Goodbye Google

For as long as there have been Gmail accounts I’ve had at least one. My primary account has in excess of 75,000 messages stored in it and that’s after daily purges of newsletters, unsolicited but legitimate pitches and the ever-present spam. Google Maps on my iPhone screen is as much a part of my car’s interior as the steering wheel. I have a well-watched channel on YouTube, store 35,000 pictures on Google Photos and have been using YouTube TV since I cut the cord six months ago.

I’m leaving it all behind.

The transition is already underway and it’s far less unnerving than I thought it would be. Even though I’ve had to do everything from changing my primary email account to resetting my mapping and calendar apps to choose Apple Maps or an alternative (but not Waze - they’re owned by Google, too) it's been easier than I anticipated. In the course of a couple of hours a day over a weekend the vast majority of it is done. I thought it would be traumatic. It’s not. But it’s overdue and I’m determined to wean myself of as many Google services as I can until there are none left. I’m still changing email addresses on all the websites that I’m logged into with my Gmail address but that takes a minute for each one.

In short, I anticipated a nightmare to make these changes. That hasn’t been the case.

Why do I want to leave all Google services behind? Because, as the mantra goes, “If you’re not paying for a product you ARE the product.” Google’s sole business, their one and only (or ~95% of it) source of revenue is advertising and for that they are completely, absolutely and myopically determined to get my data. Want a real shocker? Take a look at THIS PAGE in your Google account. It’s a summary of your activity for all Google services that you’re signed into. Picking a random day’s activity prior to beginning my extrication process they’ve got the following listed for me:

• Three different mapping locations, one from my desktop computer and two in my car. They know where I went. They know the time I left and the time I arrived. They know the route I took, the stores and restaurants I passed and whether I stopped at any of them. They're also scanning my email (see below) so they also know if I got any emailed credit card receipts and can probably make the connection between the routes I took, the places I passed and the places I made a purchase. They could reconstruct pretty much my entire day faster than the FBI.
• 13 searches on Google.com. This was a light day for me - I probably hit their search engine 20X/day on average. Think about how many times you type something into their search engine or the URL bar of your browner, where most times Google is the default search engine - and no small cost to them, I might add. They paid Apple $8 BILLION to be the default search engine on iOS devices and Apple’s desktop Safari browser. They know what you look for. They know what you click on (that’s how they get paid) and whether they gave you the right answer on the first attempt. So they basically know what you like, what you want and where you go online because they can tell which of those search result links you've clicked.
• That day I received roughly 50 emails in my Gmail account (there were plenty more in my non-Google work account) and sent probably 25. Remember - they scan all your email. That’s how they know what ads to display They know what you are saying. Have you ever wondered how they know what time your flight is leaving or what kind of food you’d like to eat? As AI improves further expect them to know even more. They see your emailed receipts, what shopping promos you get, what orders you make and a ton more.
• That night I watched a couple of cycling videos on YouTube and searched the site for a video about how to train my dog to walk without a leash (he's very well behaved but there's always room for improvement, right?). I also uploaded another of our company’s screencast videos that day with a bunch of tags helping their search engine classify it. Google knows not only what I have watched, but what I like to watch, what I want to learn and what my passions are.
• Google Photos was set to automatically upload any photos I took with my phone to their site. I didn’t take any that day but there have been other days when dozens have been uploaded. They know by the EXIF data where I’ve been (if the Maps data doesn’t already tell them) and what time I was there. They know what my favorite subjects are because they are automatically scanning every photo. Didn't know that? Surprise - you can open Google Photos and search for “beach” or “recipes” or “cycling” or “Los Angeles Equestrian Center” and it will dutifully pull up every picture that has content matching that term or was taken at a place that it describes. It’s astonishingly, frighteningly and downright spookily accurate. So they know what people you hang out with, where you go most often, what times of day you're typically out, whether you're at a bar or a beach and much, much more. Think of what you take pictures of all the time and remember that every picture tells a story - except now it's confiding in Google.

Their tentacles just kept getting deeper the more I thought about it. As I started purging The Big G’s services from my daily repertoire of activities I realized that we had purchased the terrific Google “puck” WiFi routers about a year ago and there are several of them around the house. That’s nothing in and of itself until you realize that Google specifies their own DNS address (8.8.8.8) as the default address in their routers. Since it’s superfast, free and easy to set up there are millions of routers around the world that use those settings. When you do, every bit (literally) of your traffic that goes through your router is tracked by Google. So they know every web site you’ve visited. Every. Single. One. I found another service from CloudFlare that provides an equivalent, but totally private, service free of charge. Just set your router’s DNS address as 1.1.1.1. and you’re good to go. You can use the Google pucks as a great WiFi mesh network without using Google’s DNS and giving away all of your website traffic informaiton

Can you understand why I’m nervous about all the uses of my data and the potential for misuse or abuse? Do you think that Facebook is the only company that has had major security failures by allowing developers to access data they shouldn’t be able to? Apple recently shut down all of the developer apps at both Google and Facebook when they found out how cavalier they’ve been about selling people’s data. (You might ask if I’m equally nervous about how Facebook uses my data. Not a bit. I’ve never had a Facebook account and this is one of the big reasons why.). That all said, doing something as seemingly innocuous as watching a movie at home generates a trove of data that is valuable to those that collect and sell it. For a detailed look at who collects it, stores it and sells it, read this.

To be clear, I’ve been in the technology business for so long that some people think I’m kidding when I tell them how big my first mobile phone was. (Hint: It wasn’t a cell phone and the radio part of it - about as big as a good-sized microwave oven - had to be mounted in the trunk of my car. Now it fits on a chip.). I’m not naive nor a Pollyanna. I know that other companies aren’t perfect and that there can be data lapses and careless handling of my account. Banks get hacked all the time, as do sites where I shop and even government organizations that I access online. I don't want to live like a monk and I know that I can't build a cyber-moat around my data.

(This is the "why." For the "how" I recommend the terrific and comprehensive guide to "How to Quit Google Completely.")

But that doesn’t mean I should just stand by and watch someone else collect, consume, process, analyze, disseminate and use my personal data for their profit. Scott McNealy, the one-time CEO of Sun Microsystems (a Silicon Valley original, for those of you who may not have heard of the long-defunct company) said back in 1999, “You have no privacy. Get over it.” That was 20 years ago. How much less privacy do you think we have now? Nonetheless I’m taking some basic steps to start protecting myself. Yes, I know a lot of the data is already “out there” and can’t be retracted. But that doesn’t mean that I have to keep supplying it to Google.

So goodbye, Gmail. So long, search. Ta-ta, YouTube. I’ve switched to secure services that don’t make a business out of extracting and selling my data. If you’ve got any concerns about your own privacy - and you should - you’ll consider doing it, too. There isn’t anyone or any organization that wants to protect your privacy as much as you do, so it’s up to you. Get started.