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.
It’s a slow and steady process, but
Email - This night I created a ProtonMail email which I’m forwarding my professional gmail to. Not sure how it’ll respond to replying from it, though.
Phone - Disabled all the google apps except for Chrome, Gmail, Playstore, and Maps. Plan on moving from Chrome to a different browser. Looking into a alternative to Google Fit’s pedometer because I like seeing steps, lol. I have Neostore on my phone, but I still use Playstore for the games. Will check out the guide for an alternative to Maps.
Search Engine - DuckDuckGo
Google Docs > Libreoffice on desktop.
Youtube - Freetube and Invidious.
check out Organic Maps! it uses OpenStreetMaps, a community-based initiative, and it’s pretty awesome http://organicmaps.app/
oh, and of course Firefox for the win.