Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard.The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail).Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is.On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one).One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc.I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too).The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube.Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose.They better hope their ad revenue doesn’t decay.