The longer I’m on the internet, the more companies I see misusing customer data, censoring content, and violating privacy. Censoring non-illegal content (whether you agree with it or not) and spying on US citizens through dark-pattern UX legalese strikes me as anti-American. It’s pretty concerning how much of the internet these companies control; its downright scary if they aren’t acting in its user’s best interests.

In light of that, I started a de-Googling challenge a month or so back, as they were my biggest super-company I was using. Here were some of my guidelines for this challenge.

• Don’t trade one concerning company for another – Apple products in my mind are just as concerning to me. They preach security, yet foster a secretive physical spying network & protocol. Apple products and services were out.
• Take back my data – I would use my personal NextCloud server for whatever I could. Interested? Follow this NextCloud referral link I get a kick-back on.
• Just for me – I only scoped this challenge to web services & mobile devices, and only for myself, not my family.
• FOSS – Free and open-source whenever I could

 

Web services

I took action on the following web services.

• Chrome – Just use Firefox. Its not quite as good as Chrome, but its very close. If  you must, Brave is good too, but they were recently hit with changing affiliate links on Amazon items, so… maybe not. Also now using NextCloud Bookmarks as my homepage to circumvent need for user syncing within a browser.
• Ad-block, privacy protection – uBlock Origin is a must. Both Chrome & Firefox have this extension.
• Google.com – Switched to Startpage.com. DuckDuckGo was my previous engine, but its results just aren’t as good.
• Password manager – KeePass (KeeWeb specifically, because it actually looks nice)
• Gmail – Switched to my personal email server and a tool that works cross-platform called Missive, a very pleasant surprise, even better than Gmail! For heavy lifting on desktop I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird.
• Google Maps – Using an extension called Privacy redirect, it auto-redirects Google Maps to Open Street Maps. I’m not really a huge fan of Open Street Maps, and will use something like Mapquest if I must.
• Google Calendar – Using my server’s CalDav now, with its built in calendar. I unfortunately still have a family calendar on Google Calendar. Fixed! Family calendar now on my server.
• YouTube – Using an extension called Privacy redirect again here which opens the link instead in Invidio.us, a de-Googled YouTube clone. For subscriptions, YouTube uses RSS, which I plug into my feed reader.
• Google Drive / Docs – NextCloud again.

 

Mobile

And on my personal mobile device, I did the following…

• Android – The real problem about Android is that the OS itself has unblock-able requests to Google all the time. I’m running waiting for Lineage OS to support on my device officially. Not having Google services installed does cripple many apps however.
• Browser – Bromite is the best Chromium out there for Android.
• Chat – Signal and NextCloud Talk do what I need for now
• Ad-block, privacy protection – NetGuard can be used as a traffic logger & controller, additionally blocking requests to Google in all your non-OS apps.
• Google Fi – Went back to a different provider.
• Google Play – A combo of F-Droid and Aurora Store.
• Camera, Calendar, Clock, Contacts, Phone –  LineageOS default apps and Simple Mobile Tools (found in F-Droid) are really quite excellent alternatives to Google’s stock apps.
• Google Keyboard – OpenBoard, but doesn’t have swipe 🙁
• YouTube app – I was using NewPipe, but found Google blocks certain videos from appearing in it. Now using Youtube Vanced.
• Google Keep – NextCloud Notes
• Google Family Link – No alternative yet. Managing it through the browser now.

 

This was way harder to do than I hoped, and I don’t feel like I’ve done all I needed to yet. It also seems to me that for less tech-saavy people, this process is completely impossible.

 

Addendum (Dec 2020)

Some of the alternatives ended up being too cumbersome, so I have recently returned to Google Calendar. Plus some of the privacy redirect options on Youtube are now gone. Told you this was hard.

Addendum (Feb 2021)

Great success! I’m running LineageOS full-time, have NextCloud configured to run all former Google Docs content and the family calendar.