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\u2019s relentless spying and trying to rid their on-line life of it. These were mostly people who<\/p>\n
Over at The Hour<\/a> there\u2019s an article about ordinary people trying to rid themselves of Google<\/a>. That\u2019s almost impossible, of course, unless you want to go completely off the grid. Search and email\u2014which is what everyone seems to worry about\u2014is easy: use DuckDuckGo<\/a> for search and something like Fastmail<\/a> for email. If you live in the Apple garden, Apple\u2019s email service is excellent, free, and doesn\u2019t spy on you.<\/p>\n Similarly for browsers. There\u2019s no<\/i> reason at all to be using Chrome except that you\u2019re used to it. It spies on you and it\u2019s no longer the fastest. You\u2019re much better off with Firefox<\/a> or, if you\u2019re an Apple person, Safari. And, PLEASE, don\u2019t get me started on Google Docs and the rest of their office suite.<\/p>\n The hard parts\u2014at least for me\u2014are YouTube and all the other sites that run on Google\u2019s cloud services. Realistically, your choice for on-line videos is don\u2019t watch them or watch them on YouTube. The problem with Google\u2019s cloud services is that they host sites that have nothing to do with Google and unless you\u2019re very<\/i> diligent and determined it\u2019s hard to find out which sites those are.<\/p>\n Will the Never Googlers succeed or make a difference? Almost certainly not unless there\u2019s a huge uptake in their numbers, which strikes me as unlikely. If Google has any weakness, it\u2019s probably search. Last I knew, that\u2019s where they make their money and it\u2019s very<\/i> easy for anyone inclined to draw back from Google to just change their default search engine to DuckDuckGo.<\/p>\n Update<\/b>