• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 31st, 2020

help-circle
  • First of all, don’t waste your precious time enjoying life with privacy worrying and fear. It’s just not worth it.

    I don’t know why, but I get the impression the device you are struggling to make more private is a phone. If that’s the case, the extent to which you can make things work is indeed very limited, so don’t try to push it too hard.

    You could use a tool like a firewall to have a more high-level control over all apps, like blocking them all and only allowing a few.

    This may be less overwhelming than trying to block and contain each app individually. Now, you will still need to allow some Google stuff to have a Google phone work properly (to use the Play Store for example). If you want to go further, I’d suggest trying another OS other than Android, but that may make your phone even less compatible with what you are relying on, so it may be a better idea to instead try it on an old phone first.

    On a PC, you have more freedom. Instead of trying to block everything from Google, for instance, you can rely on a separate browser profile (or Firefox Containers if that’s inconvenient) for things that really need Google (e.g. Meet, work/school using Google Apps, whatever) and in your main browser profile you can rely on alternatives. For example, instead of trying to access YouTube behind a Google blocking extension, you could use Invidious or a dedicated app like FreeTube.

    I hope you can feel more at ease with the sense of being watched and tracked online, but remember that’s not worth loosing your best moments for if it ends up just causing more distress to you.


  • I can’t seem to block them by just enabling annoyances blocks on my end.

    “EasyList – Other Annoyances” has this:

    ! Google signin popup
    ###credential_picker_container
    ###credential_picker_iframe
    

    “AdGuard – Popup Overlays” has this:

    ! Warning: check, if auth using Google is not broken
    ||accounts.google.com/gsi/client^$third-party,script,domain=<several specific domains here>
    

    My impression is that the rules want to avoid breaking Google sign-in completely, which this rule may do.




  • It wouldn’t be fair to say zsh is slow because ohmyzsh is slow. ohmyzsh is notorious for being a bit bloated. If you pull the whole thing, it makes a mess of your shell and you really can’t tell anymore what is what.

    It’s possible to install the individual stuff you need from oh my zsh without pulling the whole thing.

    I am a happy antidote user. With it, you can do something like this on your zsh_plugins.txt file:

    ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/extract
    

    Though ohmyzsh provides its own means to enable and disable plugins, this will allow you to cut that down to the pulling only of individual plugins in the first place.

    Your mileage may vary, but other plugin managers may give you different ways to accomplish the same.

    zsh is quite an advanced shell. You will find other shells that do things radically different and have their own bells and whistles, but if you are going for feature parity it may be hard to find a replacement.


  • Try removing Google from your search engines. If you still want it you can re-add it from search results (click address bar, a new search icon with a + should appear at the bottom) or Mycroft.

    Also consider removing/dismissing Google from the new tab page. If you have disabled the option showing your most visited sites, enable it temporarily to remove Google and untick the “sponsored” option in the new tab cog icon on the top right.