My divorce from Google - One year later

So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies? I trust google with my data more than I trust Facebook or LinkedIn or Microsoft.<p>Google runs their own ad network (and it's generally an honest and upstanding ad network, unlike some others). All that data they collect on you is for their own internal consumption. If they ever sell their data, they are giving their competitive advantage to their competitors - not going to happen. Other companies are also logging and collecting every scrap of data that they can, but they aren't consumers of that data. It just gets sold to the highest bidder. I'd much rather have google tracking me and know where that data is going, than have somebody else tracking me and never knowing where that data is going to end up.

Reading his service-by-service comments paints a much less favorable picture of his Google "divorce":<p>Search: Push (possible win with DuckDuckGo booleans, possible loss with Craigslist search)<p>Mail: Push (mainly using own server, Yahoo vs Gmail not an issue).<p>Maps: Acceptable, but significant loss. ("Mapquest is ok. Yahoo! Maps are my go-to" and "Yahoo! Maps UI isn't very good, but the maps are quite usable").<p>Music and Videos: Loss. Spotify covers music, Vimeo and DuckDuckGo search covers some (most?) videos, but the overall process described is pretty painful. Many alternative video sites are likely tracking him as well (despite attempted countermeasures).<p>Images: Push. Happy using private Flickr and Shutterfly, no noted advantages.<p>Social Networking: Push. Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter (occasional) cover most things. No indication of whether or not he reasonably matched his 3000 Google+ relationships.<p>GPS: Not used.<p>Google Translation: Loss. "Babelfish is ok. Others do well, too. None are as good as I would like."<p>Apps: Not used / push.<p>So... depending on whether you break out Music and Videos and whether you count Apps, that's three clear losses out of 7-9 services, with no obvious win (other than the divorce itself). To me that doesn't look very good.

Seems pointless. Trading one hosted service with another doesn't really give your privacy back. You might be able to split your profile in different silos but what's the guarantee that the personal information won't be shared between the different service providers ?<p>What we need is a way to be able to sell server "apps" in a way where they can be monetized. Right now it's really hard to sell the application without providing the service as well because they're too hard to install.

I find the number of Google "so-what" apologists rather striking in this thread. Not saying the OP did it right or did the right thing, but as a life experiment, it seems honorable. Personally, I find Google's omni-presence a bit scary as well. I never adopted gmail (except as a throw-away address to sign up with HN and other websites :-). The other service OP didn't mention is Google Analytics: so I tell Google everything about my site, then I expect it to broker ads for me honestly?<p>In addition to the personal tracking, I really agree with the following quote from the OP:<p>"I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to the detriment of us all."

I don't really see the benefit of jumping from Google just to submit your privacy to the tender mercies of Facebook, Amazon, et. al, other than to say you did it.<p>And punting on GPS with a simple "Oh, I prefer paper maps" is a trifle disingenuous.

It's hard for me to take "Google divorce" seriously from someone who still uses Facebook.

Don't really see many items in the "Observations and Lessons Learned" categories, as he titles them, it seems mostly focused on how quitting Google makes him feel..

My additional recommendations:<p>Gmail -&#62; business hushmail<p>Google Maps -&#62; Bing Maps<p>GPS -&#62; Use an actual GPS device or one of the iOS/Android maps that download to your phone.<p>GChat -&#62; This one is tricky due to being subject to network effects. Without getting into hyper nerdy jabber or private IRC nonsense, I'd say just use OTR and be done with it if the point is privacy.<p>Google+ -&#62; meet people for lunch<p>Docs -&#62; Zoho/Microsoft Office/Open Office.org/LibreOffice<p>Google Drive -&#62; Dropbox, add encryption if you want. There are libre alternatives if you want to set up your own fileserver with automagic sync. I'm trying not to get too far out into left-field on this list.

And just in that webpage Ghostery blocked 16 scripts...

Thinking about how reliant I am on Google's services and how difficult it would be to find comparable alternatives makes me very nervous. Gmail, maps, drive, translate, search, youtube are all daily activities for me.<p>Sure I could replace drive with Dropbox but it is twice as expensive. I could replace GMail with Outlook or Yahoo but so many of my colleagues, contacts and friends get in touch with me through google talk. Plus none really compare to GMail in terms of ease of use (although I've really started to dislike the new compose feature).<p>The point is the individual pieces are probably replaceable, but no one even comes close to having such a cohesive, integrated set of products. At this point the best I can do is make sure I have an offline copy of as much as possible and hope for the best.

Personally, I just don't like to use Google because I think they are gaining way too much power to circumvent fair competition in the market, and even too much power over the lives of individuals. When I see google hardware devices running google operating systems with google web browsers and an increasing majority of people using them to almost exclusively access google web services and run google software... I'm sorry, but it's just bad news.<p>No matter how ahead-of-the-curve google innovation can be, I just don't think it's worth it to sell our souls to one company for the sake of convenience.

I've been pleasantly surprised with Fastmail.fm's new webmail interface, and am currently in the process of switching away from Google. The one thing I can't seem to find is a good replacement for Google Contacts or Google Calendar. I'm currently set up with an account at fruux.com, which does hosted carddav + caldav, but finding good clients for Linux has been more challenging than I expected.

Given his reference to downloading apps from the Play store and Amazon store... it sure sounds like he's still using an Android device.

I don't understand why everyone is so big on switching away from Google these days. Some of my coworkers have been doing this as well.<p>Instead of giving away your personal information to one place, why not give it away to 10 or 20 places?<p>I think it makes sense to use the best tool for the job. At least when it comes to email, maps, and search I would argue that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google are the best services by a long shot.<p>Not to knock Duck Duck Go, but it would drive me crazy to have to do multiple searches or go through more results just to find something I could find on Google in the first half of the first page of results.<p>Sure I would get used to it eventually, but it's not worth losing my own time/productivity over.

I thought he switched to self hosted, open source alternatives. What a silly article.

Honestly, if they are going to get your information, who cares. Out of millions and billions of the information they get, why would they be interested about specifically <i>yours</i>. That's a big problem I have when people bring up privacy issues. There are certain lines, but Google's not crossing them. Sifting through your email to give you relevant advertising is harmless - in fact, some of it is how they get information for a very powerful Google Now.

For moving away from Gmail, I'd be interested in solutions that help you data-mine ahead of time how many mailing lists/services/etc you have linked to your address.<p>It might be easy to just "switch" one day away from Gmail, but it could easily be weeks and months of manually unsubscribing/notifying/etc providers of the new address to use.

So the other services handle your data better ? Or is the just your resolution?

Ironically he is able to compare products/services......

I'm more curious what the author uses for his self-hosted email. None of the IMAP servers I've seen so far are particularly stellar.

Interesting how he did not list any Bing services as possible substitutes even for things like images, email and translation.

Email, Google search, I understand but Youtube, seriously? what can be so bad about it? Google knowing that you're one of the 5 million ppl that viewed psy video clip? Suggestions to what to watch next based on whay you've seen recently?, yes that can be so annoying, I like to browse the entire video library watching 500 videos I don't want to watch to find the right one. IMHO That is just being too paranoid ...

I love Google. Its services are quite influential in my life and improve it in many ways.

What this person is trying to get away from requires not using the internet in any way.

That post is devoid of insight and full of inaccuracies such that it could easily be mistaken for shameless attention seeking or just astroturf.

I got sick of seeing everything Google all the time, so for a change of scenery I went everything Microsoft. I even switched from Dropbox to SkyDrive because of it's tight integration with the new Microsoft Office web suite, OneNote and outlook.com.<p>Admittedly, I'm only changing one taskmaster for another, but overall the change has been good, like an upgrade.

Maybe he can stop using computers and go back to stone age.