Bye, Bye, Google

It’s fascinating how regularly the beloved underdogs of the tech world rise to become monopolistic titans, betray (or are perceived as betraying) their original ethos, and are turned on and repudiated by the technorati. I’ve seen it happen three and a half times in my life: the monopolistic phase for Microsoft, the rise and repudiation of Google and Facebook, and something along those lines for Apple (though they’re somewhat <i>different</i>, probably because of very snide perception-management).<p>I’m not saying it’s wrong (I actually think it’s fair), it’s just that the regularity is amusing. When Microsoft was represented by a Locutus-ified Bill Gates on Slashdot two decades ago, “do no evil” open-source champion Google could do no wrong,<p>I was about to write “oh, how far the mighty have fallen!” but upon closer consideration that would be the wrong epithet. It’s precisely because it has not fallen, and because it has become <i>too</i> mighty, that is now viewed with ever-growing suspicion.<p>The vaunted free market that so enamours Silicon Valley and digital utopianists cannot avoid corrupting these companies’ moral cores, apparently. Quite the opposite of the declared ethos.<p>EDIT: The cherished underdogs of today, if they do not succumb, regularly become the maligned monsters of tomorrow. It’s almost as if there’s something built into the system that corrupts them...

This is amazing. So many people are starting to de-Google their life. It somehow become a popular subject. Earlier this week Fast Company wrote [1] about it, DuckDuckGo reached 1 billion monthly searches [2] and it&#x27;s a common thing to see in Hacker News&#x27; posts lately.<p>I&#x27;m personally very happy with the raise of awareness. I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;s will reach the regular folks.<p>I realized this a few months ago when I started Simple Analytics [3]. I see that advertising is almost done automatically by the press. When Facebook or Google has bad press, it&#x27;s great for privacy first tools.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;90300072&#x2F;its-time-to-ditch-google-analytics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;90300072&#x2F;its-time-to-ditch-googl...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DuckDuckGo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1091709578444750849" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DuckDuckGo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1091709578444750849</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpleanalytics.io&#x2F;?ref=news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpleanalytics.io&#x2F;?ref=news.ycombinator.com</a>

Congratulations! Personally, I&#x27;m not that radical but I agree with the motives.<p>I don&#x27;t use gmail or google docs for anything essential and have my own email address for the past 20 years anyway, but getting away from Youtube is harder. There is a lot of interesting content on Youtube, like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown, and I wouldn&#x27;t know where to find this elsewhere. I also use Youtube for its intended main purpose, listening to illegally pirated music content. I don&#x27;t understand how Youtube&#x27;s management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far, it seems that the laws in this area are applied extremely selectively. Anyway, you can find and listen to almost any record from any time period at any time on Youtube without paying a cent, and I haven&#x27;t found a replacement for that yet either.

I avoid Google when possible, but... can we stop saying shit in these articles that isn&#x27;t proven true? Google doesn&#x27;t release your email address if you delete it. Squatting isn&#x27;t an issue there.<p>When we just start saying things that are proven incorrect it makes the entire discussion look like a bunch of spooks, it&#x27;s not helpful.

I have just done the reverse process. I decided that with integrated Cloud Search (of Gmail, docs, sheets, calendar, Drive, etc.) that help me quickly find research notes, etc. on all devices, that I quit Fastmail (which is an excellent service!) and transitioned to a $10&#x2F;month Google G Suite account. I find it well worth the money.<p>I still use DuckDuckGo and my once a month visit to Facebook is done with a container to avoid FB tracking. I also don’t use Google Analytics on my web sites (except for my blogger account, no way around that). Using Firefox containers for all separate browsing modes is the advice I give my family and friends. I do still use GCP because I like it better than AWS, but that is just a personal preference (AWS is also a great service).

I have also de-Google-ified and it wasn&#x27;t a very focused effort or a life goal.<p>Google&#x27;s productivity apps win via their integration, but when judged individually the alternatives are better, at least for me.<p>E.g. if you use Google Drive it&#x27;s hard to not use Gmail because the price of a G Suite Business subscription is really good, but then Google Drive&#x27;s desktop client is a piece of shit that doesn&#x27;t work. If you use Gmail it&#x27;s hard to not use Chrome, because Gmail doesn&#x27;t play very well with classic IMAP desktop clients and for the web UI the &quot;offine email&quot; feature is Chrome-only, plus Gmail&#x27;s web interface is now really bloated and slow and by using it in Chrome it sucks the least, because Google doesn&#x27;t give a crap about other browsers. If you&#x27;re on G Suite, it&#x27;s hard to not use Google Docs, it&#x27;s great for collaborative editing, but compared with Microsoft Office it has performance issues and has missing features that makes it painful to use for serious stuff.<p>There are 3 products that are hard to replace:<p>1. Google Search can give better results, but usually DuckDuckGo does the job well; I switched to DDG after noticing ads following me on the web based on searches I did<p>2. Google Maps (and Waze) because they have really good real-time traffic information, otherwise the POIs are better in OpenStreetMaps in my country<p>3. YouTube which currently has no replacement if you&#x27;re a consumer<p>I&#x27;m not a fanatic btw, if Youtube Premium would be available in my country, I would pay for it.

&gt; [...] they have access to most of our web browsing via Google Chrome (62.5% market share – although given the amount of broken websites (some explicitly Chrome-only!) I’ve found since switching to Firefox, I believe this number may actually be higher)<p>Anecdotal, but I got in touch with a pretty popular newsletter hosting tool to tell them the charts on Firefox didn&#x27;t render correctly, only to be told to use Chrome.

For those who host their own email (read: use your own domain for incoming), I&#x27;d like to remind&#x2F;raise awareness about using `.io` which had two pretty serious security incidents recently (&lt;3 years). Last incident: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehackerblog.com&#x2F;the-io-error-taking-control-of-all-io-domains-with-a-targeted-registration&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehackerblog.com&#x2F;the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...</a>

For anyone interested in more alternatives, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;switching.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;switching.social</a> is a well-written and maintained directory.

Should we start de-Googling our lifes after the monopolistic market share of smartphones? Most privacy violations exist in Android phones and personally there&#x27;s no way I could give 1000$ for an Apple phone. If there was a trully open source mobile OS that could run on every mobile CPU with every necessary drivers we could actually build cheap phones without any software from Google. Imagine if phones were like desktops and you could grab a tiny motherboard stick some RAM, a CPU, a flash drive and you were ready to go.

Some privacy-conscious Gmail alternatives from Europe (I use them all):<p><pre><code> - Mailbox.org (DE), from 1€&#x2F;month, basic custom domain, aliases possible - Posteo.de (DE), from 1€&#x2F;month - Migadu.com (SUI), from 4€&#x2F;month, run unlimited custom domains with very flexible settings (mailboxes, aliases, forwarding)</code></pre>

I switched to Fastmail from Gmail years ago. In the beginning I missed the tagging when I went back to a folder structure, but you get used to it. Other then that, I&#x27;m super happy and can only recommend the service.

I am doing the same. Chrome was the hardest move but Safari got much better recently and 90% of the websites are working perfectly only few exceptions. Has anybody tried Amazon Workmail yet? I would be interested in the experience.

What are your guys thoughts on using Android? I really do prefer it to iOS, but the urge to de-Google has me seconding guessing my OS choice. I&#x27;ve thought about using LineageOS or something, but from what I understand is many people do not like using it without Google Play services enabled.

More and more people are using Google docs instead of Ms office. How do you get away from having a Google account to edit a shared doc that another company or consultant had shared with you? Keep a dummy account just for these instances?

Cool... Congratulation. This is a project for me as well, which started two months ago. Still moving the drive files and re-registering all accounts where I used @gmail.com and my domain email. It&#x27;s a pain after 16years. Everyday something pops up which I didn&#x27;t consider. I&#x27;m doing it with own server (hetzner) and protonmail.

I de-Googled completely a few years ago and it&#x27;s nowhere near as difficult as people think.<p>The initial switching of accounts can be tedious, but it&#x27;s a one-time job, and there are alternatives all all Google&#x27;s services out there (some better than Google&#x27;s offerings).<p>Personally the dreaded &#x27;convenience hit&#x27; was temporary for me.

&quot;If it&#x27;s not open source, it&#x27;s not safe&quot; - Richard Stallman.<p>DuckDuckGo is not open source. DuckDuckGo says they don&#x27;t track but you never know.<p>Let me give you a trivial example.<p>Bill Gates wrote the program for seat allocation for his school. He made sure girls he liked sat near him. If Bill Gates had to submit the source code, he could been caught. But he didn’t and his practice continues till date. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.in&#x2F;Bill-Gates-and-Paul-Allen-hacked-their-schools-computer-to-help-Gates-meet-girls&#x2F;articleshow&#x2F;50856013.cms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.in&#x2F;Bill-Gates-and-Paul-Allen-hac...</a>

I have migrated away from Google for personal stuff, except for Maps, and I&#x27;ve not found any alternatives for my use cases. I&#x27;m fine with Apple Maps or Waze for general navigation. But I also use Google Maps for two things.<p>(1) Keeping track of my saved places. These are split into a bunch of lists: Favourites, coffee shops, restaurants I want to try, general places I want to travel, etc. (Because Google Maps&#x27; place system is an afterthought, I also have to split it up by area: So I have &quot;NYC coffee&quot;, &quot;Berlin coffee&quot;, etc., otherwise the list view becomes impossible to use, ugh.) Apple Maps allows you save &quot;favourites&quot;, but that&#x27;s all. My ideal app would let me easily manage lists, add notes and photos and so on, and share the lists to collaborate with people, and group things like Google Map&#x27;s little-known &quot;My Maps&quot; feature.<p>(2) Keeping location history. I just want the ability to see where I&#x27;ve been, going back forever, as a kind of automatic diary (where was I on July 4, 2016 again? Oh, that was that party). Google Maps is neat in that it magically figures out what transportation method you used to travel, and uses your saved places as a hint to figure out what location you were in at any given moment. I don&#x27;t want Google to have this data, of course. There&#x27;s an iOS app called Life Cycle which is pretty good (for example, it has a view showing all the countries you&#x27;ve been to), but it&#x27;s not fine-grained enough. Day One, an actual diary app, only remembers your location history for 30 days or so.<p>Any tips?

De-google-ify Internet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;degooglisons-internet.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;degooglisons-internet.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

&gt; explicitly Chrome-only<p>That’s a thing?! Web developers have already forgotten those ridiculous “Made for Internet Explorer” badges and the mess that caused? We won that fight! Wtf!

My main problem in getting away from Google is: who will protect my email&#x2F;phone accounts as well as Google does with GMail and Google Voice? Sadly, those are the main means of authentication for my multiple financial accounts (for most banks phone and emails are the only 2FA methods available).<p>I am not worried about the privacy issues, I&#x27;m mostly worried about Google deciding to terminate my account for some reason. I&#x27;m also not worried about getting locked out due to losing my 2FA secrets, since I backup them in multiple places.<p>The obvious solution would be: buy my own domain and then connect it to another email provider or G Suite, right?<p>However, now I have a point of failure that is my domain registrar and my DNS provider, and I&#x27;m sure that even the ones that offer strong security (e.g. Gandi with U2F) are more prone to getting successfully hacked than @gmail.com, from both a technical point of view (e.g. attackers violating their systems and change the DNS records for my domain) and social engineering point of view (e.g. crafted support requests pretending to be me and begging to reset my 2FA).

He mentions a number of &quot;de-Google&quot; measures.<p>Here is one he omitted: What if those running websites stopped treating &quot;Googlebot&quot; as different from any other &quot;bot&quot;?<p>No more preferential treatment for Google.<p>What if websites made it as easy as possible for anyone to download&#x2F;copy&#x2F;create a webcache like Google&#x27;s (or even just a small cache of a particular segment of the web that interests them).<p>Nothing would radically change and democratize the web faster. No need for every web user to use the same search engine, believing it has a superior cache. With preferential treatment removed, every search engine could have the same cache of the web&#x27;s public information.<p>We could have a content-based web instead of a location-based one. There could be unlimited locations from which to retrieve any of the web&#x27;s public content. (&quot;CDNs&quot; already hint at the effiencies of this approach.)<p>As another commenter points out, switching to DuckDuckGo is more or less switching to Bing, which one might argue is just a copy of the Google webcache (Microsoft did not build it from scratch).

I was doing my own, much lighter de-Googling, (also last week). I&#x27;ve been really impressed by the amount of control you get with Fastmail. You can add all the domains and aliases you want, including ones that forward to multiple addresses, the filtering rules are very useful, and everything feels much more transparent than Gmail.<p>I haven&#x27;t moved all my stuff off Google, and I don&#x27;t expect to, but I find it really interesting how straightforward it is to move PIM stuff to other services. Contacts, calendars and mail really haven&#x27;t changed much over the years. There is some stuff missing, but it&#x27;s refreshing being able to add features by choosing the right software (or, heck, fixing it myself) rather than hoping for Google&#x27;s unlikely mercy.<p>(Granted, I found this notion harder to stomach until they killed Google Inbox, at which point it became clear they&#x27;re going all in on not bothering).

&gt; I’ve debated deleting the @gmail.com e-mail address, but I think it’s wiser to keep it and essentially squat the username lest someone else take it over and cause me trouble down the line.<p>No need. The google does not allow to register email addresses that was already deleted.

I submit that you did not, in fact, &quot;de-Google&quot; your computer usage. Not entirely at least. You may have reduced your usage of a handful of their core services, but until you&#x27;re running every device you use through a tunnel that completely filters out their entire IP space like this person[1], you haven&#x27;t truly discovered just how deep they have their tendrils into your every day Internet usage (fonts, analytics, ads, GCP, etc).<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-u...</a>

I&#x27;ll recommend before deleting everything, download all your data, or at least everything that google have stored, you can do it here [1].<p>If you&#x27;re in Europe you can apply the Right to be forgotten, implement that can be a real pain (data engineer here), link for the template[2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;answer&#x2F;3024190?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;answer&#x2F;3024190?hl=en</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gdpr.eu&#x2F;right-to-erasure-request-form&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gdpr.eu&#x2F;right-to-erasure-request-form&#x2F;</a>

I think deGooglying is easy but less important than stop using Facebook services yourself. As in case of Facebook you have to make your family stop using Facebook services before it can really make an effect

I de googlified over a year ago, but just realised I was still serving some fonts for my site via google... I&#x27;m totally happy to be &quot;mostly&quot; google free now.<p>I still need my hit of youtube... :(

I de-Googled as much as possible last year. It was surprisingly painless as I already used custom domain. Gmail to Soverin, GFonts to self hosted, GA to Clicky, Drive to iCloud&#x2F;iWork etc.<p>Haven&#x27;t yet managed to give up Google Maps as I still don&#x27;t fully trust Apple Maps for driving directions. Although the way GMaps refuses to save locations without search history turned on is seriously annoying, and a dark pattern to boot.<p>All other Google products, like YouTube, I refuse to use while signed in.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good, privacy-focused domain registrar? All of mine are on Google at the moment but I&#x27;d like to switch away.

&gt; Why go through all this trouble? I’ve grown increasingly concerned this past year with how much access Google has to our lives. They are the world’s biggest advertising company and they have access to most of our web browsing<p>I come across this sentiment all the time, but serious question: why does this bother people?<p>Does anybody have practical examples of real harm being done that would have been prevented by deleting Google?

I wrote an article with some other ways to unGoogle [1]. I still intend to revisit Part II but self-hosted email kicked my ass. I&#x27;m open to suggestions though.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honestrepair.net&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;un-google-your-life-part-i&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honestrepair.net&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;un-google-...</a>

I almost finished de-google-fy my digital life as well, but I really can&#x27;t fully leave Youtube, there is simply too much good content there.

I think the pendulum is slowly but surely on it&#x27;s way back towards decentralization. More and more people are getting increasingly concerned about the explotative behavior and control these mega corps have. An enormous amount of progress still needs to be made in terms of viable alternatives, increased awareness by the general masses, and easier accesability for adoption.

Is there a service that will let you upload a video and then it cross posts it to your YouTube &amp; PeerTube &amp; Vimeo etc.? - similar to those apps that can cross-post a social media post to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.<p>I like the idea of moving away from Google, but I also think it might be good (in terms of content) if you could post to many platforms instead of one.

How did you change the two factor authorization codes from Google Authenucator? I think they are needed for crypto sites like Kracken.

&gt; I started by moving all of my websites off of Google App Engine and onto a dedicated box that I had already owned. That was straightforward enough.<p>That surprises me, that it was straightforward, I haven&#x27;t used GAE for some time, but when I did it was python but with a custom ORM etc. - you couldn&#x27;t just use anything.

While I admire the author&#x27;s choice, individual actions, even when considered as a whole, are not going to fundamentally change things without regulation or other higher force pushing against a company&#x27;s practices. Which has more of an effect - fuel efficiency standards or people choosing to buy a hybrid?

This is great to hear! I forget exactly where it was posted but a journalist attempted to do this and she was not as successful as you.<p>I started the process, but it’s going very slowly. Mostly because I didn’t want to leave Gmail. But since you mentioned the 1Password truck, I will try that. Great post!

I&#x27;ve moved all my stuff off of Google infrastructure...except YouTube. I tried using streaming services and the content just isn&#x27;t there.<p>I really don&#x27;t know how a company or system will be able to steal the traffic from YouTube...it seems like it&#x27;s too big.

&gt; I’ve made it forward and delete any new mail it gets to @defn.io<p>Deleting doesn&#x27;t do much, by that time Google already gobbled up all they needed. You&#x27;ll get the real benefit when the trickle of emails to that address dries up.

Does anyone have a good alternative to Google Maps? I recently purchased a Nexus 5X and installed LineagosOS with no Google Services. The one thing that I am having trouble with is finding a good navigation application.

Interesting enough for me, I degoogled around 2005. And just now I have to use their online office tools and mail. Its horrific experience. (1) gmail is ugly and unproductive- not even possible to attach another mail to an email, seriously? (2) Calendar - omg, what is this. Its clunky, invites are unreadable and difficult to parse. Want to send a quick note that you are running late? There is no mail integration with the calendar... (3) Sharing - everyone over shares documents, the UI encourages, sometimes even silently grants powerful permission to others. So people have access to things they shouldn&#x27;t- this is a real security issue in my opinion. (4) list goes on...<p>I really never thought I would miss Microsoft Office, but GSuites really makes me miss Office.

For me the hardest part is other accounts associated with an old email address. I’m also moving away from google, but it is tiring to change accounts associated with gmail address to a new one

When everyone in the comments mentions Gmail are you referring to @gmail.com switching or GSuite? Two different policies. Just curious why people don’t consider it an option.

I am making an open source alternative to Google news at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.condense.press" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.condense.press</a>

Bye bye Google Bye bye Facebook Bye bye private surveillance state by advertisement companies selling private information for profit

Your site is really performant Bogdanp. Mind me asking if you use a paid host or something like netlify?

Be very careful if you somehow lose your phone number... You might lose your Gmail account completely.

I don&#x27;t know how to quit Gmail. Any suggestions?

welcome! Have you tried Protonmail instead?

&gt; While I don’t believe that folks working at Google are actively trying to do harm<p>This is my issue with all these de-Googling articles. In what way has anyone had harm put on them by anything Google has done?<p>Ignoring technical glitches where one has lost email or docs files and similar, or legal issues the user got themselves into, what harm has Google caused to anyone?

Outlook online now has labels (categories) and skype chat (that works) built in online. The spam filter sucks for me though.

Switching from one email service to another instead of self-hosting, isn&#x27;t he just trading a cow for a cattle?

I second Fastmail. GMail is 6MB now according to devtools, Fastmail is about half a meg. The latency in Gmail using any non Google browser makes it unusable.

Great. Congratulations.<p>&gt; (62.5% market share – although given the amount of broken websites (some explicitly Chrome-only!) I’ve found since switching to Firefox.<p>There is a reason why this percentage is high. Other browsers suck, firefox for me takes forever to start and don&#x27;t get me started about how long it takes to load a website. It has been copying chrome with it&#x27;s last few updates but still way too far. I would happily switch to an alternative to chrome which is equally good or atleast is near it but there aren&#x27;t any I believe.