this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Kudos to you. I've tried to degoogle myself (I'd say I was moderately successful until my last company came along), although it's been a pretty irritating ride. Now I'm still very sensitive when it comes to security and privacy but not to the extent I was before.
I misplaced my phone a few days ago and didn't think of looking for it until just yesterday. The only reason I did was for OTP for my banking apps (browser and Paypal still asked me for them). If not for those, I think I can pretty much go without a smartphone, tbh. My PC and laptop, though? Can't.
Running your own search engine sounds very interesting. How steep would the learning curve be? And is it feasible for only personal use?
Searxng is my go to. Consider using a public instance or hosting off-site to increase anonymity.
This is how I go to. Hosted on a Linode that isn't in my actual name. Not that that helps toonmuch
Most of the public instances I tried stopped working often enough to be annoying. Like if you set one as your browser default and then google blocks it, it's just frustrating.
I've gotten into the habit of just searching directly on specific sites rather than just searching the whole internet - really when you search for things the vast majority of the time you know what site is going to have what you're looking for.
For everything else I've been using bing. The results are fine and chatgpt really is dope. I know they're just as bad for privacy as google but at least it's not google having all my data.
Ye it's the freaking bank and company login authenticator else I would have rooted and do whatever I want with MY phone
in case you didn't know: it's relatively easy to write, in just a few lines, a little program to produce the OTP codes on a computer instead of a phone app.