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 be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey 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.
With a lot of time and effort, almost entirely. I’m happy to provide suggestions to anyone if they need alternatives or can’t find what they’re looking for in the privacy guides.
EDIT: in fact, I think I’ve managed to dump just about all of the frightful five (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). The toughest one is actually Adobe.
that’s awesome. it’s important for people to know that you don’t need to overhaul your digital life overnight, over a week, a month, or even a year. every step is progress