Resistance to Google and its spying may be going mainstream. Well, at least people outside of tech are talking about it and taking action. For some time, a small group of noisy people have been shouting about Google’s relentless spying and trying to rid their on-line life of it. These were mostly people who
- Knew enough about security to understand the dangers that Google and the other data gatherers/brokers represented.
- Were technically sophisticated enough to be able to adjust their computing environments to reduce the tracking.
Over at The Hour there’s an article about ordinary people trying to rid themselves of Google. That’s almost impossible, of course, unless you want to go completely off the grid. Search and email—which is what everyone seems to worry about—is easy: use DuckDuckGo for search and something like Fastmail for email. If you live in the Apple garden, Apple’s email service is excellent, free, and doesn’t spy on you.
Similarly for browsers. There’s no reason at all to be using Chrome except that you’re used to it. It spies on you and it’s no longer the fastest. You’re much better off with Firefox or, if you’re an Apple person, Safari. And, PLEASE, don’t get me started on Google Docs and the rest of their office suite.
The hard parts—at least for me—are YouTube and all the other sites that run on Google’s cloud services. Realistically, your choice for on-line videos is don’t watch them or watch them on YouTube. The problem with Google’s cloud services is that they host sites that have nothing to do with Google and unless you’re very diligent and determined it’s hard to find out which sites those are.
Will the Never Googlers succeed or make a difference? Almost certainly not unless there’s a huge uptake in their numbers, which strikes me as unlikely. If Google has any weakness, it’s probably search. Last I knew, that’s where they make their money and it’s very easy for anyone inclined to draw back from Google to just change their default search engine to DuckDuckGo.
Update : Firefox → DuckDuckGo