It took a few months preparation but I deleted all my google accounts today, and it feels good.

63 points

Now, send a gpdr deletion request because Google still has your data.

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12 points

It’s going to be difficult after deleting the account though

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18 points

Difficult but legally required by them, including establishing your bona fides.

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30 points

Do you have any guides or tips?

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35 points

A lot of (all?) email services will allow you to forward your mail from Gmail. My advice would be set that up, have all of them going to a specific folder, and only use your new email moving forward. No harm in allowing some email forwarding while you adjust for the next 6 to 12 months. But that way you can also immediately stop using Gmail itself.

Gdrive unless it is really baked into your daily life in a complicated way, it’s pretty easy to replace. Lots of great services out there.

Proton mail allowed me to export my Google Calendar over with just a few clicks. So that was pretty painless. I’m sure there are other calendar services like that. YMMV.

Google maps is tough lol

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27 points

For the google maps, it helps for us to contribute to Open Street Maps through recording with Mapillary or making edits in our community.

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6 points

Is the app itself ready for prime time yet? Can I use it daily? I live in a small but major city.

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3 points

Congratulations! That’s awesome! I’ve been Google-free for 2-3 years, but I haven’t been brave enough to finally delete Gmail. I keep worrying I might need the message history one day?

Regarding Maps: I use OrganicMaps as my main, & I reflex to Gmaps WV when something isn’t in OrganicMaps. I feel this is a reasonable privacy-friendly compromise.

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1 point

You can transfer your entire Gmail email history to your new service very easily

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1 point

I’m not 100% but I am close. Off gdrive, off gcal, off chrome, almost entirely off gmail. I’ll check out the maps!

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1 point

Just dug through a lemmy thread of recommended android apps a minute ago and found someone recommending Organic Maps. Pretty damn good compared to some others I’ve seen!

And of course, popping into streetcomplete here and there and contributing some data helps sharpen the data 🙂

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1 point
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Google maps is tough lol

You could try to see if you’d like Magic Earth. It’s proprietary, but has a good privacy policy, uses Open Street Maps, and has traffic data.

Though if you’re dependent on Google Maps for reviews and photos of places, then it’s much harder to replace. Though I guess you could just use the website to look that up.

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-33 points

A guide? Sure! Go to the account settings and click “Delete my account”

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2 points

So helpful

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1 point
*

This makes as much sense as telling somebody to delete all of the contents on their failing hard drive before transferring them to a new one

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29 points

Would you be able to let us know the services you used, the replacements, and how did the migration process work?

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41 points
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Here are the things I replaced my Google/Microsoft/Meta services with:

  • Tuta(nota): Email
  • Nextcloud: Cloud
  • Typst: LaTeX/Docs alternative
  • LineageOS: Degoogled Android rom
  • Aurora Store: Google Play Store alternative
  • NewPipe, Odysee, Peertube: YouTube alternatives
  • Firefox: Chrome/Chromium alternative
  • SearXNG: Meta search engine
  • Linux/BSD: Windows alternatives
  • Bitwarden: Password manager & 2FA client
  • OpenStreetMaps (OsmAnd): Google maps replacement
  • LibreTranslate, Deepl: Google translate alternative
  • Signal, SimpleX, Briar, Matrix: chat and group organization

DO NOT FORGET TO MIGRATE ACCOUNTS BEFORE DELETING

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12 points

StreetComplete is a great app to help contribute to OpenStreetMaps

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12 points
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Proton for email and cloud storage. Graphenos on a pixel 7a for phone. Phone spps from aurora and fdroid. Kagi.com paid search engine too.

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4 points
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10 points

Protonmail is a free service with an optional subscription for extra features you almost certainly won’t need

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1 point

Does skiff work?

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10 points

Seconded.

Without a single word on replacements for email, calendar, phone, etc… this post is pretty much useless to everyone else than the OP.

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4 points

I replaced most of that with proton mail and grapheme is which ironically requires a pixel

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3 points

No sandboxed Google Play services yet? Can be challenging without.

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3 points

See above. Plus I use Thunderbird for calendar.

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1 point

Great, thanks!

How does Thunderbird work for you wrt to sharing calendars with others (eg. family) and syncing with eg. an Outlook calendar?

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28 points

Welcome to the club.

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21 points
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13 points

You can actually use windows without an account. When installing windows, they will force you to log in. But If you simply use an account that has been blocked it will create a local user instead of an online user. People use no@thankyou.com and it works well

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2 points

Thanks for the tip!

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1 point

Or just don’t connect the PC to the internet during the installation.

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1 point

Or, when it looks like you no longer have a choice, click Back and you will then be given that choice.

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9 points

I feel like Amazon would be easier than MS and Google, wouldn’t it?

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11 points

Yep, after you realize the majority of the stuff you can buy of Amazon is mass produced trash with zero quality. It was easy to remove.

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9 points
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deleted

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7 points

Yeah. Deleting accounts, easy enough. Boycotting, much less-so.

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9 points
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1 point

Microsoft is already done same with google I have like one niche product that I have not found a place outside of lime a singular stellar on Amazon to buy from

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1 point

but i don’t want to lose my ability to play minecraft

(yes i know about minetest)

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1 point
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