How deeply are you in bed with Google?  Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to get too deeply in bed with any one company.  It’s concerning individually, and more, in the aggregate.  Really, we need a competitor to disrupt Google because right now Google has a scary monopoly and access to crazy amounts of personal data.  Could Google win a war with the US right now?  Hard to say.

Google makes great products, and I continue to use many of them, but I’ve started moving away from total reliance on their services little by little.  Two baby steps: on my laptop, I no longer use the Chrome browser or the Google search engine.  Instead I use Brave for both functions.  It’s great!   In fact, I think the browser is superior.  Google’s search engine is better, but I rarely notice the difference, and on those rare occasions, I just go to google.com and use Google.  I primarily use the internet on my laptop, but I plan to switch over on my phone as well.   I definitely recommend checking out Brave if you’d like a little privacy.

I plan to switch e-mail soon as well, as that’s an easy change and my google account has been invaded by spam to some degree at this point.  I still rely heavily on Google for maps, and since their service is so good, I don’t plan to change that at this point.  In addition, I use Google photos.  I wouldn’t mind changing photo services if there was a good one out there.  Any recommendations?  Lastly, I use Google drive.  I’ll stick with that for now as well.  My goal isn’t to fully divest from Google but to generally diversify the services I use so that no one company has access to too much of my data or control over how I communicate and live.

In addition, I don’t use Google as a sign-in.  I have a few heritage accounts for which I used Google to sign in, but in general, I set up a unique account for ever website and avoiding linking accounts when possible.

I read this article in the NYT about one way Google can screw you over unintentionally.  In this case, I think Google’s efforts to stop child porn are highly commendable and probably worth any collateral damage but I think the article just shows the enormous power of Google and the danger of letting them have too much leverage over your life in the name of convenience.