Why de-googling my life was a complete waste of my time
Are you considering de-google your life? Worried that Google knows too much about you? Well, I tried it and here’s why it was a complete waste of my time.
First, my reasons for wanting to ungoogle myself
To be clear, I don’t hate or fear Google.
Before I explain why I wanted to remove my life from Google, I want to clarify that I don’t think Google is a bad company. And no, Google is not bribing or sponsoring me to say this. Yes, there are a lot of things the company does that aren’t great, but I think they’re positive overall.
For example, Google Chrome is a privacy nightmare, I agree, but they are also behind Chromium, its open source foundation. It powers some of the best browsers on the market, including the one I use every day: Brave. Likewise, Android may be overloaded with trackers, but Google is also behind the AOSP (Android Open Source Project), which made alternative mobile operating systems like LineageOS or even GrapheneOS possible.
So no, this is not an ideological crusade against the company and its functioning. My concern was simpler – and honestly more practical. As Google tracks and captures more and more information about me, they will soon have too much data that, if stolen, could be devastating: think identity theft, financial fraud, lost IP address and much more.
This fear only intensified when I started migrating to Linux around 2015-2016, which naturally pulled me deeper into the more privacy and security-focused circles. I saw people Googling their lives left and right, and I figured I should too.
How to See What Data Google Has About You (And Delete It)
Google knows a lot about you, but how much does it know exactly? Here’s how to see it — and how to remove it.
How I Tried to De-Google My Life
There’s a privacy-friendly alternative to every Google app, but are they worth it?
In practice, de-Googling my life was less dramatic than it might seem. I’ve only used some of their main services: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Search, Chrome, YouTube and Android.
Now, DuckDuckGo started gaining a lot of traction in 2014, so it became my primary search engine. Proton Mail also emerged as a secure email provider, so I ditched Gmail as well. For my browser, I switched to Firefox, which was the default browser on most Linux distributions. Admittedly, I wasn’t a fan of Mozilla’s browser (most of the sites I frequented were down or refused to work), so I switched to Brave when it launched in 2016. Nextcloud also dropped out around that time, and I decided to replace Google Drive and self-host my own cloud storage.
It’s crazy how many currently popular security-focused products and services appeared in 2015-2016, isn’t it?
Now, I really couldn’t replace YouTube because all my favorite creators were there, and I never found it necessary either. If I keep a point of contact with Google, which shows the company my interest in certain topics, which are constantly evolving, I don’t think it represents a major risk, at least not for me.
Finally, when it came to my mobile operating system, I was beyond the Android vs. iPhone debate: I was using Windows Phone, which notoriously lacked many Google services, including YouTube. However, when Windows Phone was dying and I had to migrate to Android, I chose to root my Nokia 6.1 with LineageOS, an almost dripping version of Android, or more precisely AOSP.
Why I Failed to Live an Un-Googled Life
It made my life way too hard
Lucas Gouveia/How to Geek
The first thing to crack was DuckDuckGo. It just wasn’t reliable enough for my daily search needs, and I found myself manually switching to Google anyway. Eventually, I stopped pretending and went back to it full time.
Then came the email problem. I created my first Gmail account in 2005. I had subscribed to dozens of apps and newsletters over the years and couldn’t get rid of them. Now, updating these services with my new Proton Mail was an option, but it was a real hassle, something I had always intended to do, but never managed to do. As a result, I’ve always kept the old Gmail account active and still use it from time to time, so it’s never really been replaced. I simply moved my personal stuff to Proton Mail.
Nextcloud worked great as a cloud storage alternative, but it wasn’t really a replacement for Google Drive. I needed it to collaborate on projects, whether with clients or my friends. The custom ROMs were also nice, but they caused issues with banking apps, especially the ones I was using, so I continued to use the default Android OS.
My friends and family made deleting Google even harder
Let’s just say I even decided to leave these inconveniences aside: what’s the point if my friends and family can just cancel all of this? For example, if just one friend of mine, or a distant relative, owns an Android phone and decides to register me as a contact with all my personal information and details, I will literally be in Google’s database, despite my best efforts. At this point, de-Googling my life meant either changing my friends and family, which is impractical, or making them aware of de-Googling it, which is an exercise in frustration – anyone who has tried will understand what I mean.
There is a popular saying in the Linux and open source communities: “Privacy comes at the cost of convenience.” » I experienced this firsthand and had to ask myself: how much privacy do I really want, or rather, how much convenience am I willing to sacrifice? And I found out I really didn’t want it that much confidentiality as I thought. I wasn’t afraid of people knowing where I lived. Instead, I wanted a security system that would repel intruders if they targeted me.
I was basically looking for security, not necessarily privacy.
Better digital hygiene beats degoogle every day (at least for me)
Privacy and security are not the same thing
If you optimize your life for digital privacy, security is automatically guaranteed: if no one knows you exist, they won’t attack you. However, you can still have a secure digital life without suffering all the hassle of choosing privacy-focused alternatives with fewer features.
For example, I use different passwords for each account and have enabled multi-factor authentication on each platform that supports it. Additionally, in the event of a data breach, I have set up Google alerts (yes, a Google product) for any cyberattacks related to the products and services I use.
Additionally, instead of trying to avoid Google (or any other tech giant), I started focusing on what I was actually putting online and being more intentional about it. It’s no longer just about sharing content with Google. If you live online and post publicly, anyone determined enough to profile you can do so by deleting anything you’ve posted, whether it’s on Google’s servers or someone else’s. The platform doesn’t matter as much as what you choose to share.
I really wish we didn’t have to live in a world where you have to choose between productivity and privacy, but unfortunately we do. The positive side is that this is not the case everywhere. For example, as I mentioned, I successfully replaced Chrome with Brave, and it was neither annoying nor detrimental to my productivity. As such, I will wait for open source, privacy-friendly, and feature-rich options, and in the meantime I will focus on optimizing my life for cybersecurity and better digital hygiene.
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