Google is Evil
I’ve had enough of Google. Larry and Sergey came up with a great search engine. The motto “Don’t be evil” was woven into the fabric of their products.
Until it wasn’t. And now it isn’t.
I was a big fan of Google. I literally wrote the book on Google AdSense.
I was one of the few who used and shared Google Helpouts before they screwed it up.
I use Gmail, Drive, Calendar, YouTube, Chrome, Chromecast and still have an AdSense account.
Google IS evil. They are spying on you, likely selling your information to domestic and international organizations that do NOT have your best interests at heart, and they have become Big Brother. The attached video (ironically hosted on YouTube) is just one of many revealing how in many ways Google behaves like a fascist, totalitarian dictatorship. (And don’t give me the “they are a private company, they can do whatever they want B.S.” They are clearly violating the law.)
And so it is time to finally get off the Google bandwagon. I have persuaded @Travis Wright to go along on the ride with me.
Here are the steps to De-Googlefying…
1) Switch to the Brave browser and DELETE Chrome. It’s fast, it’s decentralized, and you get paid for sharing your information. Go to Brave.com. It’s super-easy to do on laptop, desktop and mobile. I’m posting this from Brave and will be deleting Chrome from ALL my devices as soon as I am done with this post.
2) Get off Gmail. Super hard to do, but I am looking at options now. There’s no way our email is truly private in Google’s hands. No way. The hard part is that I have a couple addresses that ARE Gmail addresses. I suppose I can forward those until I change that address.
3) Get off Google search. This may be the worst offender of privacy. Use DuckDuckGo.com instead. You may not get as perfect the search results, but its good enough. And they don’t track you.
4) Get off Drive. If I can find a solution that ports drive along with email, I’ll use that.
5) Get off Calendar. See #3. I’m looking at KolabNow as a suite of tools to manage #2-4.
6) Unplug and get rid of my Chromecast. I don’t really use it anyhow.
7) Remove AdSense from my sites. Yes, the guy who wrote the book on AdSense is kissing AdSense goodbye. Google can Kiss My AdSense! haha…
8) YouTube. But I’m going to stop uploading videos there and choose a decentralized service such as D-Tube instead. I’ll likely keep my account with existing videos. This is a challenging one.
What other services am I missing?
Google has cleverly caught us in their net and made it difficult to use other services. And many will shrug it off and say it isn’t worth it. That’s up to you. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a few years and haven’t wanted to deal with it. But I finally asked myself “so when?” Now. It begins now.
You could call it an attack against democracy, but really, is it hurting anything removing the negative influences we have in the world? Maybe removing these pillars you so holy cling to, would in fact create democracy, and not destroy it.
Jovial this has got to be one of the most moronic things I’ve ever heard. “Negative influences” are subjective and relative and having gatekeepers to spoon feed what they deem acceptable is exactly why the millennial generation (and I am one of them) is one of the weakest we have ever witnessed in a century.
I don’t mean to be rude but you should really expose yourself to ideas that makes you uncomfortable until you become capable of independent thought.
At this time, Google has begun to make users very dependent on the services they provide so that users are sometimes forced to follow the rules they apply.
I use Runbox for my email and calendar services; it’s not perfect, but it’s at least tons better than Google.
Dropbox with Boxcryptor are good alternatives to Drive; but the problem is, if you are going to use a cloud service to store your files, then you should be prepared for compromise. I can’t wait for the decentralization of computing services again. I’m not a fan of the mainframe/cloud model.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any good replacements for YouTube, other than self-hosting, which could get prohibitively expensive in a heartbeat, depending on traffic.
Brave is okay as a browser, I still have grave concerns, which I’ve shared with the developers. The same guy that gave us Javascript also develops Brave and while JS is useful, it is also arguably the largest online security concern since most people abandoned Flash. I see Brave following that design philosophy.
What scares me the most is the shear amount of telemetry Google is able to obtain by numbers alone. It has been reported that there are 1.5+ billion active gmail accounts. Think about all that personal and business information shared across the world through those accounts. I feel bad for ever having encouraged companies to adopt the service.
You are so right. Much has changed with Google since the founding days when they did have our best interests at the center of their organization. I guess money speaks louder than ideals, and thank you for taking a strong decision on this.
Google is totally evil. Trump haters to the max and in line with globalism.
They have the worst customer support ever, they leave their automated system to control and handle developers complaint. This is the worst practice and very unethical business practice.
I don’t recommend any developer to the Google Play Developer console as a person being devoted to developing programs and applications for many years.
They have terminated our developer account without prior notice that we had been publishing educational applications for years comply with the Google Play Policy. We got 1 million downloaded popular application with the package name com.konusankizasistan
They have non-moral application control and prohibition mechanisms. The applications are undergoing robotic inspection after they are published. If your application is suspended three times, your developer account is terminated. You are not allowed to register a developer account again.
Sometimes the application can be suspended from a small error you made without knowing. For example, if you have a copyrighted icon or content that you add to the application, your application will be removed after you publish it and you will be notified by email. Then it is too late. Sometimes, even if the application is rejected, they don’t always give you a chance to correct your mistake. We are all human beings can make mistakes.
They are very bad, especially in terms of support for developers. If your account or application is suspended, you can’t get a positive answer even if you object to it, and you’ll get template answers sent by the bots. Even if you say you are in good faith and ready to correct your mistake, these objections are not answered positively.
I’ve read numerous articles, disappointments, and developer stories about Google Play’s unfair use of this prohibition and account termination on the Internet. I never saw any positive comments. I understand the rigor of adherence to Google Play application publishing policies. However, you are not always offered a solution, prior notice about these terminations and suspensions by the world-leading company on the internet. For example, I haven’t seen a negative comment from app developers about AppStore. I have never experienced such difficulties in the Samsung developer console. If there is an error in your application they give you the chance to correct. They don’t threaten to close your account or ban your application.
Developers should be given the opportunity to communicate better with problem-solving in return for the 25$ developer registration fee.
After a few seconds, your objections come back with similar answers and no return is made
If your developer account is closed once, you will not be able to get the developer account again from Google Play. When family members using the same computer connected to the same IP address, the new accounts are closed under the associated account name, even if they belong to another person when they want to open the developer account. You are being treated like a criminal. You cannot open a clean page even if you understand your mistakes.
Google’s dictatorship on Android Developers
Unfortunately, Google has monopoly control over Android, When you are kicked out of Google Play Market as a developer, it’s not possible to find the same alternatives to distribute your apps that all doors are closed to you.
Google Play Store Application is installed on every Android device as a default app store for Android. Majority users have to use the play market to download apps. Other app stores don’t have an equal chance to be a competitor of play store.
Suppose your job and income depends on the Android development, you have to look at another job if you are banned from play store forever because of these monopolistic behaviors. That means you lost all the ratings, projects you have been working on them years because of little mistake you did without knowing and it’s not possible to get back play store due to you are not offered any working appeal process, they only send template answers to all your objections. We are humans, not robots to make everything excellent. You lost your developer account because of irreversible mistakes.
There is actually a website dedicated to getting off Google altogether. It is called howtoboycottgoogle.com .
The interesting thing is that if you go into Google and search for “Boycott Google” this website is the first link on the page!
Google’s view is that we only exist for their profit. Forget family, county or beliefs. In essence, if we don’t exist to enrich them, our existence is of no consequence.
Very happy to see this post Joel… I actually bought your book way back in the 2000’s and had a great time in the early days of Google Adsense…. until they showed their true evil ways and killed off some of my sites that were pretty much paying my bills.
It pretty much ruined my life for a few years… that was back in 2008 and I’m still suffering because of the ripple effect.
I’ve been halfway toying with the idea of creating a brand new search engine, but perhaps make it more old school like and not worry about trying to cover everything. Maybe a search engine for hobbies for example?
Honestly I like the Internet in the early days compared to what we have now. The technology might be better now, but the lack of privacy and monopoly factor pretty much ruins the rest of the experience.
I’ll have to catch up on your latest info… the Internet sure has become a LOT more difficult than it use to be.
Also, another reason we should all be considering starting our own search engine is that DuckDuckGo is not 100% safe either.
They use advertising from Yahoo and Bing… both pretty much have the same ideology as Google. Evil.