All hail to you!
For a little over a year now I’ve been thinking about freeing my life from Google. It’s not an easy task but after all these months of research and experimentation, I will share the few tips I found! Thank you in advance for your attention!
First, I had to understand why it was problematic. On PC, it is perhaps less bad than on a smartphone because google is not indispensable to the functioning of the computer unlike Android but I will come back to it.
So step one, remove every account that I owned: Gmail, YouTube, Chrome etc...
The easiest one was YouTube. I didn’t have a lot of activity on it, but I did have some subscriptions. So I deleted all my YouTube history from my Google account, and then I got rid of all the channels I was following and saved them as a favourite. From my point of view, I also escape the algorithm that offers me videos and thus become completely master of my decisions and my reading choices! And I downloaded all the information I had on Google Drive !
Then I had to change my mailbox. After some research I opted for Protonmail. They offer a free version that only allows 500 MB of capacity. As it seemed to me little, I created two different addresses. One for work, one for shopping and so on. As for my Gmail box, I had to delete all messages that I felt were useless to keep and I saved in PDF all those that were important.
I also recorded all my contacts to inform them of the change of address once it was created. I think that part is the most complex. Indeed, we have spent so much time communicating through a mailbox that a job of storage, sorting and reorganization seems tedious. I let everyone judge whether this time is worth taking. For me, it is essential if we want to become masters of our virtual lives again.
Then I changed the browser. High on hopes, I tried Tor but its way along the web really slowed my navigation. And then I discovered Brave... Already for its Chromium base that I mastered but also for all the alternatives on privacy and its interest in the BAT! So I imported my Google Chrome favourites without any worries and started browsing FAST AND WITHOUT ADS : Perfect !
For the research engine, after trying a lot of them in particular duck duck go (with the privacy in mind), the best for me was Qwant. I have to say that a lot of people seem to think that his referencing is lame compare to google, once again, this point of view is mine but qwant always gave me satisfaction through the researches. As for duck duck go, the privacy point is perfect but the results on search are 90 percent of the time worse compare to Qwant. But we have to admit, Google stays the best for results.
But it’s not over! A life without google is also a daily vigilance in my navigation.
As you know, Facebook analytics and Google Analytics are very easy to place in our cookies because we don't have the motivation to look in the settings of web pages when we browse. So I have installed extensions that allow you to delete cookies once the page has been left.
I opted for "Cookie auto delete" and "Vanilla Cookie manager" for the automatic removal of cookies and for Qookie Fix for the creation of a "I refuse" button when I arrive at a web page and the cookie policy page appears. However, the latter does not work everywhere, and so I make the effort to adjust my parameters myself from time to time.
Speaking of efforts, that is the key to this process. Regaining your privacy on the Internet is not so easy, it takes a lot of sacrifice, changes in habits and a lot of time to search and understand.
Everything I have just told you come with everyday gestures like no more ordering on Amazon, avoiding Facebook, checking regularly by open-source software the presence of tracker and emptying the caches of my computer (part 2 to come) on a regular basis as well.
Of course this is a very first step towards a return to privacy (and the easiest in my opinion) and there are some reflexes like automatic password registration that need to be banned from our lives but this will be addressed in the next part of this series dedicated to privacy!
Thank you all for taking the time to read and feel free to share your tips and knowledge on how to privatize your data:)
Ciao!