I'm yeah that's a bit much. As much as I would love to go cold turkey I don't want to go back to 1985.

He calls what he did digital veganism. Yeah I just want a digital diet.

There is absolutely no way to avoid using products of the major tech companies and still use technology to any reasonable degree.

The last straw was a month or two ago my sister forwarded emails about an upcoming trip. When it came time for the trip Google calendar kept reminding me with alerts my flight was at X time and the reservation for the hotel was added to my calendar. The trip wasn't for me, but still showed up since I had a copy of the email.

I just don't want Google to knowingly read my emails. Yes I know if I send/receive an email from someone using Google the point is moot.

I'm not going digitally vegan, just a diet to get me off a few products, mostly Google because they gather and sell my data to everyone whether I gave them permission or not.

Maybe you think it is stupid and pointless, but if I manage to find a couple of better products it won't really hurt anything in the long run. Google probably still knows my shoe size, but I know they can't easily read 2000 emails in my accounts.

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The last straw was a month or two ago my sister forwarded emails about an upcoming trip. When it came time for the trip Google calendar kept reminding me with alerts my flight was at X time and the reservation for the hotel was added to my calendar. The trip wasn't for me, but still showed up since I had a copy of the email.

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You realize you can turn that off? Just uncheck add events from Gmail in your Google Calendar settings.

Yes, I realize this. I actually did have it turned off, till one day it was back on again (I didn't make any changes, I'm assuming Google changed a security setting or something). I'm not so naive to think if I uncheck an option they will quit data mining my emails for information.

I was just letting you know you could turn it off if it was annoying you.

Thanks! Yeah the most annoying part is that it was turned off and then ended up back on for some reason unknown to me.

Maybe trying to get away from the tech giants is ridiculous.

I don't think so. I mean, who wants everything about them put out there?

The problem is that we have agreed to this without realizing it. You should watch The Great Hack on Netflix

Hang in there

TMoney2007 said:

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LOYAL AG said:

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That's also true for Google vs Microsoft. Microsoft is first and foremost a business solutions provider. I use Office 365 for my business. They power my email and I use the traditional Office products like Excel and Word. They don't feed me ads and aren't tracking everything I do with the ability to monetize what they know about me.

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You're kidding yourself if you don't think microsoft is just as interested in collecting and selling information about as google is...

The idea that they have revenue streams from business, so they're not interested in maximizing their revenue from advertising information is wrong. You may not notice Microsoft selling your information to advertisers, but you should know that they are doing that as much as they possibly can. The pursuits aren't mutually exclusive.

They don't make all their money doing any one thing and ignore other potential revenue streams, they're going to try to make as much money as they can. Why do you think they're moving away from selling new versions of Windows after 10? Its because they're monetizing the installed base for advertising, so getting more users is worth more than selling everyone a new windows version.

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I'm sure MS is interested in gather data. But even the most evil of them all says they don't mine or use data from paid services such as GSuites. See Google Cloud Help. The key passages:

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Google processes your data to fulfill our contractual obligation to deliver our services. Google's customers own their data, not Google. The data that companies, schools, and students put into our systems is theirs. Google does not sell your data to third parties. Google offers our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting your data.
Ernst & Young, an independent auditor, has verified that our privacy practices and contractual commitments for G Suite and G Suite for Education comply with ISO/IEC 27018:2014. For example:

• We do not use your data for advertising
• The data that you entrust with us remains yours
• We provide you with tools to delete and export your data
• We are transparent about where your data is stored

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No. There are no ads in G Suite Services or Google Cloud Platform, and we have no plans to change this in the future. We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for advertising purposes.

The process is different for our free offerings and the consumer space. For information on our free consumer products, be sure to check Google's Privacy and Terms page for more consumer tools and information relating to consumer privacy.

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Paid subscriptions have a different user agreement. I purchase service from Microsoft and have a similar user agreement. That data is not mined. Office 365 and Windows are not the same thing and the user agreements will be different whether Windows is paid or not.

But more to my point they can mine all they want. At this point their ability to present me ads is nearly non-existent. The sites I use Chrome for do not present ads at all and the sites I use that might present ads are visited on Brave where ads are blocked. I use my business email for 99.9% of email traffic with my gmail being a once-every-10-days check for things from Netflix/Amazon, etc. It's a severely limited email service. At this point YouTube and Maps are really the only places where I have exposure to their tracking and ads.

Yes this is something like I am trying to accomplish and you give me hope! Thanks

I've taken a diversified approach. Google has my email and search (which, admittedly is a big portion). I've thought about switching my email to a paid Office365 account, but the thought of switching 10+ years of email over to somewhere else gives me the shakes.

Firefox for my browsing, Spotify for music, Amazon Fire and Hulu for TV. I'm trying to break my Google News habit with Apple News, but the Google News app is better than Apple.

Google Drive also has a fairly large portion of my digital life, but that would be easy to switch over to Dropbox or OneDrive. Maybe I'll tackle that change-over soon in my saga of diversifying my digital footprint.

There's a difference between actively handing over your data and it being scooped up where they can get it.

It's not futile to try to protect your privacy. That type of attitude is why we've ended up where we are.

The only thing I've found difficult to cut Google out of is Maps. Apple Maps is atrocious...still.

Are there any other competing apps that rival Google?

For navigation? Waze. But they use Google's API to power it.

Google bought Waze in 2013.

Charpie said:

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For navigation? Waze. But they use Google's API to power it.

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It's been assimilated.