How much of your life have you degoogled?
How much of your life have you degoogled?
We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
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The biggest thing I de-Googled was gmail. I had my own domain already so it wasn't tough to move (to my web hosting provider's included email service).
I switched to Firefox+uBO from Chrome.
They de-Googled RSS for me (now on Newsblur).
Things I still use:
- Drive for backups (but have a local backup in case their AI bans me)
- YouTube Premium (I hate ads)
- Contacts (Cardbook addon for Thunderbird works well with this)
- Calendar (Thunderbird supports natively)
- Keep (Shared shopping list)
- Pixel phone (I don't really care for Apple, either)
You can replace the rest with
Drive for backups -> Nextcloud
Contacts -> Nextcloud or EteSync
Calender -> Nextcloud or EteSync
Keep -> Nextcloud (share files per link)
Pixel Phone: install GrapheneOS
Youtube: hard to replace in my opinion, but use NewPipe