We’re continually negotiating with tech companies about which tools we can use free of charge, which is to say that we pay by giving up privacy (a.k.a. data = $$$). It’s a matter of striking the right bargain based on how much of their creepiness we’re willing to tolerate. Like most people nowadays, I’m generally ignorant of algorithmic creepiness. However, some notable exceptions are worth explaining. What follows is a stocktake, of sorts, starting with the following coverage table for the brands that I use.

  On Android On Ubuntu
Search engine DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo
Web browser DuckDuckGo Google
Office suite Google LibreOffice
Email Google Google
Calendar Google Google
Photos Google Google
Maps Google Google
Cloud backup Google Google
Task manager Trello Trello
Social media N/A N/A

That final row is ‘Not Applicable’ because I have no presence on social media. I did run an experiment on Twitter over the past few months to see how their advertisers’ interface matches up with their users’ interface. And having concluded that Twitter is still far beyond my tolerance level for privacy violations, I’ve chosen to stay away. Other social media giants simply form a “NO GO” zone for me, due to the instant privacy violations they enforce on every user that joins - I’m of course referring to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., which are all forbidden brands in my book. The short story is that life is simply happier, fearless, and real without any social media.

Well, then how come Google is dominating my usage above? Sadly, that’s my only regret at present: that I cannot break free of Google so easily :( But I’m definitely taking incremental steps in that direction. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for nearly a year on my Android devices (phone and tablet) and on my Ubuntu machines (laptop and desktop). It’s a fine search engine that, ironically enough, reminds me of the early/ethical days of Google. I’ve noticed no difference in the quality of results between DuckDuckGo and Google over the past year whenever I ran calibration tests. But keep in mind that my search pattern does not necessarily resemble the typical user’s pattern, because I don’t rely on a search engine for answers to brain-dead questions.

So, having moved away from Google Search, I’m left with all the rows in the middle of the above table to address. I am working on my own site for sharing my travel photos under a creative commons license. As I become proficient with Jekyll and Ruby, thanks to this very blog, I will implement a simple site for hosting all the photos that I want to place in the public domain. It’s a background hobby right now, which means I have to live with Google Photos for the time being.

Unfortunately, shifting away from Google for the remaining categories is very hard indeed (except maybe cloud backup). I may well end up with my own email server in the future, particularly because I wish to use encryption everywhere. But that will take time to implement securely. An email server can also handle calendar seamlessly, hence those two are coupled. I use very little of cloud backup (Google Drive), thus it’s not a priority right now (besides, my cloud backup is simply the automatic syncing of a handful of encrypted archives).

I don’t think moving away from Google Maps is going to be feasible anytime soon. I don’t travel enough to warrant paying for a proprietary app that preserves privacy. Consequently, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time going through every single setting of Google Maps in order to disable as many types of location tracking and history that Google would let me. They had dozens of settings that I had to explicitly disable for preserving my privacy of physical movements. It’s a shame that the default settings are so heinously invasive. The safe path is of course to not use Google Maps on a phone, which I follow pretty much 99% of the time.

Anyhow, I reckon a tabular inventory of brands is a very useful tool for understanding the choices we make, and don’t make. The innate desire and peer pressure to conform with whatever brands dominate society are powerful forces indeed - shaped by natural selection into our distinctly human kind of herd instinct. But it helps to take a step away from the herd, once in a supermoon, and think about the bigger picture. As unhappy as I am with the table above being filled with Google, at least it is a picture that I can now envision changing for the better with each orbit of the sun by our herd.