Until late 2018, I’ve always been a very loyal user of Google products such as Translate, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Keep, Hangouts, Google+ and Android under the belief that it is a fair exchange of privacy for convenience. Or is it?
Google has great power over all of us. Why? because:
.1They collect massive amount of data on all their users through their products
.2Google Search is the main entrypoint to the internet for the majority of users
.3Google Ads is spread all over the world wide web, influencing people buying decisions
At work, I have also been using other Google products that target businesses such as Analytics, AdWords and GSuite for many years now.
Before I moved to Germany mid 2015, I used to have a bunch of theoretical concerns on data privacy and digital monopoly in the internet age and their seemingly destructive net effect on consumer behavior in free markets and on the public opinion.
It took a couple of months after living and working in Berlin to witness many of those effects in real life. As an immediate reaction, I started closing many accounts on online services that capitalized directly on my data to influence my buying decisions or to alter my view of the world for their localized profits.
When an online service I use had terms of service that are either vague or explicit regarding their collection of user data, I chose to close it. It didn’t take so long to realize that especially big products that monopolized their markets such as Facebook and Linkedin were also a bad deal on a much simpler level. I did not need to even think about their data collection effects at all, but only about the amount of time and effort invested and how higher it was than the value I got out of thoem in return.
Another fear was also proven invalid. I did not lose friends nor I missed any important news about my close friends after I stopped using Facebook, nor I got rejected by companies I applied for when I did not have a Linkedin to send to them.
On the contrary, I won lots of time back that I could effectively spend with my close friends and on presenting my own career path outside of templated experience and expectations.
That got me questioning again my deal with Google, and the assumed fair trade of privacy-for-convenience I do with their products. Is the convenience Google products provide really worth the level of privacy breach I allow them into my life, and the degree of dependency I create on their products across devices and across personal and work accounts?
On it’s face, it seems almost impossible to quantitatively measure the degree of influence digital monopolists have with their algorithms and business models on people and markets. I do not intend to include that in any of my experiments.
Rather, I allow the assumption that there is a fair amount of undesirable effects on me personally to be temporarily true, then I take the second part of the deal a little beyond convenience and ask myself: “Do I need it?”. That question is what this experiment is about regarding Google products.
This question in Google case is orders of magnitude harder to answer compared to other platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn. Google has many products. Is each of them a bad deal? If not, which ones?
Leaving all Google products at once as an experiment simply won’t work as it is guaranteed it will cause a lot of damage. And even if that damage was accepted, it won’t be obvious what damage caused by dropping which product.
The next obvious way to approach it is to go about it one by one, starting from the ones that seem to collect the most data for the least amount of convenience or the ones that are easier to drop/replace.
The alternatives I am using or will use may not have better privacy policies than Google products do. At the end, the only proper privacy solution is an offline one, or equivalent.
However, I try to choose alternatives that are not monopolising on retargetting me with data they collect, or when they have a clear business model in which I pay a subscription fee or purchase value.
In this experiment, I stopped using Google products one by one. I eventually deleted my Google account, after I downloaded a backup of my data on their servers, in January 2020.
By now, I am confident that I can live not only without significant inconveniences, but rather with great satisfaction, without any of Google products.
It was just much easier than I thought. It feels like I’ve grew out of many fallacies at once by this move :)
In the checklist at the bottom, there are more details on the alternatives I’m using for each product.
SMS or OTP feature in the password manger I use (most of them has it built-in now)
No random note keeping. Draft up thoughts where they should belong, or only temporarily store them on local phone/laptop note taking app, or use paper
Local files with OpenOffice
Local navigation apps, street signs, asking people.