We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
Not nearly enough. I use DDG as my search now and I have always used Firefox.
I use an android phone, I use Gmail and Google calendar extensively. I use Google photos. I use Google drive for documents.
I have just ordered a mini-pc to replace my raspberry pi, I hope it is powerful enough to host nextcloud so I can use that for documents instead of Google docs. And I will look for a Google photos alternative.
I want to turn off location history in my Google account but I like having the history so I am looking for an alternative. I found a self hosted location history project years ago but I can’t find it now.