How to degoogle

Date: 01/19/22

Tags: Software,

Google's Popularity

Google is like a household name to a lot of people that use the computer. For the price of 0 DOLLARS the registered account gets access to free email. Email is essential for authenticating accounts, messaging freinds and a lot of things. So you need a email and you just turn to google.

I remember being super young and someone brought up having a email. Saying: "You can't make a google account without being over 13!"

I thought this was strange and wanted to see if this was true. Going to my computer I tried and was locked from making a account, just because I was 8 years old and not 13. What I didn't know is all the information I just gave to google right the and there. I gave my real birth date, name, last name probably home address. Everything.

Now imagine this scenario with people actually use the google service.

Google's services

With google you get a LOT of services. Each and every one of them is proprietary. Each and everyone of them gives your data to google. I want in this article to go over them and show some good alternatives.

Gmail

This is a tough cookie to get away from. A lot of privacy/GNU/Linux enthusiasts even use gmail. Email is not secure. Go to searxand find out why. So you might be thinking why not use gmail? All your messages go to google's services as well as using proprietary software just to create a account. Even if you used proprietary software to create it a long time ago and are sitting nicely with a gmail drawer of emails in your email client. Your still having all your emails able to be read by google. That is not fun at all.

The solution this is using a alternative mail service. There are a couple at the time of posting this article that I think are good.

• Tormail is some sort of mail service managed in tor. I haven't used it myself

• Disroot is a public email service. All your emails could be read by disroot but at least disroot isn't google. So far there aren't any privacy claims against them.

• matthewevan.xyz. Matthew Evan or MattMadness actually gave me a email that works online and on the phone through a web app. It also should work through a email client. Possibly you can ask him and he will grant you with a awesome email

Youtube

Youtube is terrible and I bet it will be a cause for the death of humanity. I covered out more reasons and how to switch from youtube to something else in this article: Do not use Youtube.

G Suit

Google's g suit is a set of office tools. A obvious and really great alternative to this is https://[libreoffice Libreoffice docx exports to g suite products from my experience in the past were good.

Google's Search Engine

Google is named by its search engine. The alternatives to google's search engine are a LOT.

• Searx, I made a article on this already on how to set it up: Search Engines (Searx)

• SearxNG is searx but more modern looking.

• Whoogle is basicly a google viewer

• DuckDuckGo I only advise using duckduckgo if your on your phone and have no other option.

Google maps.

The best alternative to it is not waze that is literally also owned by google apparently. The best alternative is openstreetmaps. It for sure isn't a perfect solution. But at least you will find yourself using googlemaps/waze less.

Chrome Browser

There is absolutely no reason to use chrome. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/chrome.html This article does a great job explaining how bad it is. There are very few browsers left out there that are decent even.

• Qutebrowser is great with the only downside of it being that you need to know some basic vim keys to use it. However you should be able to just use your mouse for everything.

• Otter-Browser In development but looks awesome

• Ice-cat Best browser ever. Just you may need a regular browser for some things.

Google Drive

Nextcloud does a lot of things but primarily its supposed to back up files and be a google alternative. https://github.com/nextcloud/providers Here they show all the public instances, but you can obviously host your own

Google Playstore

Fdroid is a libre software focused app store for phones.

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