De-Googling: My Progress

And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting.

And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot less data when you use their apps. For instance, Maps data is never associated with an Apple ID, and significant work is done to fuzz and scramble the anonymous data they store to avoid it being possible to turn it into data about a real person. In comparison, Google Maps logs your location to your Google account every five minutes.

It's great to compare with people who have done similar, thanks for sharing your journey. It is an inordinate amount of work that non-computer-interested most likely aren't interested in. I do wonder what it takes (restoration of privacy rights enacted through judicial interpretation enforced upon companies like e.g. GDPR?) to have default UX that is E2E across most services, probably widely used companies like Apple doing it (which may compel Google, et al, to?). It surprises me to some degree that companies seem to _want_ the liability involved with associating people with their data? This seems odd, as the data is just as useful assigned to some random identifier that can be carted around the internet that can't be tied to our person, and I wonder how the cost of liability remains worth it when technologically it's unnecessary. The human aspect of social networking seems like the weak heel for removing names there, but still things like chat seem like things companies wouldn't want to store (who knows how strongly gov is compelling them to do so to make it worthwhile, maybe, with $$$ or threats). Even things like imessage, most people use icloud to backup and in this case the messages are recoverable by Apple (for law enforcement as it is or their own purposes maybe, more cynically) - this is heavily marketed E2E but in practice isn't, Apple says so on their security page even (this is nice of them): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 - I hope that as an industry we can work towards pushing ephemeral UX that users can adjust to but it will take adjusting, nobody needs a message from Nonna from 2014 and if it was the prized bread recipe, save it somewhere else! In any event, I hope this continues to get better for the lay user.

I haven't changed most of my choices since making the switch. I do use mullvad with wireguard now and I consider moving off of 1.1.1.1 for similar reasons to leaving google (see recent news about large gov partner here). I don't have many complaints. In the past year, I've also stopped reading twitter/reddit and moved to reading the news once a week in some attempt to rewire my brain, I'd say it's mostly good, I spend more time thinking and reading more interesting things and it gives me some perspective, the trade offs are being more disconnected from society (not up to date on memes, miss seeing what friends are cooking!) which has pros/cons. I'm rethinking this, it's all about values really, I do think social media can be used in a privacy preserving way to still keep in touch with friends/family (fingerprinting is slight issue) that doesn't have to constantly fight for your dopamine receptors. Anyway, it's interesting to discuss with like minded people, I know very few who aren't constantly plugged in now and it can be hard to relate (ie talk about more interesting things imho).