Man, they really want you to use Firefox
I can't imagine depending on Google to store anything. They shouldn't be able to even see what links you save.
- Yeah, this is incredibly intrusive
- As someone who just converted from Chrome to Firefox 1-2 months ago: what alternative can you recommend to Google Drive? I wouldn't miss everything from it, but being able to easily share data (so that they can play videos, audio files or documents without having to manually download them) is one of them.
  
  EDIT: and maybe Google Photos. Mainly for syncing.
  
  For storage, for free options I'd recommend filen.io, which gives you 10GB free. If you're open to other paid options, proton drive and infomaniak drive seem alright.
  
  Just skimming the alternativeto entries for google photos, the open source alternatives to Google photos look like they tend to be either paid or self hosted. Stingle Photos has a free 1GB tier you could try out. Otherwise, paid options include Stingle, ente, and seafile, and self hosted options include immich and Nextcloud (which is also a drive alternative).
  
  Depends on how much effort you want to put into it. Nextcloud is the closest in terms of features but you'll need to set it up.
  
  I have a ProtonDrive account and I like it but it doesn't have auto upload of photos. You need to manually upload them. I'm personally fine with this since 90% of my photos are receipts and junk.
  
  Protonmail has smaller cloud storage, but you have to pay for it. A thumb drive will work.
  
  I use Sync.com for years (since 2015 after my very privacy heavy swiss cloud service shut down). It's Canadian, the end-to-end encryption (on device,upload and cloud) is the highest I encountered and it's extensive zero-knowledge policy was my reason to sign up.
  
  They added some nice sharing features with quite the extensive control and easy Setup. So might be worth checking out.
  
  And obligatory referral link for a free account 🙃:
  
  https://www.sync.com/?_sync_refer=7265130
  
  I've switched over to Proton for email, calendar and drive. I still haven't found a replacement for Google Photos but I'm looking for one.
  
  Mega.io created by Kim Dotcom is (mostly) open source.
- My work, which is supposed to keep things private for customers, stores so much on Gmail and Google Drive. It's comical to me.
  
  What type of company? I, too, find it comical. There was a lot of cloud resistance due to privacy and control issues in financial services years ago. Concerns were justified. Nothing changed except managements' attitudes because "everybody else is doing it".
D I T C H

C H R O M E
- And stop using chromium browsers too!
  
  No point in ditching chrome just to use chrome with a different coat of paint.
  
  Yep! A few months ago I moved from Brave to Firefox since Brave can’t be trusted
  
  isn't it alright if you use ungoogled-chromium? It sends 0 requests outward so it's completely safe.
- I'm pretty sure the other browsers have to comply too
  
  I'm hosting my own sync servers with bookmarks for firefox, if I don't delete it nobody will.
This feels like a corporation complying with their obligations under the DMCA.

To maintain their safe harbor status, companies have to remove allegedly infringing content in response to a properly filed takedown notice. This does include links stored in google's search results. This is what a company like google has to do when storing user data on servers in any country that signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

They don't seem to be doing this in a malicious way. They have done their duty and removed the offending links from their service. But they quite kindly chose to notify the user by email, including the exact URL that was removed. The user can store that link elsewhere.

It would have been far easier to remove the link silently.
- See, this is why I like reading comments. Cooler heads prevail. Thank you for the context.
- They shouldnt be reading and playing with things privately stored. Are they going to go through all my documents to replace any swear words? It's completely inexcusable. Private doesn't mean private until some big company asks about it wtf.
  
  It's not on bookmarks. Is on collections(a different thing) that are public, shareable and technically hosted by Google. This whole thing has been overblown by not fact checking.
  
  What do you mean by privately stored if you're saving it in some google application?
  
  If that's the case (what OP mentioned), I think it's still the responsibility of who made those effing laws. You cannot ask a corporation to break the law to protect your privacy. But you can definitely ask your representative to protect it
  
  This is google we're talking about, there never was any privacy to begin with, and what you believed was there was always just an illusion. This was always their interpretation of the ideal and power of the internet with its "free sharing of ideas and knowledge" - they literally went with including personal data in that much like facebook and both have yet to be stopped or held accountable to start treating it as such.
  
  Please contact your congressperson. Having dealt with shit like this, a company's other option is fines approaching infinity and jail time for those who don't comply. We elected the people who did this.
  
  We should be angry at corporations for monopolistic behavior, using profits from one business to prop up another and drown competitors (Bard), cross-business-unit offerings that smaller companies can't compete with (Prime shipping, video, music), not this. This is a company complying with a terrible law.
And yet, I can still google torrent sites
- Google search really has gone downhill. I'm using fence on my phone and it defaults to duckduckgo. Gotta say, it's just as good, occasionally a little better.
Don't rely on online service to save your stuff.

Edit: how can i exclude < and > from being interpreted?
- Usually a backslash (the one under the backspace key, not the one that shares a key with ”?") before a character that would usually be treated as a formatting instruction will stop it from being interpreted as such. Could be different for other machine-interpreted languages but when used this way, the backslash is called an "escape character".
  
  The \ key. And you might ask how I wrote that symbol without it gettting interpreted. Well, by writing \\.
  
  But that didn't work for 'angle braket open' text 'angle braket close'? Not even in code tag right now.
  
  It's a forward slash, to be clear. There's not two backslashes on the keyboard.
What excuse are they using if it turns out that the takedown request was false?

Would they undelete the private user's lists?

Would they reimburse anybody for the damage?
Maybe it will make people see Google for what they are. So many are stuck in some kind of illusion.
- They did a lot of good for the FOSS community for many years. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
  
  “You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” — Harvey Dent
- They're an advertising company that tries to collect information about targets through products those targets use. That's it
  
  I signed up for a Google Ads account for a non-profit I volunteer with. I had to verify the organization with governing documents, okay, fair enough. They also "require" my drivers license or passport. Excuse me? We will no longer have a Google Ads account after Sept 15 (the cut off to verify my identity).
- I think because the moment you admit to yourself that Google is not so good a company, you are forced to recognize most are not and that is too much for many to swallow.
Honestly, the only useful Google service these days is gmail. And that’s only because I don’t want to deal with changing providers after 15 years.
- I wish other providers had the tab system that Gmail has, I'd switch in a heartbeat if it did. Folders just aren't as convenient.
  
  Many do. I use labels on Fastmail and it's great!
  
  To be fair, I use labels like folders, so I probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
- There's gotta be an app for that, though that could ve dangerous since you're letting it access your Gmail.
  
  Yeah, the issue is with going through every service you've used that you might use again and changing the email. That can take many hours, depending on how many sites you have an infrequent need to use.
I don't use this (Google Saved?) and I'm unfamiliar with it, is it similar to Pocket?

Is it this: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9217379
It's wierd. 4 Days ago I got an email saying they removed a link from my saved websites. Only the link, in the email, was of a reddit post from 8 years ago on how to plug in speakers into a Motherboard I used to have??? How is that piracy? Its on the buildapc subreddit.
- You should be asking how the fuck do these cunts still have a reputation that you are supporting?
  
  Googles new, but not announced motto is, "We are the evil".
  
  That motto ain't even new. It's been a thing for at least a close to a decade now if you ask me.
I think the word private in "privately saved" should be in quotes, clearly.

Remember kids - firefox was built off the netscape navigator kernel. A download for FF is a vote for the right side of antitrust history (and therefore future)
- This has got nothing to do with browsers. The article is saying that if you use an online Google service to save Google search results, then when they are forced to take said search result down due to DMCA then it also is (obviously) gone from the saved collection. This could just as easily happen in Firefox if you use Google's saved pages service, which is a bit like Pinterest. Meanwhile Chrome, like Firefox, never touches your actual bookmarks
it also removed all of my saved places from google maps. thanks i like it
- I don't think that's related
  
  They had the pirate chests locations.
  
  it isn't but nobody is going to post a news article about it so I'm just fucked
Oh boy, I'm feeling ultra smug now. Been using a Keepass database synced via Syncthing for about 3 years now
- I use it too...but I like to spell it KeepAss.
  
  Thank you dear friend, I'll be using that from now on as well. KeepAss!
kinda makes sense. it's like if a youtube video or soundcloud track gets DCMA'd then they're going to remove the link.

if it was you actual browser bookmark i would understand the outrage.

im still on FF tho
- Isn't removing the bookmarks from people's browser what they're mad about? Now that Google is selling content through YouTube TV, I'll bet they crack down hard on piracy. The old reddit /r/NFLstreams moved to a site a lot of people know. Now that Google owns Sunday ticket, I will not be surprised if it gets DDoS'd to shit this year and becomes borderline unusable. We'll find out next week I guess.
  
  It’s not from the browser. As stated in the article:
  
  Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google’s synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that’s not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google’s saved feature.
  
  It’s a feature specific to the google app that lets you share collections of bookmarks:
  
  https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13128452?hl=en
  
  They don’t want people sharing links to pirate sites.
  
  It’s still bad, but saying they are going through bookmarks in chrome and deleting them is misinformation.
- Just yesterday I saw a post that they did in fact remove bookmark and notified user about it with detail
  
  A users bookmarks on the browser, and a collection saved on google, are different things. One is private, the other can be shared.
Assholes.
ITT: nobody actually reading the article

Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google’s synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that’s not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google’s saved feature.

This Google service allows users to save and organize links, similar to what Pinterest does. These link collections can be private or shared with third parties.
I'm gonna give Mullvad a shot, sick of Google's shit.

https://mullvad.net/en/browser
- What's wrong with Firefox?
  
  Firefox is usable with some tweaks and not that evil, even though sponsored by Google. But many people feel that they can't believe Firefox like 10 years ago.
  
  Some users feel it's so wrong that they have forked the project: LibreWolf, which seems a good option too.
- Mullvad browser is just a copy of Firefox that’s designed to work with their VPN.
  
  Not entirely true. The mullvad browser adds a lot of anti-tracking stuff, which was originally implemented in the TOR Browser. So you're definitely safer using the mullvad browser instead of plain Firefox

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