Congrats! I did it last year and it was SUCH a relief.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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You beat me by a year! What pushed you over the edge?
I actually wrote a whole (free) book about it, haha! (I'm a retired journalist.) In short, I got tired of feeling like I was always being followed and watched. I also disliked the way the big tech companies have been taking over U.S. politics. I was proved right after the last election and updated the book to reflect the new administration. And so many more reasons! I also quit Microsoft and Amazon, most of Meta (I have some friends in other countries who only use Whatsapp), and am working on Apple.
Keep blocking ads and VPN up, use a generic user agent. Google will create a ghost profile and they'll be able to link it to your old data eventually. Or even if they don't, they still know who you are because you had a Google account, and by your browsing habbits
Hey, congratulations. I did this back in January of 2023 and couldn't be happier.
Did you use Gmail? If so, how did switching various accounts to another email address go?
You can start by creating a new email address with another provider.
Then, go to your Gmail settings and set it to redirect all new email that comes into your Gmail mailbox to your new email address.
Gradually, you sign in to your favorite sites and replace your Gmail address with the new one. If you're subscribed to a lot of things, it can be overwhelming to do this all at once. So do it for your most important accounts first, and change the others as you go. :)
Password managers make it pretty easy to see which websites have the old address too 👍
I understand it makes things easy. I'm not a fan of that though. I know if you send mail from your new address to someone using gmail, google will get that address. But the robots have to then create a new advertising profile corresponding to that address and that profile is empty . If you tell google send it all to this new address, then google can already stuff the profile of your new address with the info from your gmail account. (And no: robots are stupid because there are hundreds of new emails created every second, they don't understand that [email protected] = [email protected])
You have to change one after the other the emails in each important account you have (friends, family, employer, governmental agencies, ethical brands) and keep the ones you suspect of being sellers of your ID have the now secondary gmail one.
@winety @cauthon117 by the time I had cancelled all of the American selling sites. Travel booking sites. Hotel booking sites. Airlines and car hire sites plus all sources of media. I found it really easy to shut out all Google software, exclude AI And rediscover my freedom. Saved a fortune every month and now can afford to buy loads more stuff from all those free trade countries :lidl_woozy_terminator:
Getting rid of YouTube is like freeing up two hours of my daily schedule. And yeah it’s absolutely eye opening seeing all those services one subscribes to without even giving it a second thought.