How to slowly de-Google your life

What we know about Google today:

• They have a LOT of your data
• They don’t respect your privacy 
• They’re enthusiastically bending to fascism before even being asked

It’s time for you to leave them. It’s daunting and scary — Gmail was my primary mode of email for about 20 years — but you gotta do it. They already removed Black History Month from their calendars and changed their maps to reference Gulf of America before being asked. They're bending the knee and they have all your data to just give to the regime if they wanted it.

Before we dive in, though, it’s best to be clear about the goals of de-Googling your life and the reality of your digital footprint.

You cannot take back the decades of data you’ve already given them. G knows you exist and probably has a clear profile of who you are. The point of all this is to try to mitigate the amount of data they collect on you going forward and to try to stop contributing to their revenue as much as you possibly can.

This is going to inform your choices in services. Maybe this project encourages you to stop using big tech services altogether. Maybe you even take it a step further and seek out the most private options. Or maybe you have a job that lives on Google Workspace so you can only de-Google your personal life. Or, like me, you have a family with shit to do, and you just need an easy off-ramp and can’t go full hermit mode.

My personal de-Googling journey was mostly informed by convenience. My family is already in the Apple ecosystem, so it was easy for me to just switch over to the tools I was already paying for. I won’t get into whether or not Apple is a more ethical choice (not really), but Advanced Data Protection is sufficient enough for my privacy needs. Also, I am the Tin Foil Hattie in my family, and these people were not going to follow me to a service nobody’s heard of, so it is what it is.

However, this is not the situation nor the best approach for everyone, so I'm going to take the principles here and expound. I won't lie – de-Googling is a long and annoying process, but it's not impossible. And because the point here is mitigation and not having to scrub yourself from the internet entirely, I'll give you different levels of approach and you can choose to do all of them or just some of them.

Easy: Change your default search engine

The easiest place to start is to change your default search engine in your desktop and mobile browsers, as this is usually just one setting you have to adjust, and you never have to think about it again. Here are some alternatives:

DuckDuckGo: This has long been the standard in privacy, but some users say the search results have tanked in recent years. The advantage is that it comes with most modern browsers and can be chosen as the default without having to install any extensions.

Startpage: This is another anonymized search engine that gives you both Google and Bing results allegedly without tracking you. However, they are now owned by an advertising company, so proceed with caution. You may have to install an extension in certain browsers to be able to use this as your default.

Brave Search: This is the search engine used within the Brave browser, which I use as my default in Safari. It has its own indexing and gives the best results, IMO.

Easy: Change your default browser

Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop using Chrome. It's not just a privacy nightmare; it's inefficient and there are far better browsers out there. Switching your default browser is another thing that you can just set and forget, as most modern browsers have easy ways of importing all your bookmarks and other preferences. My recommended alternatives:

Firefox: As an iPhone/Mac user, I use Safari with AdGuard primarily, but have Firefox installed as a backup. It's highly extensible.

Brave: I waffle back and forth about whether or not I should be using this browser, mostly because the CEO has shitty politics and it's still built on Chromium, but Brave Shields work really well on ad and tracker blocking. Of all the Chromium browsers, it is the best one.

Medium: Move out of GDrive

This one is a little more time consuming (to transfer data) and will likely cost you money, so I've set it at a medium effort.

I use iCloud Photos and Drive because it's something I already pay for. For people not in the Apple ecosystem, I've seen Dropbox and Ente most often recommended. I have also personally moved out of Dropbox because it's expensive and I feel some type of way of putting all my data in another American tech company, and I've moved on to the following cloud providers:

Filen: This company is run out of Germany and touts end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. Its desktop app is pretty smooth, and they also offer lifetime plans that are stackable.

pCloud: Another cloud company based in Switzerland that also offers lifetime plans that are often discounted. Do be careful to use separate encryption (like Cryptomator) before uploading content here, though.

Medium: Transition to another email provider

Most of us on Gmail have been using it for literal decades, and the thought of moving onto something else is going to seem like a gigantic hassle no one has time for. So we do this one in steps:

First, choose another mailbox provider and set up a new account.

Remember: the primary goal here is to move data off of Google and prevent them from tracking you going forward. You just want a service that won't be scanning all of your emails to serve you ads. Proton and Tuta are secure options, if that's what you need, but do note that for fully secure email, whoever you are communicating with must also be using encryption. I'm using a combination of Proton and iCloud.

A quick caveat before you move forward:

The best practice is to configure every service you use with a different alias/email address, so you can easily kill that alias if the service sells your data and you start getting spam. There are many services out there that do this and will route all of your email to your primary inbox, so it's a lot easier to do this than it sounds. With iCloud, they offer Hide My Email. Proton integrates with Simplelogin, which is a similar service. There's also addy.io which integrates with Bitwarden.

Second, start changing your email in the services you use the most.

Again, you're ideally going to do this with a different email alias for each service, but it's entirely your choice. I have all my utilities and important accounts going to one email address, and I use a different Hide My Email alias for every other service, including shopping and media. For social media, I use a different alias for each account, and have that forwarding to Proton.

This is not something you need to do in one sitting. As you log into different websites over the course of a week or a month or several months, just change your contact/login info as you go along.

Third, set up a separate alias for Gmail to forward to.

Proton has a service configured outside of Google that automatically forwards all your future email to your new inbox. If you aren't using Proton, I recommend using one of the aforementioned alias services to set up a new one only to be used within Google's settings for forwarding (thus, you aren't giving Google your real email address).

Fourth, download all of your old email from Google Takeout.

This is a good practice, but not super necessary if you don't plan on deleting your old email and still want to be able to search through your archive in Gmail. If you want to be ready to leave Google for good, though, just grab all of your .mbox files and move them into another database or email app. I moved my stuff into DEVONthink and Apple Mail, so I can still look for important emails in the app of my choice.

Hard: Find decent alternatives to everything else

This is really the most difficult part of de-Googling because you have a ton of different options for other services, and none of them are that great.

I know the easiest transition for calendars and office tools is Microsoft 365, but I would never recommend them as an alternative to Google if the whole point is keeping your data from being used and sold. I'd sooner recommend the Apple tools for everything (including Maps), but they work best on Apple devices and I have no idea how they function on Android or Windows.

The r/degoogle wiki has the best list of alternatives I can find, but you can also refer to these European alternative lists, as they are bound by GDPR which is marginally better than whatever bullshit we have going on here in the States.

Hard: Completely de-Google on your Android device

I don't have an Android device outside of my e-readers, so I don't really know how to do this, but I know it's not impossible. r/degoogle is a great resource for information on how to do this.