Privacy | De-Google | Other Products

After I moved out of Google Search and GMail, it was time to take stock rest of the Google ecosystem and take steps to move out of those as well.

Google Chrome

This was a pretty straight forward decision. And in fact, I moved out of Chrome right in the early days. If you remain pretty much in the Apple ecosystem, then Safari is a natural choice. It has got pretty good privacy focussed defaults now and I don’t have to talk about the deep integration with the Apple ecosystem.

Firefox

However, I now use Firefox as my primary browser. Firefox has also become extremely privacy focussed in the last 18 months or so. Firefox now comes with “Enhanced Tracking Protection” that automatically blocks cross-site and social media trackers. Here’s what it can block automatically

Firefox Containers

In addition, I use an extension called Firefox Containers. This allows you to create multiple isolated containers within Firefox. I use this for two purposes:

• What it was originally intended for – if you use the same product for multiple use cases then you can run both in the same browser. For example, if you have got multiple email addresses with a service provider, you can be “always logged in” both of them. No more switching across multiple browsers
• Dedicated container for Google – for all those occasional Google searches that I still do, it all goes into a separate container
• Dedicated containers for tracking sites – any sites that are very likely to track extensively, I make sure they run on a separate dedicated container

Brave

I also hear rave reviews about this new privacy focussed browser called Brave (based on Chromium). I haven’t given it a shot yet – something that you might want to evaluate.

Google Photos

I completely migrated all of my Google Photos to iCloud. I was definitely worried about giving information about my family, how it is evolving (kids growing up, their gender and all). Given the amount of pictures that we take with or phones these days, the simple question was this – why would a service provider give unlimited storage for photos. And if you are comfortable keeping pictures of some of your private moments with such a service provider. I was not.

I switched to iCloud Photos, given, again, Apple’s focus on Privacy. And the fact that they do charge for storage beyond the initial 5GB that everyone gets.

If you are not on the Apple ecosystem, I would recommend you to choose a third party / neutral service provider like Flickr.

Google Drive / Cloud Storage

Apart from Photos, I was using Google Drive to store documents and backup. I have moved those to iCloud Drive as well. However, I did consider the following alternatives and went with iCloud Drive as it was simpler (one vendor for all data backups).

• Dropbox – I was annoyed with the fact that they either have a paltry 2 GB for free users and start with 2TB for their paid plans. I don’t need 2TB of storage. I feel most people would be just ok with 100GB of cloud storage. Even though storage prices have continuously fallen, it felt Dropbox was more interested in keeping prices high and satisfying their shareholders rather than providing options to consumers
• Sync.com – A cloud storage provider with end to end encryption
• IDrive
• pCloud

Google Pay

This is one of the hottest products now. Almost everyone has Google Pay on their phones and use it for making both online and offline payments in India. I hear great reviews from my friends and colleagues in terms of how seamless it is and the great user experience.

I didn’t bother to sign up for this from day one. To me, Google Pay is Google’s shot at getting shopping data – both online and offline. Something that is increasing becoming locked within the walls of Amazon (people no longer search in Google and buy in Amazon. They search in Amazon and buy in Amazon).

I cannot fathom the amount of data that they would be able to collect from all those transactions that go through their network. And I would highly recommend you to think if that extra convenience is worth!!

Note: For what it’s worth, I have stopped using PayTM and Amazon Pay as well for the same reasons.

Final Thoughts on Google

With that, I am mostly out of Google products. I still use YouTube though – no viable alternatives!!!

While, I have gotten rid of all the above Google products, I do realize that Google will continue to track. I guess more than 90% of websites that I regularly visit will have some kind of Google trackers. However, I feel comfortable that I at least make it harder for them.

Google was and is a company that I admire for the “technology” part. No one has pushed web and mobile as they have. No one else operates at their scale. However, I never thought that the very company that I admire also has sacred me enough.

Alongside all these free products, if they provide a “paid” option where data is not monetized, I would happily come back to this ecosystem. Until then, I will continue to De-Google my life.

---

So, how is life after all the steps? What lies ahead? Here’s the last post in the series on some of my closing thoughts on Privacy.