My DeGoogle journey

A sheep in the flock 🐑🐑     🐑    🐑🐑 Link to heading

I have been using many Google services or software for a really long time. And to be honest, and this is surely nothing new, they are pretty convenient to use. Search, GMail, Calendar, Maps, Drive, Meet, Chrome, Password Manager, Authenticator and many more are great services or software and are all either available as web applications or native apps for the desktop or mobile or both. And over the years I had to pay close to nothing for using these. But what is common knowledge now, but can’t be repeated enough: You are paying Google with your data, which is collected through all these services and software.

And I actually knew this for a long time, but I also was ignoring it for a long time, until to a point where I was no longer willing to pay that price and get out of the Google trap.

DeGoogle my life 🚫💩 Link to heading

After using the Google offerings for so many years, I couldn’t see myself replacing all of them with good alternatives immediately. And it became clear to me, that this would be an ongoing and probably long process.

So I decided to start with the easy transitions first and get to the more complex ones later.

• The things that were fairly easy to do:
  • Using WhereBy instead of Google Meet
  • Changed my default search engine from Google Search to DuckDuckGo
  • Using Bitwarden instead of Google Password Manager and Google Authenticator
  • Replacing Google Chrome first with Firefox, then with Vivaldi and after some further consideration finally with LibreWolf on Linux and IceRaven on Android
• The things I’m currently looking into replacing:
  • Google Drive for file sharing and backups with a GDPR compliant cloud service like pCloud
  • GMail with an independent, secure and also GDPR compliant provider like posteo or even with a self hosted mail server like mox
  • Google Calendar with either posteo or mox once the feature is available
  • Google Maps seems to be the hardest bit to replace. I’ve looked into some apps on android like MAPS.ME, Magic Earth, Organic Maps and OsmAnd. And as others mentioned, “the 1st step is to accept there is not one single replacement”.

It is still a long way ahead, but it feels good to be on the right track.