I can’t wait to graduate college so I can stop using my Google account. I still have to use mine for the online office suite. I use LibreOffice if it’s just me but I have to collaborate and do group assignments on Google Docs and Slides too.
about time 😊 that’s not the goal; one of the first basic steps!
EDIT Sorry I should not have said it like this. Even though that was my honest feelings, said as free speech without any meany connotations, this should have been treated as good news, like someone finally ditched Windows.
One of the next steps might be to figure out how not to load GA.js GTM.js Google Fonts etc.
There is a long way to go to de-Google oneself, and unfortunately it’s not easy nor trivial. One subtle example: Google is a broker of Tor Snowflake, which could cause a difficult dilemma.
I’m building up to doing the same. Already using Protonmail and Kagi. Looking for a less Google-dependent phone to switch over to and then I might pull the plug myself.
Microsoft is already done same with google I have like one niche product that I have not found a place outside of lime a singular stellar on Amazon to buy from
You can actually use windows without an account. When installing windows, they will force you to log in. But If you simply use an account that has been blocked it will create a local user instead of an online user. People use no@thankyou.com and it works well
A lot of (all?) email services will allow you to forward your mail from Gmail. My advice would be set that up, have all of them going to a specific folder, and only use your new email moving forward. No harm in allowing some email forwarding while you adjust for the next 6 to 12 months. But that way you can also immediately stop using Gmail itself.
Gdrive unless it is really baked into your daily life in a complicated way, it’s pretty easy to replace. Lots of great services out there.
Proton mail allowed me to export my Google Calendar over with just a few clicks. So that was pretty painless. I’m sure there are other calendar services like that. YMMV.
Just dug through a lemmy thread of recommended android apps a minute ago and found someone recommending Organic Maps. Pretty damn good compared to some others I’ve seen!
And of course, popping into streetcomplete here and there and contributing some data helps sharpen the data 🙂
You could try to see if you’d like Magic Earth. It’s proprietary, but has a good privacy policy, uses Open Street Maps, and has traffic data.
Though if you’re dependent on Google Maps for reviews and photos of places, then it’s much harder to replace. Though I guess you could just use the website to look that up.
If you can contribute, that would be great. Especially business names and addresses. The best thing I have found to do is get an address from a place via the internet and plug that into gps-coordinates.net and use the first 7 numbers like 31.12345 -82.12345 into osmand when navigating. Then when i arrive i add it to osm so nobody can claim i stole data from another mapping service.
Congratulations! That’s awesome! I’ve been Google-free for 2-3 years, but I haven’t been brave enough to finally delete Gmail. I keep worrying I might need the message history one day?
Regarding Maps: I use OrganicMaps as my main, & I reflex to Gmaps WV when something isn’t in OrganicMaps. I feel this is a reasonable privacy-friendly compromise.
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