Breaking Up With Google - Debrief

From the get go, I never really assumed that I would be able to COMPLETELY stop using Google. Honestly, I figured I would move back to using most of their services after this experiment was over. Let’s take inventory after 2 months!

Recap

I subscribed to 13 of Google’s services, with their replacements noted:

• Chrome [Firefox]
• Search [Startpage]
• Movies/TV
• Keyboard
• Music [Spotify]
• Photos
• Drive [Dropbox + LibreOffice]
• Keep [Todoist]
• Maps
• Authenticator [Duo]
• Voice
• Mail [Proton Mail]
• Domains

After 2 months of slowly moving towards Google alternatives, I am down to 4:

• Keyboard
• Maps
• Voice
• Domains
• Google Play Music

Updates

Google Play Music

Woah woah woah, I thought you moved to Spotify!

Well I did, and I loved it.

But, as mentioned in that post, music is very much a background media for me.

It wasn’t worth an additional $10/month for something that I keep in the background. I’m on a family plan for Google Play Music/YouTube Red, and it’s incredibly cheap when maximized.

If you have a slot on a Spotify family plan, hit me up!

uMatrix

After some investigation on how to best tune uMatrix, I found out that the developer abandoned the project.

But the same functionality is available in uBlock Origin! I set it in “medium mode” and go about whitelisting as necessary.

Search

Right after I got used to DuckDuckGo, I stumbled upon StartPage.

Essentially, their servers make the Google search on your behalf, and return them to you.

Mind. Blown. I know.

Moving Forward

End of the day, how much safer do I feel? Well, not much.

If I was being super targeted, there’s no stopping big brother from finding out everything they wanted to. There are so many points of attribution that it isn’t worth it to me to seek THAT level of anonymity.

After all of this, the last product I would go back to is Chrome; Firefox is noticably sluggish in comparison.

If I count the switches to Chrome and GPM back, that puts me at 6/13. How many are you using?