I know you can’t fully de-Google… at least without losing access to parts of the internet, your work life, or the people you care about. But this checklist isn’t about purity, it’s about giving regular people a way to push back without needing a tech background or an off-grid cabin.
It’s a week-by-week guide to easing out of the Google ecosystem:
- Replacing Gmail, Maps, Drive, YouTube, etc.
- Backing up data safely
- Making privacy decisions that work for you
- Optional “fallback” steps for folks who can’t go all-in
This was built as a shareable tool for anyone who’s feeling digitally exhausted or sick of feeding surveillance capitalism. It’s free and printable—no signup, no tracking. It’s a gift from an angry little dog/semi-retired journalist who cares.
PNGs are below, and the PDF automatic download with links is here. I’ll build a post around it one of these days but wanted to get it out to the world asap!
I’d love thoughts on turning this into a free course/challenge, maybe with a Signal group.
Some decent suggestions, others not so great.
Why tf is turning off advertising ID on the last week?! Stupid easy and prevents many more services other than Google from targetting you.
Half of these privacy browser extensions make no difference since they make you more fingerprintable due to your unique set of signals based on what is blocked. Unless you’re gonna install CanvasBlocker or NoScript, adding these extensions doesn’t due a damn bit of good besides blocking ads and bloated telemetry scripts.
Also, all of this is kinda moot if you run a version of Android with Google Play Services. Using GrapheneOS, a mobile Linux distro, or getting a Huawei phone is absolutely necessary if you don’t want Google to see every single notification you get on your device.
Normie-friendly privacy guides always suck ass because they don’t ever explain threat modelling. It’s always switch to this other corporation’s cloud services instead of using offline-first or self-hosted services.
Thanks for the feedback!
When I create my materials, I have my mom in mind as the target reader. While I use GrapheneOS and have tried (and hated) fingerprint-blocking tools, many people are at a much earlier stage of ability/interest. That’s actually why I started my site: Two years ago when I was feeling ready to do something about being surveilled, I had to do a ton of research and figure it all out for myself. There was nothing that was understandable and doable for the average person, and my goal is to get people on board with caring about their privacy and reclaiming their lives from Big Tech This checklist is meant for newbies to get started on their journey.
I put the advertising blocks at the end because I figured in the first four weeks, people would be experimenting with different software, platforms, and maybe even hardware. Is that a bad idea?
ughhhghgh getting off gmail has been the hardest part for me. like i dont want to pay for tuta and how much can you really trust proton? and also - I have so many fucking logins and changing them is super annoying
I get it! Mailfence has a free starter plan.
I used a spreadsheet to track all the logins I changed, privacy settings I did on each, etc. I did a little at a time. Now, ProtonPass stores all my passwords so I don’t have to worry about remembering the masked email I created for each one.
There’s a lot of up-front effort, but then things smooth out as the new platforms and habits become your new normal.