DeGoogling My Life

My digital life has been pretty entrenched in Google since I first signed up for a Gmail address in 2008. My philosophy in the past was reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s wisdom: “You gotta serve somebody.” The way I figured, you either sacrifice your digital privacy to Apple or Google. Choose whatever you decide is the lesser of the two evils.

There’s no need for such black and white thinking, however. Every bit you can claw back your life from the tech giants is a win, in my book. So I decided to try and reduce my Google footprint as much as is practical, while replacing Google services, ideally with self hosted solutions on my own hardware. Using my own hard drives. Deployed on my own network.

Why DeGoogle?

The most common question I get when I tell people I’m trying to get away from using Google is “why?” And that’s a fair question but the answer is multifaceted and not so simple.

Privacy

The first main reason is privacy. Who’s to say Google isn’t mining your emails for advertising data or to train their AI models? Even anonymized and in aggregate, I have no desire for my data to be used for anything. My countless saved cat pics and outdated memes are my own business, thank you very much. There’s a lot to be said for the idea that if it’s free then you are the product. And in my case it wasn’t even free, as I was paying for Google Workstation plus additional storage on my personal Google account as well.

Data Sovereignty and Data Portability

See Digital Sovereignty as an Individual Right and Portability of Data.

Because I Can!

The fact is, I have the hardware to self host my own services. I have the technical know-how. I have the time and I enjoy the project. Why not try to engineer my own solutions to the problems Google had solved for me for years?

Cost?

Any initial thoughts of cost savings quickly dissipated when I started to consider the math. Not only do you have to consider the monthly fees to rent cloud backup storage, there are also the ongoing energy costs, amortized hardware costs, etc. At the end of the day, going with big tech might be better bang for your buck unless you’ve already got a server running for other purposes.

How Far to Take It?

You can be as extreme as you want in your quest to remove Google from your life. As part of that quest, some people go down the path of erasing all online record of their identity. Some people choose to run privacy-focused operating systems on their phones like GrapheneOS instead of Android, to essentially deGoogle their phones. I haven’t gone that far yet. I need to get a new phone to pursue that option.

Current Status

What I’ve Done So Far

Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far:

What I’ve Struggled with so far

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t yet been able to replace the following:

  • Google Messages - giving up Google Messages means giving up on RCS, which is a dealbrealer for me at the moment.
  • Google Maps - Still my go-to for finding stuff and getting directions.
  • Google Docs - I’ve been trying to use Collabera instead through my Seafile instance, but I’m not entirely thrilled with the user experience.
  • Gboard - though I don’t use it anymore, I haven’t found a suitable replacement. The closest candidate so far is FUTO Keyboard, but I still keep mistyping words on it.

What’s Next?

At this point, I’m debating where to go next or how far to take this. This is an ongoing project, and I’ll continue to update this as I make progress.

I still need to look into the following:

  • Google Font alternatives.
  • Chromecast alternatives. (Someday)
  • Open Source Google Assistant alternatives (Someday)

Resources

r/degoogle

r/selfhosted