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.
I have slowly but surely moved everything important off google. My main email is a proton mail now, and I changed my pixel for a oneplus :).
I’ve wanted to do this too for about a year but I see no benefit since most addresses I correspond with are unencrypted. One-way encryption is negligibly any better - unless I’m seriously misunderstanding Proton.
I’d switch to @iCloud.com but that just feels goofy.
It’s more about the ethics of the company hosting than any encryption benefits for me personally. Self-hosting would be ideal but email is a bit too important for me to do that personally, so I use proton as a compromise.
this, but also proton-to-proton emails are end-to-end encrypted by default. see here for more info. supporting security-by-default is super important to me.
your email is quite literally an advert. almost every time someone sees my emails end in @tuta.io or @aleeas.com, they ask me about it. when all emails use a google or a microsoft domain it reinforces this oligarchy.
if you’re switching then you have the privilege to start anew with something great, you should look at options like Proton or Tutanota rather than other equally exploitative megacorps like Apple :p
i think it’s also important to be accepting of changing service providers because it’s the right thing to do, not just because it’s an improvement. i think we should be thankful that alternatives are mature enough now that we don’t lose much, or anything, when we switch.
Changing from a Pixel to another Android phone is hardly degoogling, if anything it’s just inviting in another pair of eyes! Ironically the best way to degoogle on Android is with a Pixel running GrapheneOS!