How I Fully Quit Google (And You Can, Too) | Hacker News Reader

How I Fully Quit Google (And You Can, Too)

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103 pointsbenryon42 comments

I don't find it difficult to not use Google the search engine (instead opting for DuckDuckGo, only resorting to Google but for the most challenging queries). I found switching from Gmail to ProtonMail was a lot more hassle than I thought it would be (yet I still maintain my Google inboxes because I haven't updated my email on every online service yet)

I use Apple Maps when I need directions, but not when I need to look up a business. I find Yelp integration atrocious and a bit of a slap in the face.

The browser is a tough one. I have a desktop computer, which Firefox runs very nicely on.

However, on my Macbook Pro Firefox slashes battery by half, barely churning through pages and a few tabs without grinding to a halt. It's not good enough for Mac laptops, honestly. I tried. Trying Nigthly versions ever since 57.0 was released, profiling CPU usage, tracking bug reports, nothing helped. With every version I am hopeful but I don't hesitate to quit Firefox app and keep hoping the next version will be the golden build for retina Macbook Pro's.

I kinda agree with this. One place where I think user agnostic search engines are better is that your bubble is burst by default. You can see the different with Google and DDG. DDG sometimes does give outdated results but their results change sufficiently when you change the search query, not so much with google. Sometimes Google just keeps repeating the same stuff over and over.

Why not use Safari instead of Firefox?

I use FF on my 2012 mbp and it's great. using is 10.11

Web browsers:

> Avoid Opera and Vivaldi, as they use Chrome as their base. Brave is my secondary browser.

Brave is based on Chromium too, isn't it? (I don't blame the author for not knowing this; I'm not certain myself.)

Yeah Brave uses Blink. I just went to its Wikipedia page and it’s in the first sentence. Switching to Firefox would solve the browser issue though.

I think switching to Firefox is the easiest of all. You are not logged in with your Google account all the time which I would think is a big deal.

My problem would be YouTube. I spend way too much time there and none other site has half of the content.

Perhaps creating an account for Youtube only and/or browsing it inside a Firefox Multi-Account Container [1] would already go a long way.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

You can browse the entire YouTube site and play videos without any cookies even enabled.

If you don't have cookies, there are no logins by default. I've been experimenting with this and almost all sites work fine without any cookies these days (as long as you don't need to log in).

I like to use youtube-dl to automatically download videos from channels I want to follow (subscription feed replacement) and use hooktube to watch YouTube videos without providing Google with data. I haven't found a problem with that till now except for discovering new content (hooktube isn't that good with that, I found), so for that I have a YouTube only account that is pretty much disconnected from me in everyway (even IP address wise through VPN) made with non-real info. I hope that gives a few ideas for media consumption without sacrificing privacy :)

PS: I cannot add links to youtube-dl and hooktube because I'm on my phone, I believe a quick search can provide them.

I recently did the same thing. FastMail for email, Apple Maps for Google Maps (not as good as Google, but better than when it launched), DuckDuckGo for search, Firefox or Brave as my browser. I was not prepared for how long and sometimes convoluted it was to change my email address on every site/service. Some bafflingly did not allow me to change my email address. I use Microsoft OneDrive for photo storage but am looking for an alternative. It did feel momentous to delete my Google account, which was firstname.lastname@gmail.com. But it also felt liberating.

> I was not prepared for how long and sometimes convoluted it was to change my email address on every site/service.

I’ve made this recommendation before, but buy your own domain. It’s cheap, and will allow you to change your email hosting provider should Fastmail pivot their business from email to surveillance.

It’s pretty easy to set up. Others have offered, and I’ll repeat it: if you need a hand getting started, I’ll help.

EDIT: Fastmail’s instructions https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html

I used to do this - it's nice but it does come with some downsides. Like paying for the domain and hosting in perpetuity, and having to (at least nominally) manage whatever system you use for email.

Still, the only 100% secure way to do it.

The trouble isn't getting the domain and setting up the email server behind it, the issue is maintaining the email server. I am sufficiently distractible (and I'm sure I'm not alone) that it's very important that my peripheral software/devices do not bother me. With an email server (or any other kind of server really, but email is especially bad), you need to pay attention to it constantly to make sure it is up, you are not on any blacklists (which you will get on by default for the simple fact that you are a new host), etc.

You can of course set up all sorts of monitoring, but then you have to check that that is working. These concerns never really go away. You cannot truly let your email slip from your mind, because if it stops working ever you will miss emails (unless you use a relay, which is either external or also needs monitoring, etc) and that means that potentially things get closed that should not be closed, you miss things from the doctor/dentist, etc.

But that would be the point of using an email host with your own domain, right? Be it Protonmail, Fastmail, or any other, you only need to provide the domain, and they provide the actual hosting.

I just bought my .net domain name from namecheap and setup protonmail. It's been a year but I'm still surprised that people think it's cool to have an email like jack@jack.net. It's like I'm a big deal or something.

I like protonmail enough to buy their first tier email hosting, which gives this ability.

And, if I find a better email hosting service, or roll my own, my email doesn't change, of course.

I'm curious as to why you did that.

I get people wanting to use less Google services, but why quit all together?

To not be surveilled and behaviorally analyzed so much.

I’d say using less services only inconveniences you, where as at least quitting completely inconveniences Google as well because they have zero way to track you around.

> I use Microsoft OneDrive for photo storage but am looking for an alternative.

We keep a few hundred GB of family photos and videos in Apple Photos/iCloud. You could also consider Flickr now that they're owned by SmugMug

If you need RAW file archival, then most photo sites will not work and you will have to use OneDrive, Box, etc. Most free photo sites will convert or require conversion to popular compressed formats. That may be okay with many/most, however, some people will want to retain original files.

For photo storage, I personally use nextcloud for hot access and backup an encrypted copy of all my photos to Wasabi AWS S3 equivalent and Online.net's cold storage under the intensive class. I find it worth it to pay for backing up to those services since I take photos of almost everything and I would hate losing them.

It's great to see how far open-source tech has come that someone like the author is able to switch to non-google services!

Moreover, I'd just like to mention that it would be fine to leave the gmail account open if it was just for password resets, etc (I've left mine open for whatever obscure service that I might have forgotten to switch over). It is a bit annoying yes, but Google does not really get any data out of it from you apart from knowing which services you have an account on.

I also in an attempt to freed from Google Services. I switch google search engine to duck-duck go. When i used to search things related with programming / website that using "english language", DDG could compete Google. But when I start to use DDG in my country (Indonesia), DDG is failing a lot against Google.

About browser, i'd rather to use Safari & Firefox as a secondary browser.

I am trying to do this right now, I want to make android apps but I already have one strike on my account and the threat of losing everything associated with Google is too much. I already successfully moved my email but that took something like a year. Finding all the places where I used that address wasn't easy. I am now wrestling with photos, I haven't found a service that I like yet. I'll try nextcloud but I am not very keen on paying for a vps just for that and all my other have their resources allocated to running other websites. Another VERY important one for me is really Google maps. I travel a lot and both the public transport features and search are extremely useful. And last but not least apps. I don't know if I can make it with just f-droid. For example, neither maps.me or Here WeGo are on it.

To avoid this problem in the future, I would recommend registering a domain name and attaching an email address. I have switched to a different email provider three times in the last ten years without changing my email address.

Yep, that's what I did now with Namecheap and Fastmail

You should register your own domain name and using a hosting provider with email. Switching emails is a hassle, and it's so much easier to just be able to keep the same domain name forever.

Medium is funded in part by GV (Google Ventures), so maybe not fully out of Google nest yet.

Every alternative I tried for Gsuite handling email for some domains ended up being less user friendly, more expensive, or both.

I love my iphone but Google Maps is better than Apple Maps in almost every way.

I could live with DuckDuckGo if I didn't mind being annoyed 1 out of every 4 searches but I do mind. I mind a lot.

Google's Nearline cloud storage is silly cheap and always works.

From a security standpoint I have a hard time using firefox when I know chrome exists.

In short, I've decided I'll just accept privacy is dead in exchange for not being slightly angry each time I use a computing device. YMMV.

What's the point of posting a Medium members-only article? No thanks.

I am not a member nor am I signed in and I am able to read the article just fine. Just delete your cookies for the website.

Nice article by a non-techie. Although I am still a fan of Google (I worked there as a contractor and have fond memories of the experience), I have taken a middle of the road approach to Google.

I still use: Google Play Movies and Music, Google Cloud Platform, Google Photos, and Google Drive. Notice the common thread: things I pay for and that don't impact (too much) my privacy. I am a very happy customer of these services.

What I avoid: Gmail, Google web site analytics, and search.

I rely on Fastmail (with their calendar and notes) in my day to day work.

> that don't impact my privacy

> Google Photos

doesn't make sense to me

What about Google Drive, containing every document ever created on his computers.

Google has for many reasons succeeded in getting techies on their side, to the point that techies are standing by them, giving up privacy and integrity completely to a giant ad company with close ties to military and government. You could not make a worse choice for your privacy if you tried.

I do store some plain files to Google Drive and Dropbox, but mostly I created backup ZIPs, GPG them, and store for backups. My working files are on my laptop.

One thing I store as plain files on Google Drive is years of Communications of ACM PDFs, and other purchased material - it is all searchable.

Mostly though, I agree with you.

Impressed someone who doesn’t know how to code has managed to do this.

There's no alternative that even comes close to Google Inbox. Until then, i'm staying in the google ecosystem.

Yeah I tend to use Firefox and try to use DuckDuckGo - but it just doesn't seem to return results for software development that are as useful as Google does. I'm not really sure why, either.

If you live in China, the Great Firewall protects you from Google.

Unfortunately, it can't protect you from China.

Quote from TFA:

  (yes, I don’t use Facebook either)

The thing is, I don't find the same seething contempt that Facebook manages to evoke, when I use Google products. Google's stuff is legit, when push comes to shove.

Really it's that they are such a potent organization, capturing so much raw situational awareness that by way of monoculture alone, this represents an existential hazard of sorts. Even if they can dodge the monopoly bullet on paper, a rose by any other name...

By turns, comparing Google's products to what Facebook simply is, isn't even a contest. Facebook is this deformed abomination afflicting the internet in the worst ways possible.

Facebook is like thalidomide for ideas and cognitive capacity. When I browse content on Facebook, not only is there some sort of stifling claustrophobia to it all, but it's like the compromises made to present it within that awful, awful user interface seem to dim the wattage on even the most amazing things. The way people succumb to such a manipulative reality distortion field is truly disappointing.

The reason to fight Google is much more subtle than the reason to fight Facebook. At least with Google, they're producing things that work, things that don't deceptively hobble practical utility in confounding ways. Facebook is this underwhelming quicksand of unredeeming zombification.

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