Is it possible to de-Googlify your life?
I couldn't sleep the other night, so I ended up lying in bed reading random stuff on my phone. One of the things I came across, was an article about how Google catalogs your email - including keeping a list of your online shopping history. This is probably not surprising, given how much personal data is collected via Google services, but it somehow made me really angry.
Of course, making any dramatic changes purely motivated by sudden anger is never a good idea, so I've been trying to push the thought about this article aside for a couple of days. However, I'm still annoyed, and by now I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to... if not completely de-Googleify my online life, then at least choose to use Google products as little as possible.
First of all, I guess I'm kind of lucky that I don't use "everything" from Google - as in, I don't use Photos or Google Drive or Google Docs, apart from whatever I have in there from testing those things years ago. So, not using those are the "easy" bit.
As for the thing that has become its own verb - "googling" stuff: I've replaced the default search engine on both my phone and browser with DuckDuckGo now, or I use Bing sometimes as well. I highly doubt that it's possible to never google anything again, but at least it doesn't happen "mindlessly" and automatically anymore.
It's much harder to think of alternatives for Gmail. I've been using that for many years, and I'm actually happy to have a full archive of emails from years back in there. Sometimes I need to check when I did this or that, and it's usually found very easily in my archives. That is important. Of course there is also the fact that those who need to know my email address for whatever reason, already have the Gmail one(s) in their systems, and if I were to change to a better mail provider, it would mean a lot of hassle to update everything.
I guess one trick could be to get a new email account (Protonmail looks good), and then gradually just start replying to the important stuff from there - and leave all the uninteresting stuff just coming in to Gmail instead. I guess it would be a kind of "fresh start" online, and would get rid of a lot of junk mail that I signed up for at some point - newsletters and tech stuff on sale, mostly. (Somehow, it's hard to unsubscribe from those, because "what if" there's something interesting in there? But when they arrive, I mostly just look at them quickly and then delete them, mildly annoyed that they weren't "proper" mail!)
Also, another plus point for Protonmail: It allows up to five email aliases with different display names. So, I could actually use one account both for my personal mail (with my real name on) AND the Zimena mail (which just has my online name on). As it is now, I have separate accounts for both, and I often thought about this being a less than ideal way to do things.
I'm still not sure I would be prepared to go through the process of migrating to a new service, though. Even though I could do it gradually, it would still mean checking mail from both the "old" accounts and the new one (at least until there isn't any more important stuff coming in to the old accounts), and it just sounds like it would be confusing and something I'd get impatient about really fast.
EDIT: I suddenly thought of Youtube as well. Let's be honest, it's pretty much impossible to avoid using that. Sure, I'm not spending hours on there daily, but then I can easily suddenly spend hours there if I go there looking for something. Then something leads to something else, and then I've suddenly been on there for an age.