Tagged as: Google

A couple of years ago I started the progress of slowly de-googling my life: lessening my reliance on Google services, moving my data to my own servers and limiting what data Google can collect about me going forward as well as deleting the data they already have.

In this blog post I'll talk about the Google services I used to use and the solutions I found for replacing them. The full list of Google services I used to use and have found alternatives for include:

• Gmail: hosting my @kirsle.net email addresses elsewhere.
• Contacts & Calendar: Nextcloud provides my cross-device sync for these.
• Drive: Nextcloud holds my files in the "cloud" (my home PC available on the go).
• Photos: I moved all mine to my Nextcloud.
• Search: DuckDuckGo.

Also check out some of my personal notes I've been taking as I went:

• Degoogle
• Android App Compatibility w/o Play Services
• Self-Hosting

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Something pretty odd that's happened to me on more than a couple of occasions:

I'll wake up in the morning, and then a couple minutes later people start sending me messages on Google Hangouts, so my phone's making a bunch of noise. If it's early enough in the morning, some of those messages will even say things like, "you're up early."

The thing is though, I didn't even touch my phone yet. I didn't even look at my phone.

Messages like this don't tend to wake me up, but instead I don't start getting messages until just after I'm awake.

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