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 use YouTube through freetube or newpipe. I use my old university google account as a free backup service using restic. It’s all encrypted and free storage is free storage. I still have an old google account that I don’t use, I’ll probably delete it.
Other than that, no google that I can think of. I use DDG for search, with startpage as my backup search engine. I think it uses google search as a back end. I try to use FOSS stuff whenever possible. I don’t think I have any non-FOSS stuff on my laptop besides firmware. My android phone is a different story as I can’t put another ROM on it, but I’m not signed into google at least and use F-Droid mostly.
I’ve always used Firefox and my email is hosted on mailbox.org with my own domain. I’m in pretty good shape with not relying on large corporations, but there are always things to improve on.