A process that started roughly a year ago with just changing browser and search engine, now feeling that I got somewhere. The journey ended up being more than just degoogle, but also demetaing and taking more control over my data and privacy.
Before and after picture with notes:
Chrome -> Zen browser (Firefox on iOS)
Google -> Qwant
Gmail -> Proton Mail
NordVPN -> Proton VPN (I don’t use VPN very often, but have NordVPN through another subscription, now replaced with Proton across my devices)
Google Drive / Photos -> Proton Drive
Google Password Manager -> Proton Pass
Google Authenticator -> Proton Pass / Ente (Ente Auth is only used to store my 2FA keys for the Proton account, other keys are stored in Proton Pass)
Google Translator -> DeepL
YouTube -> FreeTube (Unwatched on iOS)
Google Maps -> Magic Earth (OSM on desktop)
WhatsApp -> Signal
Notion -> Anytype
Keep / Notes -> Notesnook
X -> Mastodon / Bluesky
Reddit -> Lemmy (Voyager on iOS, dreaming of an eventual complete migration)
Instagram -> Pixelfed
Facebook -> stopped using
Windows 11 -> Ubuntu (Only personal laptop, work laptop still windows)
As predicted, here come all the purity tests.
I know there’s no way to definitively prove it, but in my mind Apple is the safer alternative vs. anything Google. I know you can do custom roms and all that, but let’s face it: It’s a huge pain in the ass. I know, I know, “It’s not really”… I beg to differ. I went through my purity phase with degoogled roms and all that. Due to driver inconsistencies, updates breaking things (even the phone part), and the inability to use a lot of “normal” apps, I gave up and went with an iPhone. Apple’s business model is to sell you the thing at a higher price, thus reducing the incentive to sell your data or enshittify. Yes, that will degrade over time and I’ll reach a threshold at which I’ll reevaluate my options. Given the two major choices, I choose the less terrible ecosystem of the two.
I refuse to have any Google or Meta products on my iPhone. I know that makes me lame here, but we should also understand that any normie would never go to all the trouble of OS tinkering. The are a lot more people who want to degoogle vs. the people who understand how to do rom flashing. Criticizing a person’s degoogle effort as “not good enough” does nothing but drive people directly into the arms of the very evil we wish to diminish. This is a community to banish Google, not everything backed by a for-profit corporation.
This sub is strangely pro Google
Not really. Research has demonstrated that iOS and Android send very similar types of data even when users explicitly request to opt out. Apple was even so arrogant as to not bother responding to the authors of this paper when they reached out for comment (unlike Google which did reply).
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
iOS is also much more hostile towards 3rd party apps than Android, greatly limiting what they can do. This makes moving to FOSS options harder.
Sounds like you haven’t tried modern GrapheneOS with sandboxed Google Play Services. Neither of these are issues for me and I’ve been using it for years after switching from iOS.
Flashing GrapheneOS takes like 2 seconds and requires nothing but a desktop/laptop and a browser. If you can read, you can install GrapheneOS with minimal effort.
Apple already proved they’ll roll over for the EU on encryption backdoors.
If it comes down to them selling in the US or not selling in the US, they’re going to roll over and do whatever the government demands.
They’re all so holding all of your data, metrics, and browsing habits securely in their hands.
When the government demands baggacips data, they’re going to hand it over, the same as Google would.
And none of this is ever a problem until the government goes kind of fascist. When browsing privacy subs on Lemmy becomes an act of treason…
Even if I’m not doing anything wrong or illegal, I sure as hell I’m not going to send my data through a VPN that logs and is known to comply with foreign court requests.
You can in fact drive yourself insane trying to stay private and secure, But I do know that trusting a single gigantic monolithic company that operates in a questionable regime to protect you from government entities is a losing battle.
Did they? They explicitly made a big deal about not doing that for the UK government’s request.
They said they would remove all encryption rather than installing a backdoor.
It’s good that this attracted some attention, but they still agreed to removed all the protections the UK requested.