No More Google (opens in new tab)

I never react immediately. Unless directly affected by an event, I accumulate information over time and it will influence my decision making. Reacting is too disruptive to my own life, and those of the people I support (e.g. family.) Would an article like this make my family change? No. Many don't care; most don't understand the impact on themselves.

My De-Googling has started with my browser. Moved all my open tabs and bookmarks to Firefox, took some time to settle in, now I avoid Chrome except to debug frontend code. Email? I have a Gmail account that I use for all my personal things, so I need to find something else and migrate my usage (and maybe archive my Gmail account so I can search it.) I haven't been creative enough to find a domain name for personal (and family) use. I've been paying for G Suite (for email only) on a business domain, so I need to find something else (and maybe archive the inboxes ...)

There's friction. I'm busy. I'm lazy. I know there's a chance I could suddenly lose access for no reason on the free account.

The most compelling reason I have found for degoogling is to make the question "what happens if they ban me?" get the anwser "nothing much". The next most compelling reason is to protect the world from their influence. i.e. take my influence amongst my family and peers and use it to steer another small part of the world away from googlopoly.

So I use firefox (of course Mozilla is massively dependent on google for money), and I use DDG, and I have fastmail.

My phone is Android, yet its replacable and correctly backed up (not google auto backups). I try and avoid google apps and services.

I barely use other google services.

With the exception of my day job. Currently we are a GCP shop, for good reasons. At some point in the hand wavy future we should be able to hop clouds as we will though.

https://duncan.codes/posts/2020-10-20-migrating-away-google-...

This week I made progress with my phone, now running https://calyxos.org/ and using Google services only via https://microg.org/ for Maps and Cloud messaging.

In my case, privacy is a reason, but I also consider a system inherently insecure if your account can be locked without any way to appeal. Add privacy and the continuous sunsetting of products and I had enough reasons.

edit grammar

I did get a wake-up call a few years ago when while writing an email in gmail, I accidentally moved a folder with 200 icons, into the new email window, as an attachment (I thought the icons in the folder were zipped up, but they weren't). I realized my mistake almost immediately and closed the browser, but I still hit some internal trigger because my account was immediately suspended. As I frantically tried to find a human to call, the account unsuspended itself after a few minutes. Bullet dodged, lesson (almost) learned.

I am, slowly, figuring out a backup approach and these articles do push me to make those plans more concrete. It is a time-bomb.

I don't mind the automation and the inevitable false-positives, but the fact that there is zero transparency, and you can't get a human online to help you (even if you're a paying customer) is just terrible.

But if every time this sort of thing comes up, a few of the crowd are nudged to finally make the switch, eventually we'll pick up some momentum.

Back in 2013-2014, when I first started telling people switching away from Google was critical, people treated me pretty much like I believed in bigfoot and UFOs. In 2020, a lot of progress has been made, even if it doesn't feel like it. Perception is changing, and the legal system is finally starting to catch up.

For data, I use Tresorit. They have a great, if premium priced, alternative to gdrive, onedrive, etc. In my experience, Tresorit is more reliable in terms of successfully tracking and syncing terabytes of data (and many files). Plus their encryption story is believable, and storage is their primary job. They're not going to kick a client out without some conversation at least. I tried Nextcloud, but like OneDrive, it ultimately would develop sync issues with large volume and large numbers of files.

I switched to Firefox a couple of years ago and found it mostly better than Chrome, especially regarding the Multi-Account Containers and the Facebook Jail.

For chat, I used Wire for a long time until they changed their focus to corporate only and their home to the US. Now I'm back on Signal. It's not awesome, but it works fine.

I now use Fastmail with my own domain and I love it.

I also use Firefox which is pretty much back to being the best browser after around a decade of falling behind Chrome.

For search I use DDG but I often find myself doing a '!g' search for local information such as restaurants/maps.

Chat I use a combination of Telegram and Whatsapp (but this is dependent on what other people use).

I use OneDrive instead of Drive (I get 1TB thanks to the Office family plan), which is ok.

I still use an Android phone as I find iphones to be very frustrating to use , especially if you do not use a Mac.

I think the two big unbeatable ones are Search and Maps. No one is able to even remotely compete on those two but I think that's ok. We have to go back to a world of diversifying the software we use and stop companies from forcing us into a single ecosystem.

Really, the only Google service I routinely use directly (i.e. other than because some Android app I use requires Google Play Services to function) is Google Maps.

The result is that I can still enjoy the technology but I can drop it at any moment.

I don't use Chrome browser on iOS because ands blocking doesn't work there.

The plan now is to switch to android phone start supports large SD cards and install syncthing on it to be fully local-first.

The disappearance of my Google account would be annoying (I'm using an android phone if nothing else), but that's about it. I'd probably lose a lot of contacts, but a lot of them would be people I haven't really interacted with since I migrated them off my Palm Tungsten T3 so not a huge loss. I'd lose my calendar entries that remind me it's Taco Tuesday 3-for-5 day at a local taqueria, but I'll probably remember that.

Financial accounts? No. Domain registrations or hosting? Nope. Business email? Nope. Social media? Not primary at least. Cloud hosting or services? Oh hell no.

Google is fine as long as you keep in mind that it's a giant behemoth to which you and any concerns you might have matter not one bit. It's also a capricious enough behemoth that relying on it for anything important seems foolish.

Long-term reliability and excellence. If you keep shutting down products, who could risk relying on them? Not me, because switching costs are non-trivial.

If you launch ten different chat products (luckily the icons match) and shut them down a few months later, what kind of product mind want to join your company? Not me, because I want to work on products that survive.

If your product hiring pipeline suffers because you keep killing products and you disable customer accounts willy-nilly, who wants to risk falling behind because they are stuck with products designed by designers who never talk to customers? Not me.

So avoiding Google at this point is less about morality and more about insuring yourself against a myopic product strategy and engineers who are not allowed to talk to their customers.

If you want to fix Google, put engineers on call and let them talk to customers. Fire anybody who refuses to talk to customers. The problem will resolve itself in 6-12 months.

Of course, it is important to put your money where your mouth is, so to answer your question directly: I am actively de-Googling myself and being very vocal about it because I believe that's the only way to affect change in large corporates who. Here is what I've done:

- Switched from Google to DuckDuckGo. Haven't used Google in over 6 months. - Switched from Chrome to Firefox. Very happy so far. - This week I signed up for Fastmail and switched my MX records over, so Google can't learn show me ads anymore. - Next up is Google Docs. Sheets is going to be tough.

Hey Google, you're screwing up BIG TIME. Talk to your customers!

I started with Chrome, because it was easy.

Google Photos is holding my photos hostage, so it's the first candidate. Google Drive will come next, since the solution I picked also covers that.

I also stopped using the Google Maps location timeline, and use OsmAnd most of the time for navigation.

My personal website doesn't use Analytics. I don't load Google Fonts either.

I have my email hosted on fastmail, using their web interface. I don't use gmail.

I switched over to duck duck go three (?) years ago and have been happy with it. This was because of online advocacy that you are questioning.

google maps was the killer app for me, but I've been using the here wego app on my phone and it is 90% as good. the main irritation is that every time it does an update it seems to reset all of my preferences. This was because of online advocacy that you are questioning.

I'd be free of google except (and this is a big exception) I use an android phone. I don't want to participate in the apple ecosystem.

What’s really difficult: - completely moving out of an email address people have been using for years to contact me - many clients I work with use google docs - the stuff I don’t see, all the cookies and analytics - YouTube, though I prefer reading

It would be very nice if my taxes could go towards protecting me as a consumer from companies that get too large - especially considering some of the acquisitions in the ad ecosystem (YouTube, doubleclick), but here we are.

The list in the headline is very helpful.

Another aspect is that I have much less trust in any online services - free or not, open source or not. I'm more sensitive of where my data is hosted (politics and privacy), who owns the service, and their reputation. I now have a plan B for those solutions I've switched to, just in case.

For things like backups, passwords, file storage, calendar, I use different systems on a Raspberry Pi that I can access online. When picking an online service, I made an effort to read the EUA and the privacy policy to find out how my data would be used and if/how I would be tracked. In the end, it's very possible to move away from Google and it's working for me, but this will always be an ongoing issue, since companies, like people, will "adjust" their ethics to fit their needs.

I have decided not to buy a Google phone next time, and to start the mamoth task of moving my primary email address to one using a domain I own rather than a gmail.com one (changing email address is hard :( ).

It isn;t so much because Google is evil, it is because their stuff isn't as good as it used to be, and they arbitarily lock people out of accounts for poor reasons, or force changes on people, at times. I have a Pixel 4 and have been pretty unimpressed with it as a phone and with how buggy Android seems to have become. I've also, over the past few years, started to dislike their stuff more and more. Having to use G Suite for work, as a user and an admin of it and supporting users (though I don't actually suport them directly myself), puts me off their stuff too.

Google no longer makes good products, but they think they do, and change thewir stuff on the assumption that they are improving it when they are not.

1. Google has great products and they are "free". Airtable a drop-in for G-sheets? Count me out.

2. This is the sneaky part - zero onboarding friction. Want to try notion? Need to "sign up" or watch stupid video. Try google docs? COMMAND+L + doc.new

A non-insignificant number of people around me behave similarly. At my company pretty much every non-tech person uses DeepL. My lawyer uses DuckDuckGo, and some other people I know also do.

I practically removed everything Chrome in my life. I never was much of a desktop user, but I used their Android app out of convenience and have gone 100% Firefox.

I stopped using Google Search and instead use Bing for most things... yeah yeah I know, one demon for another, but Microsoft Rewards have saved me some measurable cash so far and I have pretty much isolated my Microsoft life from any other online personas.

I'm starting to eyeball moving away from Gmail more and more as these stories show up. I've had my own domain for years now and have my incoming mail forwarded to gmail. It won't be hard to migrate that end of things.

I don't see myself ever dropping Android, but I'm not going to be replacing my Pixel with another one. I'll probably go towards something less "high end" and just root it for my next phone.

I think my experience is the same as many. Its not an all or nothing thing, its about gradual, manageable changes that happen over time.

At this point I still maintain my GMail account for stragglers, which forwards to my new domain. I still use YouTube since most of my favourite creators are still exclusively on there, though I have moved to Vimeo or Patreon whenever possible. I use Chrome at work due to policy, but I use Firefox at home. I don't think it's possible for me to 100% decouple, but I am no longer dependent on them, nor are they getting the bulk of my information. I think I can live with that.

Switched search engine to DuckDuckGo

Switched browser to Firefox

Moved away from Gmail. Still have my account but moved my personal domain to Zoho and started using that for most things.

So there's some effect. On the other hand, I still have an Android phone, and haven't found good replacements for Google maps and Photos

I find this list useful.

If Apple decided to ban me it would be fairly miserable, but I don't see them pulling this sort of shit in the same way FB and Google do.

My replacements are Fastmail for Mail, Contacts, and Calendar; Apple for photos, notes, and music; and Microsoft 365 for all of my office apps. I’d already used Dropbox for storage.

The Gmail accounts are still active because I’m still finding services I missed during the switch. It’s easier to notice this if I don’t forward them.

Search, I tried DuckDuckGo for a month, but just wasn’t good enough. Every fourth search ended up on Google anyway.

I'm still using other Google services. Have a Chromebook I like, and still defaulting to their search. But at least I won't be at their mercy when it comes to email.

Basically Google maps and Gmail are my main 2 google services that I haven’t yet moved away from. Apple Maps isn’t quite there yet, especially when it comes to international map data. And Gmail is something I’ve been meaning to swap out but it’s just so tedious to switch and I really don’t like the alternate options I have tried. I also have a Google Fi account for international data, because it’s the best way to get unthrottled unlimited free international data basically anywhere in the world, but I don’t use it as my main phone line domestically.

In 2013 I was one of the first Google Glass explorers and I wore it religiously for 3 years. I was google’s biggest fanboy in every way imaginable. And yet Google abandoned me, not the other way around. My switch off Google was less about privacy issues and more about the Google products and services I used to use have been either getting worse or pulled out from under me, or just aren’t worth account closure risk anymore. There’s also the privacy aspect as well, which wouldn’t be so bad if I still trusted them as a company to do the right thing, but those days are long gone.

For example switching Google Drive, the top suggestions are Nextcloud and Dropbox. I tried Nextcloud and it was horrible. Stopped after a few months of sync issues and slowness. And Dropbox is like six times the cost for the basic tier of service.

Only Google product I willingly use is YouTube (no viable competitor).

My schooling forces me to use a gmail account.

I've successfully excised their products from my life otherwise.

Email: fastmail Music: Apple Music Documents: LibreOffice, MS Office Video conferencing: Zoom, Discord (Google cloud, unfortunately)

My phone is technically Google (Pixel), but it's operating on Grapheneos

There are a couple instances where I have migrated off the cloud, but other instances where it's too much work (e-mail, etc.)

But I avoid taking new dependencies on the cloud, unless it's doing something tremendously new that I can't do otherwise.

Lists like these are excellent for people who havn’t come across or had time to look for other services yet. Maybe they were stuck thinking “it’s too hard to leave google, I’d have to make all that stuff by myself” (or the corporate equivalent for things like analytics).

In my case, it took several years of posts, paranoia and planning. I tried out a few services. I already used Safari (Apple’s another story). I switch to Firefox as my main front-end dev tool, which took some getting used to. I already had a vanity domain name and some for of email hosting. At one point I decided to flick a switch and stop using as many Google things as possible. Some time later I got sucked back into GSuite because of work and some of my hobby/social life projects. When I start my own projects, I don’t use Google.

I was an early Gmail user, got my account though an invite from a kind slashdotter. I've introduced Google docs/drive to a few organisations successfully around 2010. A few years later the privacy issues started to become clear to me and are what started my quest for ending my Google use. Around 2013 I started moving services off Google one by one, as fast as I could find satisfactory alternatives. Gmail was the last service I left, in about 2015, because it was obviously tied to external use, and for which i made a plan with timeline. Search by the way was not hard, other engines are really quite good, otherwise just use a proxy like startpage.com.

I still have an account for the odd Drive share I have to collaborate on, but other than that, zero. I even deleted the email address this year.

The main motivators for me was not having all my eggs in the same basket, and also supporting smaller single-service businesses. The privacy & tracking issues were also considerations. An unexpected benefit is that I found my relationship to tech and the internet has been simplified, partly because I'm no longer engulfed in one company's gigantic ecosystem that constantly pushes new features and new products on me like Google or Apple.

i don't need to de-google myself from search or youtube. they're read-only for me. i don't post videos to youtube. i do use the subscription feature on channels and sometimes create some private playlists, and i enjoy the recommendation sometimes finding me gems, but i could do wityout it, or even re-create it if needed. (all my subscriptions are backed up as pinboard bookmarks with tags)

I am never logged in while searching or on YouTube, which they don't like given the newest message that pops up randomly with a prompt to sign in. Mobile and PC are completely compartmentalized, I don't need to sync anything.

I use duckduckgo, since I can just add +g to get Google results and otherwise it uses Bing. Perfect for privacy and convenience.

I use Chrome and FF at work, but I vastly prefer FF. I use their services if useful, but I certainly try to minimize data exposure. Not too strict, but I think it helps.

In general I'd say not to be too pessimistic about consumer awareness. I know non-technical people who are using brave browser, do not want smart home listening devices in their houses, avoid buying from amazon, etc. A few years ago I wouldn't have expected that from them, so it feels like it's getting better (anecdotally).

Gmail and Google Maps are two services I still rely on. There's a few good online map/navigation services where I live (Prague, Czechia), and I'm starting to migrate there - it takes time to kill a habit, though.

Gmail seems like the hardest thing to let go.

Oh, and of course deleting Facebook acc a few years ago has been one of the best decisions for my mental health ever.

There is just no replacement for YouTube for now. 99% of I'd like to watch is there, most of which I can't even find a place to buy.

I guess this is where it's hard: even if an alternative is built to better YouTube on every technical aspect, the contents are just not there.

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Tangentially, I don't believe it's possible to pressure Google to do anything by not using a Google product, as long as the majority of the users, who are not at all technical, don't care.

It's practically quite meaningless, apart from making myself feel better.

I've switched to brave as my browser (curious to see what the opinion is here of brave) DuckDuckGo as a default search engine.

Proton mail for most of my email, although I am looking for a better alternative.

I've backed up everything that I used to leave on drive, I although I still work on drive then download the files, I haven't found a good alternative here.

I have a OnePlus so oxygen os for Android.

For example, I started using Google Docs again because I was required to for a job, and found some of its features useful enough that I didn't have an immediate replacement.

I reflexively use Google Translate (there are alternatives listed here that I didn't know about)

Btw: Most of these large social sites allow registering multiple emails for a user. That seems sane to use if your attack model primarily is Google attacking you by cancelling you. Keep one gmail email, and add one with your own domain. That's also a backup in case you mess up somehow with domain.

I took the plunge and switched to Fastmail recently. They've done amazing work to make that as quick and easy as possible - in about an hour, they'd imported all my mail, and I had all of my email clients set up again.

I'm mostly off Google services now, but I haven't found a good replacement for Google Maps. I've had Apple lead me into the woods one too many times to really be willing to trust it.

Just about the only Google services I still rely on are Android (Because you can't get an iPhone with a physical keyboard) and Drive, and even that I only use because it's the path of least resistance for syncing my password keychain.

Give it another 3-5 years and they might turn it around, but as far as I can tell their still costing on reputation at this point.

In order for a competitor to do so they need to first tackle search (the hardest part) but also think holistically about replacing other big "points of contact" like Browser or Email. Because Google is not just search; Google has become the infrastructure of the web.

I still have my Google account, but when I do a "takeout" there is almost nothing there.

I don't care if google know what I'm working on.

At that same time switched from GDrive to iCloud Drive.

Switched to DuckDuckGo 3 years ago.

What I still use Google for (with a fake account with fake info and a fake e-mail):

- YouTube; there is no alternative

- Google Maps when I need to use maps on my work Windows laptop

And as much as I don't think people can be completely "degoogled", we need some healthy competition to keep juggernaut's power in check. And hopefully we can nudge it towards more privacy-aware and open practices.

Gmail is the hardest for me to replace. Everything else was not difficult at all.

Firefox, DDG, protonmail, BitWarden, LibreOffice, etc. I even switched to iPhone.

The only thing I haven't been able to get rid of; YouTube. There's really nothing to replace that. At least I access it without being signed in, and in a browser on both desktop and mobile.

It is pleasant knowing that Google for some reason blocking my account would be a minor inconvenience as opposed to the destruction of my entire digital persona.

Not one post though as it was growing in me.

I stopped doing that a while ago, and now as they turn off, in moving to other options. Eg. Google music turning off printed me moving away from chrome and search

Those might be small steps, but the thoughts of google closing my account are filling me with genuine terror.

Alternatives need differentiation to specifically pick them and being not Google isn't good enough.

Ddg has bangs which make it a universal search bar.

I did completely move over to Firefox and change email providers though.

There’s no replacement for YouTube. But otherwise I’ve cut it out pretty well.

I do have to maintain old gmail accounts as they’re logins for god knows how many sites.

[1] https://github.com/searx/searx

I agree it's slow and the mobile apps are terrible. But I haven't found anything better yet.

They use Google Analytics though, boo.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Also, what on Earth is "Tech Twitter"? My forays (now abandoned as fruitless) into twitter show it as dispersed as any other social media group - if not more so.

I can't imagine anyone being able to run a cross-sectional survey of 'tech' over twitter without massive buy in from either twitter or dozens of disparate groups who would have no interest in measuring tech giant positivity scores.

no offense but is it surprising that the people who likely draw paychecks from those companies like them? The question is framed as "does tech company X do good for the world?"

Presumably if you're working in tech you're already self-selected to agree with that question or you're likely hypocritical enough to answer yes anyway. Seems like asking people in the oil industry if oil company X is good for the world

https://coda.io/signup/email

But the problem with locking yourself into a proprietary platform, be it Apple, Google, or Microsoft, is that in order to use service A, that you like, you may also have to put up with services B, C, or D, which suck. For example, you might love Google Photos, but if alongside sharing Google Photos with your friends, you have to deal with Google's endless stream of terrible short-lived chat services, that seamless ecosystem platform isn't really doing you any favors.

Just my opinion, but if you want a one-stop-shop for a Google replacement, probably Fastmail is your best bet: email+calendar+notes. ProtonMail is less well integrated, but in a year I would bet their email+calendar+vpn+secure data storage will have a better workflow. In addition to Google Workplace, I am also a paying customer of ProtonMail and Fastmail - I just don't use these alternatives right now.

Lots of choices is a good thing.

There are enough self-hosted options and third-party paid alternatives that the Google ecosystem lock-in isn't as useful as it once was to me.

I'm still not sure I understand your comment, but I would add that that even with multiple services, each can buy data from each other and from brokers, bringing the situation with them closer to a multiple-google situation.

Problems like this cannot be solved by technology.

edit: Being all Google may ultimately be more similar to the Apple proposition, where they actively fight their users to maximize their own profits, but also actively fight others for the complete possession of their users. As an Apple customer, you know that if your usage is irrelevant to their bottom line, they'll generally protect you from third parties. The reason it's not obvious that Google could be that way is because they're an ad company.

But I agree it can’t be replaced currently

There's a bit more context recently released here: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...

Even if firefox was a slightly worse product (which I don't think it is) I would still use and recommend it just for its privacy focused features recently.

Non-chromium based browsers break google's 100% ownership of the web experience and gives some leverage against undesirable change. So even those are better. On Android only firefox supports addons and easy ad blocking.

[1]: https://ente.io

Email is not secure, no matter what service you use. It is transferred in plain text between providers.

A backup of emails in gmail can be downloaded over IMAP and saved offline. Offline searches in Thunderbird are many times quicker than within gmail.

It's been a good experience, and I found the privacy settings (in Europe distribution anyway) a pleasure to disable. Collections are also a pretty nifty addon.