I\’ve had enough of Google. Larry and Sergey came up with a great search engine. The motto \”Don\’t be evil\” was woven into the fabric of their products.
Until it wasn\’t. And now it isn\’t.
I was a big fan of Google. I literally wrote the book on Google AdSense.
I was one of the few who used and shared Google Helpouts before they screwed it up.
I use Gmail, Drive, Calendar, YouTube, Chrome, Chromecast and still have an AdSense account.
Google IS evil. They are spying on you, likely selling your information to domestic and international organizations that do NOT have your best interests at heart, and they have become Big Brother. The attached video (ironically hosted on YouTube) is just one of many revealing how in many ways Google behaves like a fascist, totalitarian dictatorship. (And don\’t give me the \”they are a private company, they can do whatever they want B.S.\” They are clearly violating the law.)
And so it is time to finally get off the Google bandwagon. I have persuaded @Travis Wright to go along on the ride with me.
Here are the steps to De-Googlefying…
1) Switch to the Brave browser and DELETE Chrome. It\’s fast, it\’s decentralized, and you get paid for sharing your information. Go to Brave.com. It\’s super-easy to do on laptop, desktop and mobile. I\’m posting this from Brave and will be deleting Chrome from ALL my devices as soon as I am done with this post.
2) Get off Gmail. Super hard to do, but I am looking at options now. There\’s no way our email is truly private in Google\’s hands. No way. The hard part is that I have a couple addresses that ARE Gmail addresses. I suppose I can forward those until I change that address.
3) Get off Google search. This may be the worst offender of privacy. Use DuckDuckGo.com instead. You may not get as perfect the search results, but its good enough. And they don\’t track you.
4) Get off Drive. If I can find a solution that ports drive along with email, I\’ll use that.
5) Get off Calendar. See #3. I\’m looking at KolabNow as a suite of tools to manage #2-4.
6) Unplug and get rid of my Chromecast. I don\’t really use it anyhow.
7) Remove AdSense from my sites. Yes, the guy who wrote the book on AdSense is kissing AdSense goodbye. Google can Kiss My AdSense! haha…
8) YouTube. But I\’m going to stop uploading videos there and choose a decentralized service such as D-Tube instead. I\’ll likely keep my account with existing videos. This is a challenging one.
What other services am I missing?
Google has cleverly caught us in their net and made it difficult to use other services. And many will shrug it off and say it isn\’t worth it. That\’s up to you. This is something I\’ve wanted to do for a few years and haven\’t wanted to deal with it. But I finally asked myself \”so when?\” Now. It begins now.