They have also been purging messages on the ProtonMail subreddit which they control. The community-controlled alternatives like ProtonPublic have been unaffected.

I deleted my Proton account back when this started and it seems like that was the right move. This company is fucked.

Firstly: The company, and especially its CEO, have a shady history which makes trusting them difficult.

Secondly: Their browser further promotes Google’s browser monpoly. For some of us that is a huge downside.

Daily reminder that the majority of alternative search engines get their upstream results from Bing or Google. As part of their agreements with Microsoft and Google, they may share some information with them. This is not a secret or anything; you can read it all in their terms of service.

Also a reminder that most of these search engines are black boxes. They’re all closed source and all we have is their “just trust us” promises of privacy and security and none of them have been audited by trusted third parties as far as I am aware. At this point, just use the one that most closely aligns with your personal values and ethics.

They can do as much damage control as they want. I’m not touching them with a 10 metre stick until their entire management is replaced.

Chrome users will do literally anything except pick an alternative browser.

Alec from Technology Connections brought up a good point in recent video about EVs. He mentioned how Tesla owners are a special kind of EV driver and don’t actually care about EV technology or green(er) vehicles; they only care about their Tesla. I’d imagine this is part of that mindset. Tesla can do no wrong in their eyes, even if it goes against their normal morals and beliefs.

As you’ve pointed out, Vivaldi is based on Chromium so you are still indirectly supporting Google’s browser monopoly.

Qwant is a decent search engine but they share certain information, including IP’s, with uptream search providers such as Microslop and Google. I do believe they have a partnership with Ecosia to develop their own joint search engine/crawler but until then they both rely on Bing and Google and have to share information as per agreement terms. As always, check privacy and ToS agreements for full details.

Search engines are kind of in shit place right now with so many being either A: American, or B: relying on Bing or Google (secret third option: both A and B). As for browsers, Firefox is also in a shit place right now but there are numerous excellent forks that strip out all of Mozilla’s stupid stuff. Waterfox, Librewolf, just to name a couple.

WeatherCAN which is made and run by Environment Canada (government run). Many weather services and apps get their data from them anyway so might as well get it right from the source.

Been with Posteo for years now. They’re very solid.

The problem I have with disabling or turning off permissions is that it assumes that Google respects you enough to honour your requests and actually disable them.

And I have absolutely zero faith in Google to do that.

Biometrics harvesting under the guise of “convenience”.

Unfortunately it is quite effective. People love this stuff.