Contact: barbara@mechanicalgirl.com
Python Developer and Educator
2025-03-27
We are in some deep trouble as a nation (I'm speaking of America, in case anyone had doubts. I know that not everyone reading this will be in the States.)
As I write this, a student named Rumeysa Ozturk is being held in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. If you've seen the video online, you know how chilling it is. She was kidnapped outside of her apartment in Somerville and illegally transported out of state within a matter of hours. She has not been charged with anything yet, but it appears that her only offense was to co-author an op-ed in the Tufts daily newspaper calling on the school to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.
Today it's students here on visas, but who doubts that U.S. citizens could be next?
It's hard to know what to do to fight back. I've been trying to focus on the things that I, personally, can control. I can't help Rumeysa Ozturk, or Mahmoud Khalil, but I can stop supporting the billionaires who are in bed with this administration.
It might not move the needle much, but for me it takes away some of the ache of feeling powerless.
When it comes to the big US-based digital services, safety and privacy are of course also an issue. At the end of this post is a link to a WIRED article that sums up the security concerns neatly. In a nutshell, US-based tech companies aren't necessarily reliable when it comes to the services that people and businesses use every day.
Anyway, on to a description of the actual de-Googling I've done.
As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve had my account since at least 2009. Moving away from it was no small feat.
The first thing I did was research email providers. I settled on Proton, a privacy-focused digital services provider out of Switzerland. Yes, I'm aware of the crappy remarks their CEO Andy Yen made endorsing some of Trump's political picks. But Proton is managed by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, and I trust them to stick to their principles. Full disclosure: I have a paid account, but the free version probably offers enough space/features for the average email user.
Transitioning from Gmail to Proton email has taken almost a month. I use email forwarding for the bulk of my subscriptions, so changing the target of that forward took care of about 80% of my email traffic. If you want to go this route but don't want the trouble of setting up your own mail server, you have a couple of options.
Email aliasing is the more comprehensive of the two. Through an aliasing service, you can do things like set up wildcards that let you generate aliases on the fly. One use case for that is to see where your address is being shared. For example, if you sign up for a service using "myemail+[XYZ]@mydomain.com" and then you start getting spam from other companies using that address, you know that XYZ sold your email address. For more information on aliasing services, check out this page on privacyguides.org.
A simpler but more limited option is to register a domain with a registrar that offers email forwarding (most registrars do, it's just a question of comparing costs and reliability). In most cases, configuring the forwarding will be as easy as naming an address to go with your domain ("myemail@mydomain.com") and then deciding on a target inbox ("myemail@proton.me", for example). The registrar will take care of the rest, and any email sent to "myemail@mydomain.com" should reach the inbox at "myemail@proton.me".
One proviso: If your registrar has aggressive spam filtering, you may not receive all emails that are sent to "myemail@mydomain.com", even things like newsletters that you have explicitly opted in to. If you're signing up for something that you really want to be sure you receive, just use the original inbox address ("myemail@proton.me" in this example).
So for those examples, and for things like utility accounts, credit cards, memberships, anything where I might need the ability to reply from a confirmed address, I moved to my Proton address. There was no special tool I could use to manage that transition, I just had to go out to all of my known accounts and gradually make the changes. Boo to those accounts that don't let you change your email address at all (I'm looking at you, Etsy).
Archiving the actual contents of my Gmail inbox took some time. I decided to go through and make decisions about what to keep, what to delete. From there, I just went to Google Takeout to request my data. You can request data from most of your Google services there. It takes some time for them to complete the request, but I was able to get a compressed email archive within a couple of days.
The archive comes as an mbox file - you can open and see that it's all in plain text, it just includes all the email metadata and headers in one big blob so it's not easily readable. I know there are tools out there that will parse the mbox into individual email files, or make it possible to import into clients like Thunderbird, but the first few I tried were buggy as hell, so for now that file sits unparsed on an external drive. I'll get to it when I get to it.
The other tough thing I had to tackle was moving to a calendar. Proton does have a calendar offering, but it weirdly does not support CalDav. My partner and I rely heavily on our shared household calendar, so we opted to set up an account on NextCloud. We were able to create a shared calendar there, then we used CalDAV to import that calendar into local clients. I now use the Apple Calender apps on my laptop and phone to manage that calendar. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out how to get the notifications working (the calendar started with an export from Google, into NextCloud, then into the Apple app, so some things were lost in translation) but overall we're both pretty happy with it.
So what about other services?
It turned out that I had accumulated a lot of documents on Google Docs over the years. I took some time to sift through them all, deleted a lot that just wasn't useful anymore (one of the hardest parts of this migration was convincing myself to let go of things). If you have a mountain of documents and don't want to do this culling, just request that archive through Google Takeout. I also discovered that I could just move everything into a folder, then choose Download from the More Actions menu on that folder to get a zipped file containing all the docs and spreadsheets with their formatting retained. Some of those will now be stored on either Proton Drive or NextCloud, some will just be filed away on my laptop.
I also found it eye-opening to go through the account page at myaccount.google.com and see what I could safely remove. There was payment and purchase information that I didn't realize Google was storing, along with device sessions to be revoked and history to clear.
Outside of the personal services I was using, I was also hosting a web site on Google Cloud - I recently moved that site to Uberspace.de, and I will be writing a separate post about how much I LOVE it there.
YouTube? PeerTube and other networks do exist, but none of them are very mature. I don't think there's an easy way to replace the content I was getting on YouTube just yet. The good news is that you don't have to have a Google account to access YouTube. I created a bookmark.html file of all my saved playlists (I did this using an archive from Google Takeout, but there are other Python tools out there that can help you with the export). I imported those bookmarks into DuckDuckGo, where I watch with the DuckPlayer. (Oh, and if you have uploaded your own videos to YouTube, you can also get those files via Google Takeout.)
Here's what else I've switched to:
Other alternative services
I'm not just leaving Google, I'm also moving away from Meta, Reddit, any of the big centralized online forums.
Eventually, when my iPhone gives up the ghost, I want to switch to Fairphone (the /e/OS version that uses non-Google Android). And some day, when my current MacBook goes belly up, I'll finally get a Linux laptop. I'd also eventually like to switch our home router to use the OpenWrt One.
Some things that have bitten me in the butt:
Hopefully this overview has been comprehensive enough to help anyone looking to move away from the big tech oligarchs, either for security or political reasons. I'm sure there's a lot more I could have included, and I know that some of my suggested options are not perfect, but I believe in not letting perfect be the enemy of good. If you have any suggestions or questions, reach out to me on Mastodon.
Additional reading:
Other resources:
Contact: barbara@mechanicalgirl.com