DeGoogle Yourself

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A community for those that would like to get away from Google.

Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!

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Google Play can go straight to hell. (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by orphiebaby@lemm.ee to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was trying to change my primary YouTube/Google account while still holding onto my Movies & TV purchases.

You can't change the email address associated with your YouTube account or Google Play Movies & TV purchases.
You can't transfer your purchases to a new Google account.
There is a way to create a Google Play family account, but it's so buried and un-obvious that it takes search engine research to accidentally discover that this is an option.
Once you create your family account, apparently some purchases can't be shared due to how they were paid for years ago.
When you try to share many stated-as-"eligible" purchases with the family by using the toggle, it errors, and a refresh shows that it never shared. I used Firefox, Edge, no VPN, and no adblocker. Tons of attempts. Nothing. No fix.
Google has no proper support channel.
If you try to remove the family account and host it under the Google account that owns all the purchases in hopes that they will now work, you will discover that none of the accounts can join a family plan again for 12 fucking months.

Lesson: Don't ever buy your shit through Google Play. Put your pirate hat on.

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[–] doctorn@r.nf 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm using torrentgalaxy for all my shit. I do tend to still buy stuff occasionally, but usually after having seen it and appreciating the work into it. I'm a bit against paying for cats in bags (not knowing if it's any good until you already paid). The original website ends in 'dot to', but you might have to set your dns settings to an open one (like google [8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4] or Cloudflare [1.1.1.1]) to get there.

😜

[–] gr522x@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Please don't recommend Google DNS 8.8.8.8 in the DeGoogle community. This would be the last service I'd use for privacy and security. Cloudflare isn't much better for privacy. Mullvad's public DNS offering is the best I've found that appears committed to privacy and supporting libre projects.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/

[–] doctorn@r.nf 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey, I mentioned the self-hosting way of doing it, but it's not for everyone. Google and Cloudflare are just easy to remember, yet just (arguably bad) examples. But in the end any company can't be trusted anyway. Google once promised to keep your privacy and to never spy or give ads, so did Facebook at the start to get you away from "Evil data-seller MySpace". In the end you're just giving info to a new company that one day can start using it against you too, and if past is any indication, they either disappear or start doing it,... Correct me if I'm overseeing something now, but I can't think of anything that got popular and didn't abuse its power...

Anyway, though maybe a good ad-profile source, for the few that still have direct IP's (which is getting constantly smaller among consumers) these days with CGNAT and hotspots, it gets hard to identify someone over the limited info of a DNS request. In any case, going completely self-hosted is sadly not possible in a single sweep so you'll always have things that remain centralized throughout the switch, and even if you could, DNS will always be the biggest centralized entity. The root-dns servers all the way at the top (I have been taught in an IT catch-up education thing not so very long ago there's apparently just 5 keys, owned by 5 people) still would have some control cause the centralization of them is a necessity for having constant global consensus over a single internet. Until someone comes up with a decent genious ad-hoc federated dnsservice-alternative idea one day (and somehow would get all registrars with current running contracts on board) we're stuck with it, which is gonna be for still quite some time, I'm afraid... 😅

Anyway, that all being said, none of the above is meant as an excuse. I do also see the irony of suggesting a Google thing in an anti-company-dependence place, but in all honesty, I hadn't even connected those dots until now. 😅 I did not do it out of bad intent anyway, so also: my apologies. 😉

[–] orphiebaby@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've never heard of torrentgalaxy. Did you say I need to change my DNS to reach it?

[–] doctorn@r.nf 0 points 1 year ago

In a perfect world you don't, but many ISP's block torrentsites by poisoning their own dns lookups to torrentengine domains and even some torrenttrackers. (They purposefully send you back a wrong IP when your pc asks where the website is, usually one that goes to a "this website is blocked" webpage instead).

If you use an open one you kinda circumvent this measure and you can get on any site again without any further hassle. There's Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, there's also 9.9.9.9, or if you are a techy you can even run a dns server yourself and then point to localhost.

Anyway, in my previous post I first said it ended on "dot io", but was wrong and then edited it to "dot to", but since edits don't always federate well I'm repeating now it is '.to', and not '.io'. 😜