{"id":8832,"date":"2020-04-30T10:49:47","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T14:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8832"},"modified":"2020-04-30T10:49:47","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T14:49:47","slug":"degoogling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8832","title":{"rendered":"Degoogling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Ogle has a couple of interesting posts on how<\/a> and why<\/a> he is degoogling his life. The why is just what you\u2019d expect. He\u2019s tired of having Google vacuum up all the data on his online activities. Like many of us, he understands the bargain you\u2019re making when you adopt those \u201cfree\u201d apps and like many of us he\u2019s decided that the price isn\u2019t worth it.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also concerned about committing his workflow to software that may not be there tomorrow. That holds especially\u2014as Irreal is always saying\u2014to his data. As Ogle points out, a company could go out of business and take your data with it. For that reason, he tries use self-hosted services as much as possible and diversify among vendors for those services he can\u2019t self-host.<\/p>\n

Like most people trying to reduce their reliance on Google, Ogle replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo. At first, it didn\u2019t seem as good as Google but he soon realized that that was because Google knew so much about him that it could guess what he was looking for better that DuckDuckGo, which doesn\u2019t collect any data about your browsing. He also noticed that DuckDuckGo almost always had the result he was looking for on the first page.<\/p>\n

Also like most people fleeing from Google, Ogle chose FireFox to replace Chrome. Unless you\u2019re an Apple user and like Safari, that\u2019s probably the best choice.<\/p>\n

His choice to replace Gmail was the most unusual. He considered ProtonMail<\/a> but decided to run his own server by running Mail-in-a-Box<\/a> on a \\(\\$5\\) a month DigitalOcean droplet<\/a>. That\u2019s a really attractive option\u2014at least for me\u2014because you\u2019re running your own mail server and don\u2019t have to depend on a third party who might not have your best interests at heart or who might collect and sell your data.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s replaced many other services as well so take a look at his posts to see what he used. Like the rest of us, he found YouTube really hard to replace and still hasn\u2019t chosen an alternative. It\u2019s not clear whether Ogle wants to replace YouTube as a consumer, a content provider, or both. Regardless, it\u2019s a hard service to replace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaron Ogle has a couple of interesting posts on how and why he is degoogling his life. The why is just what you\u2019d expect. He\u2019s tired of having Google vacuum up all the data on his online activities. Like many … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[62,3],"class_list":["post-8832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-privacy","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8833,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8832\/revisions\/8833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}