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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I'm living a Google-free live now, and it works very well:

- DuckDuckGo as default search engine

- Own domain for email, forwarded to Apple's mail

- Apple map, Yandex map, Waze, Here WeGo for maps (depending on the country)

- For videos, I search them in DDG with "<searchterm> !yt", then copy the links I want and download them with `youtube-dl`

- Firefox and Safari

- Zoho as a replacement for online docs and spreadsheets

etc.

EDIT to add: I should say that I try to live Google-free...

Just a heads-up: Waze is owned by Google [1] now.

Waze was recommended by family for a trip to Israel.

The good news: Available for Windows Phone (which I had at that time)

The bad news: In order to use it access to my address book.

For a navigation app?

WHAT THE FUCK!

probably to suggest destinations

That would be true if it was optional, not required.

Peeves me that in order to control Spotify from Waze I have to agree to share my Waze location data w/ Spotify...

I really wish we had regulations that limited companies from blocking functionality behind data-walls.

You've certainly reduced your Google footprint. I don't think it's possible to reduce it to zero though.

What do you do about websites that use reCaptcha?

good point... browse in private mode by default, and with a VPN (which by the way means that I solve a lot of captchas :-/ )

Informative, thanks.

Hmmmm, Uber, Lyft, and Dropbox - I avoid those, too.

This was a great article. I found the one on the author attempting to cut Amazon out of her life even more interesting:

It's next to impossible. Maybe one day our antitrust laws (and the rest of our laws I suppose) will catch up to the world we're living in.