Google is probably your search engine. Chrome your web-browser?
Google flavoured Android + your OEM skin, the OS your phone runs on
I’m talking about — Xiaomi’s MIUI, OnePlus/Oppo/Vivo’s Oxygen OS, Color OS, Samsung’s OneUI, literally anything other than iPhones probably run Android + proprietary Google software.
YouTube? — it’s the 2nd biggest search engine after Google
Often the only source of video hosting at such a cheap, subsidized rate. Not to mention censorship 😷 / corporate gaslighting. I haven’t even talked about the deadly recommendation algorithm. My dependence on Google is disgusting. I store all my photos using Google Photos, use Chromium, Google Play services for Android, at least for now. Not to mention, gmail and search.
Google excels as a product company
Google builds high quality products with great security like the Pixel phones and the Chromium web browser; but that isn’t their true goal. Google is an advertising company disguising itself as a product company. All attempts at making their projects good are neutered by anti-features like data collection, telemetry and straight up spyware, F/OSS builds of the operating systems don’t ship by default. You’ve gotta de-google all their products, to make use of it.
They trap you in their proprietary ecosystem
By shipping Android / Chromium with their proprietary services — Google Play, Google Sync, Gmail, Drive. All of these services needs an active internet connection and are switched on by default. You’d have to rely on 3rd party apps instead.
Why does Android need to ship with Google Play by default? Can I ever buy a mainstream phone without it phoning Google back home? No, it’s not the status quo. There are one or two phones phones that run de-googled’d android out-of-the-box like the XDA Phone running Lineage OS or /e/ OS phones. But these aren’t available by where I live and it’s way out of my budget for a simple device.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Have you ever read Google’s ToS / Privacy Policy? They can shut down my account anytime for any reason. The more I use Google, the harder it gets to wean off their gratis service. Every year they bring major changes to their services like YouTube, Gmail and Photos, leaving you with 0 control over your data hosted there.
This ^^ doesn’t include YouTube (16GB)
Yes, 15GB is quite generous for cloud storage! But, I’ve already crossed that 15 GB mark. I mean I am currently storing 32GB of photos + 16GB of YouTube videos around 48GB worth of data, stored in my Google account.
2020 is the year I plan to delete my personal Google account
By deleting my Google account — it allows me to reduce how much personal data gets uploaded to Google’s cloud. I need be able to live off-grid and reduce cloud based dependencies regardless of the provider.
I made a (new) brand account for my YouTube channel. I plan to siphon users who find my content on YouTube, towards my PeerTube and LBRY channels. #FediFirst Here’s an excellent guide I found for exporting Google Photos.
Export all your data: takeout.google.com
You’ll get an email when they’re done:
After June 1st what will I permanently lose?
Some icon packs I redeemed via Google Play credits and my gmail id: polarhive@gmail.com. I can brag then, who uses gmail lol? If someone claims to impersonate me ask for proof. If you get an email from my gmail account after Nov-2020, that’s not me!
The Google ecosystem is weird
I like Google’s efforts in GSOC, improving the security of the linux-kernel, libre-software. They have some of the best minds in the world, have huge investments in computer research and engineering that Googlers can exploit.
Chromium is a secure, powerful browser, PWAs allow for powerful cross device web apps. WebRTC, WebM, WebP and other projects that have improved our lives. Custom ROMs on Android can be flashed on almost any smartphone thanks to project treble and alternative stores like F-Droid can be installed, unlike Apple’s locked-ecosystem.
The problem I have with Google is — you don’t have control over your Google account & other proprietary bits of the Google ecosystem. They can shut down your account at any time. I don’t want to use or promote GSuite, Google Classroom, YouTube or other services which rely on ‘signing up’ for an account unless Google lets you self-host like NextCloud!
Chromium’s sync server can be self-hosted but Gsuite can’t be self-hosted. You can flash custom-ROMS; but don’t expect any banking apps to work without Google Play services. You get the point: Google as a whole (proprietary ecosystem) is a big no-no. All the products they make are really powerful, but only when you take the time to de-google it!
Their true goals aren’t really interesting i.e. to collect more personal-data. To improve their ad-targeting tech. After all, they are anadvertising company