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.
Even despite the drama I’m still on Graphene. I don’t like the drama at all, but I literally got a P7 just for Graphene and it would be silly to let Google have all my data because of the drama. The OS itself is still good and it works really well. I get the dealbreaker though. I still use a card to pay for things so it was never an issue for me.