-to-break-up-its-ad-tech-business-judge-brinkema-rules/

[6] â https://lawfold.com/google-antitrust-lawsuit/

[7] â https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/

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