We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
(sigh) Probably not enough. I was enthusiastic about Google when I first started using it in 2002 (twenty years ago, it really was a cut above other search engines) and had intense loyalty to the brand, which hasn’t entirely evaporated. I still use the search engine from time to time, still use Gmail, still use Android phones. There’s a lot Google was doing right at the beginning, but eventually, they cast aside the façade of “don’t be evil” and revealed themselves to be only slightly less sleazy than Microsoft.
I still use Microsoft products, too. Just could never get used to the taste of Linux in my mouth.