Has anyone tried "De-Googleing" themselves?

[arnavvr]

Has anyone tried this? I've been recently moving away from Google services, but with how interconnected they are in many peoples lives, it will near impossible to totally degoogle yourself.

[AntiTrust]

I'm trying to get away from them as well but its rough man, I was totally plugged into the google ecosystem - chrome, android, gmail - but I'm more and more concerned about my privacy lately and the permanence of my online activity. Switching to firefox is a good first step, I haven't really decided where to go for email but will probably make that switch next. 

[wONKEyeYEs]

28 minutes ago, arnavvr said:

degoogle yourself.

Never got googled in the first place.

I only exist virtually.

[Quadriplegic]

Well, I use Yahoo mail and Opera for browsing...

Does that count as something?

[Mooshi]

13 minutes ago, Quadriplegic said:

Well, I use Yahoo mail and Opera for browsing...

Does that count as something?

Opera is just reskinned Chrome and Yahoo mail is full of cyber aids.

[Guest]

I can’t even escape google. 

[arnavvr]

17 hours ago, AntiTrust said:

I'm trying to get away from them as well but its rough man, I was totally plugged into the google ecosystem - chrome, android, gmail - but I'm more and more concerned about my privacy lately and the permanence of my online activity. Switching to firefox is a good first step, I haven't really decided where to go for email but will probably make that switch next. 

I chose Proton Mail. Yeah it really is hard. I made my google account in 2010, and it was my main email account up until a few weeks ago. Migrating all that data was tough.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I haven't since I'm entrenched in Gmail and such. However I have manged to manipulate the search results for my name, so that must account for something.

[aezakmi]

That's my secret cap, I never made a google mail or youtube account, I do use youtube to watch LTT videos but can't follow, comment or upvote them because I'd need an account

 

made my personal hotmail account when I was a kid and still have it

[Underwrought]

Its going to be nearly impossible or highly inconvenient to do so.  Even more so if you have an android phone.  For instance I have now switch to protonmail myself but still have my google account for non-critical importance stuff.  And for my phone, because even after rooting, swaping bootloaders, and roms you still have to use google play services to get apps, notifications, and other stuff.

 

And you might think ok no problem ill just signup for a throw away gmail account right?  Wrong they will ask for your phone number, and unless you have a throw away number that can receive texts that isn't in your name, its going to automatically link back to your main gmail account.  And now google still knows exactly what youre doing.

 

Doesnt really matter though because any free service is selling your data to the data brokers who sell to other companies.  Probably even most paid services too.  And even your ISP.

 

You want anonymity?  Too bad no anonymity for you citizen, back into your place!  I mean it CAN be done, its just so restrictive its all 'designed' to make you WANT to go back.

[18358414]

1 hour ago, Underwrought said:

And you might think ok no problem ill just signup for a throw away gmail account right?  Wrong they will ask for your phone number, and unless you have a throw away number that can receive texts that isn't in your name, its going to automatically link back to your main gmail account. 

VOIP service is a good work around for this.  Sign up for 1 month and then cancel.  Then, to ensure they can't track requests by IP, only sign into that email via a VPN.

 

Sadly most of the methods to obtain anonymity seem require you to have been trained from an early age for them to seem intuitive.

[Underwrought]

44 minutes ago, 7he404guy said:

VOIP service is a good work around for this.  Sign up for 1 month and then cancel.  Then, to ensure they can't track requests by IP, only sign into that email via a VPN.

 

Sadly most of the methods to obtain anonymity seem require you to have been trained from an early age for them to seem intuitive.

Yeah I am vaguely aware of some possible services that will allow me to get a number that can receive texts that's not tied to my name.  And I already use VPN and sometimes TOR.  I have no real NEED to hide myself online, but I REALLY despise companies data mining me for profit without my consent or getting some of that money.

 

Problem is even with all that you can still be tracked by browser and browsing habits alone.  Its not as accurate but possible.

 

I prefer to use ways that are free or non sub based.  Using a raspberry pi as a pihole is REALLY good however it doesn't have integrated DNS over TLS.  It does have DNNSEC which is great but its not enough alone.  If it had that integrated + using TOR or even standalone with good browser plugins and settings it would be the perfect solution next to a paid VPN.  But I do use Private Internet Access right now.

 

The REAL problem there is once you have all that setup every website will trigger a captcha and it gets SUPER annoying, to the point of driving you mad and 'forcing' you back into the fold.

[EPENEX]

I do have a Google account, for YouTube- and I have a Gmail, but it's only use for my google account. For my phone I use LineageOS with no Google Services installed. I use to use Hooktube instead of YouTube before they got a cease and desist letter. I've used Firefox since version 3 (before Chrome existed), and about a year ago switched to Waterfox which is still Firefox based. The only Google services I use frequently are Youtube and the Recaptcha- don't really have a choice on the Recaptcha. Sometimes I will use Google Docs/Drive, but I haven't used it too much now that I'm out of school.

 

 

Edit: furthermore I do not use Google's DNS server, and I do not have a phone linked to my Google account, I just have my yahoo account linked.

[Meandia]

use a new online alias like mine, make a new private email server and in general just don't worry a whole lot

[mr moose]

Unless android is reading my emails (using a third party email app and email provider), then I keep my professional/important email address way outside of the google services sphere.  I have a gmail account or three for the android devices I use and that's it.

[Teddy07]

On 3.8.2018 at 6:51 AM, arnavvr said:

Has anyone tried this? I've been recently moving away from Google services, but with how interconnected they are in many peoples lives, it will near impossible to totally degoogle yourself.

Not yet but definitely in a few years when I want to hide my tracks.

[pipnina]

I've done my best, I stopped using the google web search, but other google services would be difficult to move away from because they contain so much of my stuff. Mostly gmail, youtube and some stuff I have on my drive.

 

I did move from chrome to firefox however, and turned on the global "do-not-track" feature firefox provides. It acts a bit like an adblock (in that most ads won't load due to containing some form of javascript tracking) and I also moved to Linux over a year ago (for the whole tracking thing as well as Microsoft just annoying me generally).

 

There will always be things tracking me though. But at least now I can count those things on my two hands... Discord, Steam, google, reddit, twitter, games published by 2k.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

I found it easy enough to get rid of most of it, but then again I never got dragged into their ecosystem too much to begin with. 

 

PC :

• Firefox instead of Chrome or Chromium
• Duckduckgo instead of Google search.  I hear people complain about not finding what they are looking for with DDG, but I never had an issue with it myself.
• Open Street Map instead of Google Maps
• The uMatrix plugin allows me to block most of Google's "added functionality" (Google Analytics and Google Tag Services on this very page). 
  Sadly you can't block all of Google's stuff everywhere because that breaks Captcha/Re-Captcha/No-Captcha (or whatever they are using this week), otherwise I'd just put all of Google in my hosts file and call it a day.

 

 

Phone :

• Lineage OS without Google Apps (when buying a phone, make sure it is supported.  Be careful with the Galaxy S models as they can have different CPUs in different markets)
• f-droid instead of Play Store
• OsmAnd (basically the mobile version of Open Street Maps) instead of Google Maps
• Firefox on mobile supports the desktop version's plugins, so you can use uMatrix (or whatever plugin you prefer) on your phone to block whatever you don't like there too.

 

 

YouTube is a bit harder to avoid, mainly because Vimeo completely effed up when they had a shot of actually becoming a thing.  Still, here's what you can do :

• Instead of using a Google or YT account, bookmark the "video" tab of your favorite channels and go through them every once in a while. 
• Don't watch most of the videos on YT itself, instead copy the link to the video page and just run it through a video downloader.  Doesn't really make a difference in bandwidth and you can just keep the video if it's something you'd like to watch multiple times. 

I also let the PC go on a YT watching spree on its own while I'm taking a shower or going shopping, or download random videos on subjects that I don't care about and delete them as soon as the download has finished.  Doing so gives Google plenty of misinformation.  Basically they don't have much of an idea what I actually watch or how long I spent watching it, data that they'd otherwise still link to your IP address. 
 

 

 

 

Do remember one thing : even if you are blocking or avoiding Google at your end, they still log your IP address and activity on their end whenever you run into a site that uses Google for anything.  If you really want to become untraceable by Google you'll need to resort to VPNs, ideally in combination with several virtual machines and a very strict cookie policy.

[Nicnac]

wouldn't wanna give up my 15gb of cloud storage for all my medical books.