Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the kind words!

People have issues with user profiling, tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google does it too btw, with AdSense.

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> Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each?

This is a false choice.

Also, I already pay for YouTube Premium to avoid YouTube's ads. I would gladly pay for a subscription that stopped ads in Google's Search too.

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> Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).

That's irrelevant.

The danger isn't in Google serving you with more relevant ads, the danger is in that data being collected in the first place, linked to your persona.

And contrary to what other HNers say, no, we don't need to wait for a fascist regime in the US to see the dangers of doing that.

China is targeting political activists and they can coerce any company operating within their borders. Being gay or an atheist already puts your life in danger in many parts of this world. Etc.

But OK, say you don't live in those countries. How about the story of that father finding out his daughter is pregnant from the ads being served [1]. And what would you say if your credit score dropped due to your Facebook activity? Or your insurance prices were affected by those who you befriend online?

There are some real, contemporary consequences of user profiling that go beyond Google knowing if you already own a google fi or not ;-)

[1] https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-...

One reason why our web became so successful is Decentralization. But, in recent years I feel like we are heading to more and more centralized web, where only a few big companies control the entire ecosystem. Take email and instant messaging as an example. Everybody can maintain it's own, independent mail service, but everybody can still communicate with each other. On the other hand there are very few messaging services that are totally incompatible to each other. Depending on where you live, you might only use iMessage, Whatsapp or WeChat. Even tough it may be technically possible to use other services like Signal or Threema, you are most definitively going to experience a lot inconveniences. In my personal bubble only very few use these apps and as if that were not enough, these few users are also distributed across a wide variety of different services. If it were like mail, everybody could use his/her preferred messaging system and still talk to each other.

Thats only one example and I dont want our web to be like Whatsapp in a few years from now. So I encourage everybody to try and use his own infrastructure. You are also going to learn quite a bit while doing so.

If you are unsure about where to start, here is a nice list of awesome self hosted services, that are relatively easy to deploy: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted