Linus Tech Tips: De-Google Your Life (Part 1)

Thought it is worth to share this, as it’s a pretty good video for starters.

Part 1:

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This video is shockingly good when considering the fact that it comes from a mainstream YouTube channel. Big respect to LMG.

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I mean there are some inaccuracies. Wish they had consulted us lol, but yeah mostly just good that they’re generating more attention for the alternatives.

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What inaccuracies? I ran the video in the background and everything seemed fine, probably missed something.

They say Quad9 has no malware blocking at all, despite that being its primary goal.

They also did some backwards thing with stars for telemetry on the browsers table. More stars means more telemetry, but that should be inverted.

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F.x. that nextdns does no logging.

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Haven’t watched the video yet, but just going from the description…

Browsers:

Opera

Lol?

I could nitpick more but most of the other recommendations seem decent to pretty good, that just immediately striked me as a WTF. I’ll probably watch the video later, either way, it’s always good to see people bring awareness to these issues, especially someone in the mainstream like Linus.

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Imagine if they had told people to visit privacyguides.org :innocent:

I was worried when I saw the video pop up this morning, but it’s pretty cool.

Epic Things:

  • Brought up Manifest V3 Shenanigans
  • Mullvad Browser shoutout!
  • Emily wrote this video which is probably why it’s good
  • This video is how I found out Ente has an (insane but I like it lol) mascot

Meh Things:

  • Makes Ungoogled Chromium and Floorp look good in the table :skull:
  • Browser telemetry stars are opposite like @SkewedZeppelin said lol
  • Kagi has the “most comprehensive” privacy policy of all the search engines? :thinking: I think they did Brave Search dirty here.
  • Insane Quad9 info - I thought LTT recently had that whole controversy where they promised to review their tables/graphics much more thoroughly.

8/10 would recommend

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I’m the only one who thinks that Manifest V3 is valid? I daily drive uBlock Origin Lite because it doesn’t require invasive permissions, and when you think that some people might install countless random extensions, I think it’s a good idea to restrict them.

Malicious extensions are not restricted from exfiltrating data at all, because the Web Request API still exists. The only part of the Web Request API which has been removed is the blocking capabilities.

The biggest threat to user privacy on the internet is not the capabilities of MV2 extensions, it’s the proliferation of tracking scripts and other nonsense on various websites. Until MV3-compliant extensions are able to adequately block such threats it will always serve to make your personal privacy worse off.

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Well, that’s indeed a scummy thing to do.

Fairly probable the advice is ripped from Privacy Guides, without references to their sources of information. As a complete newbie when I searched for privacy guides, many were conflicting and all of them had little overlapping software and hardware recommendations. Some were from governments and hard to read. A lot of the recommendations in the description are suspiciously similar to PG’s. These two observations together are why I believe they ripped advice from here. I could do statistical analysis on this but it would be a waste of time, just look at the description of the video. Suspicious af.

Now that I think of it PG should incorporate more peer reviewed academic references in their suggestions.

Nonetheless, what do you expect from a Youtuber, they are scummy sell outs making mindless videos

I mean folks are allowed to use our stuff, anything that helps bring privacy to the attention to the general public is a big win for me.

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While I agree with the sentiment of your statement, in academia failing to reference sources not only prevents readers from judging the validity of the information, is not only disrespectful, but also constitutes plagiarism. For a big company like LTT, to (very probably) rip off the work of smaller websites like this, to their own gain (which is already disproportionate), just seems is scummy.

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I wish they copied it better. If they had left out all the things we do not list it would have been a better video.

I mean agree that referencing is nice and so would have been consulting them. But we should also cheer that there is more mainstream attention.

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Interestingly, the few things that aren’t listed on PG are super common recommendations on Reddit including PG’s Reddit. Their research has been super superficial, I bet they just wrote something along the lines of “privacy guide” on Google and called it a day using the top results (Reddit and PG). Also, I bet you they watched a Techlore video. Just have a feeling.

Considering their core audience and focus is computer hardware and PC builds, this is fairly well done, for an introduction to some big tech alternatives.

I would have liked them to point to resources like Privacy guides, techlore, the new oil, The privacy dad, NBTV, Firewalls don’t stop dragons, the book. There is still opportunity to do that if and when part 2 is released

I doubt they will, they are obviously self interested individuals.

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They link to other sources on the regular. I wish they would have linked to sources in this video, but I don’t think we can do much about that. Almost everything they showed off is used by people both inside and outside this community. The writer, Emily, is known to be really into Linux, privacy, and self hosting. So makes sense they would have similar recs to what is seen on the PG site and communities.

On the “self interested individuals” part, they obviously wouldn’t make the video if they didn’t think they would get views, they are a business that needs to make money to pay people. Its very different to what the team members of PG do, as most of them are volunteers and there are many contributors who aren’t apart of the core team. I don’t have the best view of LMG myself, but this is very shortsighted and reductionist view of the people who put in the work to make content that is helping people who might not have even though of looking for us in the first place. We should support people when they do good things and call them out when they mess up, and overall I think this video and hopefully the rest of the series is a net positive.

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I think it’s important to note that this is a de-Googling video and not a privacy video, which are not the same thing as we frequently remind people :slight_smile:

Suggestions like Fastmail or Ecosia for example are things which I wouldn’t consider to be the gold standard in terms of shielding your data from the internet, but they are certainly not Google, so… mission accomplished (for the purposes of their video).

IMHO de-Googling is an important first step for a lot of people, and if anyone wants to go beyond that after watching this video then the resources are out there for them to find what they need.


I do think LTT is usually better about telling viewers where their information is coming from, so the lack of sources at all a strange omission. Even if Privacy Guides is one of the sources they used during research though, I’m not going to be upset about it. It’s good content overall that many people are going to find informative :+1:

Plus like @zestygrass said maybe they will point to their sources in part 2 :innocent:

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