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scooching away from Google
Feb. 5th, 2012 03:50 pmWhile I think they're probably still the least evil of the bunch (I even know people who, bizarrely, think it's crazy to keep anything on Google, yet have active Facebook accounts), I've decided it's probably a good idea to move out of centralized data. There's just too much crazy these days in general, and Google's recent move to integrate all their data is a bit bothersome as well.
While not part of Google, the big one is, of course, Facebook, which is the biggest privacy fail around short of just posting every personal detail on a billboard on main street. Easy enough there, I never exposed significant data to them and I am essentially completely inactive there.
Email is relatively painless. I simply switched my email address with Dreamhost from "forward to GMail" to "fully hosted" which gives me Squirrelmail access from the web when I'm away, and spent a few hours getting Thunderbird set up with the few dozen folders and matching filters that I use. I picked up a couple of 16GB thumb drives that are cheap ($13), fast and small enough to be keychain fobs (they're thumbnail sized), and made them one big TrueCrypt volume (with about 1GB left as unencrypted space since frequently I'll want to grab something from someone else's machine).
I use Thunderbird Portable - local copy on my hard drive, synced to the TC volume on the thumb drive with Robocopy.
I also am playing with RSS feed systems since I also use Google Reader - it looks like the Brief add-on for Firefox will work for me.
I'm using LastPass for passwords, which is online but supposedly even if their data is compromised, it's stored encrypted and even they can't decrypt it without cracking your password. I'm also using XMarks from the same place, which is the best bookmark syncing I've found so far. I don't really know if they encrypt but I'm not so concerned with bookmarks.
Google Docs is a bit of a problem - there's simply no real substitute. I guess I will continue to use Google Docs for shared content such as reimbursable convention expenses where I want to keep open books, but go back to ODF on the thumb drive for most everything else.
I'm not sure how to replace Calendar either. I run my life out of Google Calendar. I do have a web-based calendar that I can put onto my own website and lock it down. I've used it in the past and it works pretty well (once I fixed some bugs in it). I've looked at a few other systems like Remember The Milk and Toodledoo, but ISTM that either I trust free shared systems or I don't, so it doesn't make much sense to give up one system that's working to go to another of questionable utility when there's no way to know whether one is better than the other for privacy.
I'm probably going to continue to post public stuff to G+. I never really did any limited posting there, and certainly all of my private journaling has been restricted to LJ, sometimes even posted encrypted, so no real change there.
I may install GPG on Thunderbird, but there's really hardly any point since nobody that I ever email will put up with it anyway. I've installed it a dozen times over 20 years and have yet to exchange a single encrypted email with anybody. I do know people who have PGP installed but nobody that I ever actually talk to anyway.
While not part of Google, the big one is, of course, Facebook, which is the biggest privacy fail around short of just posting every personal detail on a billboard on main street. Easy enough there, I never exposed significant data to them and I am essentially completely inactive there.
Email is relatively painless. I simply switched my email address with Dreamhost from "forward to GMail" to "fully hosted" which gives me Squirrelmail access from the web when I'm away, and spent a few hours getting Thunderbird set up with the few dozen folders and matching filters that I use. I picked up a couple of 16GB thumb drives that are cheap ($13), fast and small enough to be keychain fobs (they're thumbnail sized), and made them one big TrueCrypt volume (with about 1GB left as unencrypted space since frequently I'll want to grab something from someone else's machine).
I use Thunderbird Portable - local copy on my hard drive, synced to the TC volume on the thumb drive with Robocopy.
I also am playing with RSS feed systems since I also use Google Reader - it looks like the Brief add-on for Firefox will work for me.
I'm using LastPass for passwords, which is online but supposedly even if their data is compromised, it's stored encrypted and even they can't decrypt it without cracking your password. I'm also using XMarks from the same place, which is the best bookmark syncing I've found so far. I don't really know if they encrypt but I'm not so concerned with bookmarks.
Google Docs is a bit of a problem - there's simply no real substitute. I guess I will continue to use Google Docs for shared content such as reimbursable convention expenses where I want to keep open books, but go back to ODF on the thumb drive for most everything else.
I'm not sure how to replace Calendar either. I run my life out of Google Calendar. I do have a web-based calendar that I can put onto my own website and lock it down. I've used it in the past and it works pretty well (once I fixed some bugs in it). I've looked at a few other systems like Remember The Milk and Toodledoo, but ISTM that either I trust free shared systems or I don't, so it doesn't make much sense to give up one system that's working to go to another of questionable utility when there's no way to know whether one is better than the other for privacy.
I'm probably going to continue to post public stuff to G+. I never really did any limited posting there, and certainly all of my private journaling has been restricted to LJ, sometimes even posted encrypted, so no real change there.
I may install GPG on Thunderbird, but there's really hardly any point since nobody that I ever email will put up with it anyway. I've installed it a dozen times over 20 years and have yet to exchange a single encrypted email with anybody. I do know people who have PGP installed but nobody that I ever actually talk to anyway.
