
How To De-Google-ify Your Life: The Complete Guide To Leaving Google - joelrunyon
http://impossiblehq.com/complete-guide-leaving-google
======
vezzy-fnord
_Hush Mail – Hushmail is free email service with privacy and no ads. I haven’t
used this personally but it’s a good option for the privacy-conscious._

It certainly is.

If you intend on getting fucked over.

Hushmail has a history of complying with arbitrary appeals, and has sent
plaintext transcripts of messages many times in the past. Look it up. Jacob
Appelbaum also explicitly warned to stay away from them at this year's 30c3
talk on Tor.

As for search engines, don't forget Startpage:
[https://startpage.com/](https://startpage.com/)

~~~
locusm
Plenty of FOSS howtos here
[http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/email](http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/email)

------
joelrunyon
Author Here: Got gmail back when people were begging for invites and over the
years found using their services out of "convenience". Lots of the recent
changes have made me start looking for alternatives. I'm not technical, so I
may have missed some self-hosted solutions, but I'm open to suggestions on
anything I may have missed.

~~~
femto
Taking up your mention of self-hosting, it would be interesting to see an
attempt at the same article, but using only software from the Debian
repository. Any takers?

------
Karunamon
..and not one of these is even close to being feature complete. I could get
bare IMAP 20 years ago.

There's a very damn good reason that Google's services are so popular.

~~~
chimeracoder
I wouldn't use feature-completeness as the goal.

I was a Gmail user since it was released[0], and while it was certainly unique
back then, I realized recently that almost _none_ of the features I use
nowadays are Google-specific[1].

In fact, the one major annoyance of Google's mail services for me _is_ IMAP!
Namely - Google provides an IMAP-like interface, but it isn't _quite_ the same
as IMAP, and it has a number of warts that make it not impossible to use, but
certainly uncomfortable.

I have seen a number of mail/IMAP clients literally special-case Google's
idiosyncrasies into their IMAP handling because of this.

[0] Now it's 2014, and it feels kind of weird to think that I've had my Gmail
account for almost 10 years.

[1] Even in 2004, most of what Gmail provided was unique _to web-based email_
, but had been around for a while on desktop mail clients. That, and the 1GB
of storage, which felt excessive at the time (how things change!).

------
tdtran
Regarding Gmail: I've been using Google Apps for Domains for years, among
other things to host my private family domain. All family members, wife, kids,
have email accounts there.

Around New Year my 7-year old son's account was permanently suspended. Even I
as the superadmin of the domain can't unlock it, there is no way to get the
data out. What happened is he tried to register G+. No, our young kids don't
have G+ or FB accounts. They are not allowed to and we monitor how they use
Internet. But it's hard to avoid running into G+ these days. So my son clicked
on a link somewhere. It turned out that a person younger than 13 years are not
allowed to have a google account. Period. It's a violation of their TOS. Even
though outside of USA, GMail or Google apps for domains never explicitely
asked you for your age. Not before G+, and even now only if you register your
G+ profile.

Bottom line: I have no other choice than to de-google-ify my life. Google
forced me to do it. I know you can lie about age of your kid but doing so is
risky. See above.

I have a cronjob that runs every hour to backup all Gmail inboxes to a IMAP
server (dovecot) so in my case it's not a disaster. But imagine if I wasn't so
paranoid about Google...

Also as they say if the service is free _you_ are _their_ product. These days
everywhere every time when I can I choose the paid option.

------
sb23
"At least with these options, you’re diversifying the companies you give your
data to."

Why is this better than giving it to one company? Won't I just get more ads?

~~~
hrkristian
The argument is the same as applied to governance, you don't want to give one
person or entity too much power.

I find the crusade against Google ridiculous for the most part, they're one of
the few entities who are doing actual, quantifiable _good_ in this world
whilst demanding surprisingly little of me. Compare with for instance Facebook
which is really just Zuckerberg's boyish stalker-fetish turned billion-dollar
industry.

~~~
abengoam
The flip side of spreading your data across several providers is that you are
increasing the odds of finding a problem. But the problem will have a smaller
impact (hopefully).

~~~
cromwellian
But you're not actually splitting your data across several providers, in many
cases, you're making copies of the same data, and so you're actually
increasing your exposure.

------
pedalpete
I don't think you really can 'De-Google-ify' your life.

Think about it, if you visit a site and they're using Google Analytics, you're
part of Google data. Same with sites using adwords. Firefox and Google are
partners (hence the default Google Search in Firefox). You can avoid hosting
your videos on youtube, but are you really not going to watch YouTube videos?
Ever??

In the end, though you can cancel your Google Accounts, and not 'actively' use
their services, you'd have to block adsense and analytics in your browser, but
if you're doing that, you're really harming the site-owner more than google (I
suspect).

------
mark_l_watson
After consulting at Google last year, my position on them softened - really a
pretty cool company, doing many good things.

I use an email address on my own domain, but route it through Gmail for
convenience. It takes me about twenty minutes to reroute it, something I have
tested a few times.

I did move my blog away from blogger last year, and I just use Chrome for
Gmail, twitter, and Facebook. I do all other browsing using Firefox with tight
security and anti tracking settings.

I think these steps are reasonable compromises that I also recommend to my
non-tech family and friends.

------
tyranel
I'd say that notes is better than Textedit if you're looking for something
dead simple. Simply because it cross syncs to all your Apple devices
(considering you're in the Apple ecosystem). So I end up starting blog posts
on my phone and finishing them on my computer as if they were synced with
dropbox or something. Mavericks added notebooks so you have some simple
organisation. The lack of formatting just lets me get back to writing.

------
ZaneA
I'd recommend Piwik ([http://piwik.org/](http://piwik.org/)) as a decent self-
hosted alternative to Google Analytics that is quick to set up on any PHP
based hosting.

~~~
curiouscats
I have been using it also and agree it is worth a look. I keep meaning to move
more of my sites to using piwik but time keeps going by without that
happening, [sigh].

------
helicoidal
No self-hosted/FOSS alternatives. This is a bit disappointing.

~~~
chimeracoder
I could have sworn I saw an EFF (?) link back in June (post-Snowden)
containing a list of FOSS alternatives to a bunch of services (Gmail, Skype,
Google Analytics), etc. For some reason I can't find it now, though -
hopefully someone else has this saved somewhere.

 _EDIT_ Thanks to vezzy-fnord below: [https://prism-
break.org/en/](https://prism-break.org/en/)

They seem to have updated their layout since then, but I'm fairly certain this
is the same site that I was referring to.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
[https://prism-break.org/en/](https://prism-break.org/en/)

------
blueskin_
Ironically, I find the hardest Google product for me to ditch is Maps.
DuckDuckGo is a decent alternative to search and I use both, but there isn't
anything else at the level of google maps.

Still, only using three google things (third being youtube - don't have an
account, but watch stuff) isn't so bad.

~~~
rayuwa
openstreetmap.org

------
locusm
Listing Microsoft products as an alternative to Google. Why bother?

------
dm2
I'm sticking with Google so that their killer robots will have information
about me and hopefully know that I'm friendly.

------
michaelyoder81
Great Read!

~~~
pedalpete
Hey Michael,

rather than post 'Great Read!', it's best to just upvote the article. Comments
are really for commentary on HN, not for Kuddos.

