This article is under heavy consruction and is part of the bigger article series: Big Tech Detox which will cover articles about how to DeApple, DeMicrosoft, DeMeta and DeAmazon your Life.
First I have to admit, Degoogling is harder than it might sound at first. Depending on how much you know about how deep entangled google really is on the web, you might already have a clue that this would require more than just 2 or 3 steps. The decision to detox from big tech is a wise one. But not using any of the services google offers visibly or under the hood of other webpages / web services is easier said than done. I will guide you on this and list some good alternatives for googles services. A lot of them are easy to use and offer flexibility, privacy and security combined.
Transparency: I have not yet checked which services are completely Google free. I have to check if any of their hosting takes place in the Google Cloud. This article is under heavy construction and far from finished.
Part I
- Changing your default search engine -
This is easy and can be achieved in the settings menu of all major browsers. The harder part is, which search engine to choose. You might ask which search engine should I trust? Well this is up to you. I won't recommend any of them regarding this.
But I will name a few that I think are a better alternative to Google and Bing. From a privacy standpoint of view, you should do your own due diligence and decide on your own which organisation or company you trust.
At first, we should clarify, that a lot of websites that are considered to be a search engine by lots of people in fact aren't real search engines. Most of these are only providing a search mask, some kind of routing service or tunnel that connects you to the big search engines and delivers the search engine results back to the web browser. In most cases, these "search engines" use the search index of Google, Bing or other web giants. Only a few search engines have their own search index or are working on setting one up themselve.
These search engines have their own search indexThe alternatives to Google#s search engine are:
Ecosia seems to be evolving into a real search engine. They are establishing their own search index in cooperation with qwant and may get completely independent of Google or Bing some time soon. But be careful. At the moment and depending on the country you live in, the use of their service makes connection requests to bing.com and bingapis.com or googles servers. Ecosia makes use of googles and bings search index to deliver the search results and loads scripts from these sites as well. So Ecosia shouldn't be considered a privacy-friendly search engine. Their focus on ecological well-being is quite charming but from a privacy focused point of view - Forget Ecosia for now. Maybe they will evolve into a privacy-friendly and eco search engine.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience. Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).Source: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
Being the default search for the Brave Browser this search engine powered by its own search index can as well be set as the default search engine for any other major browser. Brave seems to be a privacy-friendly company that
First, and most importantly, Brave Search adheres to core principles of privacy. We don’t profile you. Ever. This is far different from most other search engines, who collect every piece of data about your search behavior and tie it directly to you as a way to sell more targeted ads. Second, Brave Search operates from a fully independent search index.Source: https://brave.com/compare/google-vs-brave-search/
"We have made a number of changes to the available APIs and added a number of new features. Manifest V3 aims to be the first step in our platform vision to improve the privacy, security, and performance"Source: Google Documentation https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/what-is-mv3
Wait what???
Google wants to "improve the privacy"? Well let's break it down. In parts, this statement is true. Web Manifest V3 embodies a stricter ruleset and limits the power browser extensions get granted. So with a fully Manifest V3 compliant Browser, the browser extensions on the webstore aren't going to be the same anymore. Manifest V3 limits web enthusiasts as well as power users from making use of some of the best browser extensions, of which many have been in use and developed for years or even decades. While this might be not that bad for the uninformed user that surfs through the web with an extension free browser - The shift to Manifest V3 has a serious impact on people that consider the web as their universe and their webbrowser as their spaceship.
Why this decision was made - Cui bono
Who profits from Manifest V3. Well look no further. All the companies that rely on the delivery of ads and selling your data do. As far as we all know, google does heavily rely on the ad-revenue from various channels and websites they own to empower their company. Manifest V3 makes it impossible for browser extensions like uBlock Origin to work properly by limiting the ways the extensions can operate and interfere within the browser / the connections. What do you think? Did google force Manifest V3 on us to protect our privacy or did they do it to keep users from blocking ads and making Google or other big tech companies earn less?
Write your opinion to my comment-box.
Should I still make use of a Chromium based Browser?
Well, that is up to you. If you want to go the full route of Degoogling, using a browser or framework made by google developers doesn't seem to fit your intention of Degoogling in the first place. However, there still are chromium based browsers that keep supporting V2 Extentions. At least until now.
Namely, Brave and Opera. While Brave only hosts 4 V2 extensions (AFAIK: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript) that are ad blocking and security related. When Google finally drops V2 support (expected 2025) Opera has plans to keep supporting all Manifest V2 based browser extensions. At least until now. Opera has a big advantage over he other competitors, it operates their own extension store. It remains to be seen how this will work out in the long run.
Google has plans to remove the support of V2 from the chromium framework entirely.
Some browsers may end up implementing their own adblock adaptations (Brave actually has one) and Opera and Vivaldi have integrated Adblockers as well. These are are actually quite usable because they work outside the extension framework and thus are not limited by V3. But they also aren't as feature rich, capable and adaptable as, for example uBlock Origin is. The option to download custom filter lists for uBlock Origin as well creating your own filters is, what makes this extension superior. You can do way more with that extension than just blocking ads.
Gmail doesn't offer end 2 end encryption out of the box. So Google should be able to read the contents of your E-Mails. They officially state, that they scan your mail for viruses and malware which in return means, they can't have any end 2 end encryption in place. Regarding this, Google does not only scan your e-mails, they also track your data across the whole web and sell it or make use of it by distributing personalized apps to you. While Google has stated: “we do not process email content to serve ads.”, it's up to everyone do believe it or not. While they pretend that they don't serve their ads to their clients based on the content of their e-mails, it remains unclear to what extent they really use all the data of their users for. The problem with G-mail is not necessarily their E-Mail hosting service, it's the whole entangled Google ecosystem that raises privacy concerns in me. While there are lots of e-mail providers without e2e encryption, it's only Google which has dozens of other online services that will track you across the web. Well Google and the other big tech giants of course.
Hint: You can make any e-mail provider unable to read your e-mail contents when using PGP (Pretty good privacy) encryption but it's not as user-friendly as some of the services listed below
There are lots of good alternatives to google products out there. The question you have to ask yourself when degoogling: Are you willing to hand over your data to any other big data giant like Microsoft or Amazon? Even when switching to a provider that is not affiliated to any of the big players, chances are high that their web services still rely on foundations or server structures managed by AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft) or within the Google Cloud. When correctly configured and encrypted, your data should be safe from the Big Tech companies but you never know. They are as well affected by data breaches regularly: See here, here or here.
I encourage everybody to rethink their use of cloud storage. Ask yourself: Do I really need my files to be online? In the case of using cloud storage for backup reasons only: Instead of paying for a subscription, you could as well buy 1 or 2 extra hard drives and store your back upped files yourself. If you need to access your files from several places or devices, you could as well host your own cloud solutions. But covering all of these option would blow up this article too much. That's why I will list you some easy to access Alternatives for Google services.
Whenever you browse the web, there is a very big chance that your computer connects to Google services without you knowing it. This is because Google has lots of services that other webmasters use. The most well known are Google Maps, Google Adsense and Google Analytics but there are many more. People make use of Google's font servers, Google Tag Managger, Google ReCaptcha and many more. While the use of these tools or services provided by google can be convenient for the webmaster, it's a privacy desaster for the user who visits a website. By visiting many websites in a row, Google will get a very deep and insightful profile about the user behind the machine. What are the interests, the beliefs, what is the political stance of the user. You will get a glimpse on how much Google really knows about you when you think about how many websites you have visited in your life.
So if you really have a focus on privacy, blocking those requests is a mandatory action to DeGoogle for real.
Privacy Redirect - Development has been discontinued since 2021 - Has been and partially still is a neat and easy to use Browser Extension (Firefox, Edge, Chromium) that redirects traffic requests to Google Services like Youtube, Maps or search requests through privacy-friendly front-ends and alternatives. It works as well for Twitter and Instagram.
Next-Dns - Next-DNS is advertised as one of the fastest DNS- Resolvers with ad blocking & a focus on privacy and security. A DNS Resolver basically tells your computer which IP address belongs to a given URL. Without, you can't connect to google.com for example. By using Next-DNS as your DNS Resolver you get the ability to make use of custom filter lists. These lists, often curated by people on the internet, can have several impacts on which websites or servers your computer might connect to. This way you are able to block porn sites or google etc. If there is a custom filter list for it, you can block the traffic to the domains/ips that are in this list.
Biggest benefit when using Next DNS: Works with your computer, mobile phone, tablet etc. Using Next-Dns is a very convenient way to stay secure and more or less ad-free on multiple devices. It keeps you from connecting to malicious domains (when using the right filter lists).
LibRedirect - Delivers everything that Privacy Redirect has promised and is still updated and maintained regularly. LibRedirect offers traffic redirection through alternative front-ends a whole heap of online services, including but not limited to: It is available for Firefox (Android Version as well) and chromium based browsers for Linux, Windows and macOS.
Advances Techniques to block requests to Google
When you have to make use of a video from youtube, there is an alternative way of embedding those by routing them through an instance of Invidious. Some instances allow for proxy-streaming the Youtube contents which results in ZERO connections being made to youtube or google servers.
Youtube Alternatives for embedding hosting / sharing Videoshcaptcha -
Cloudflare Turnstile - (also available as a simple to use wordpress plug-in)
Friendly Captcha - a privacy-friendly and invisible reCAPTCHA alternatives. Makes use of cryptographic proof-of-work and background risk checks.
MTCaptcha - with a focus on privacy and compliance it is advertised as an enterprise ready solution driven by an invisible proof-of-work method.
Akismet - is a widely adopted anti-spam tool that filters any piece of user‑submitted text. It started as a wordpress plugin but can be adopted to many use cases thanks to it's flexible API
GeeTest CAPTCHA - Makes use of behaviour recognition and provides
Self host a ReCaptcha alternative
While I think that the alternatives to ReCaptcha I've mentioned before are a good way to start, I believe that self-hosting your anti-bot tool is the best way to do it. Depending on how good the documentation is, this can be pretty simple or require some more effort. You have to make sure that your web hosting provider / server meets the requirements to do so. By hosting a reCaptcha alternative yourself, you retain full data-ownership.
ALTCHA - open-source reCAPTCHA alternative with high privacy standards. It is GDPR, LGPD, CCPA, PIPL, and HIPAA compliant.
mCaptcha - An open-source approach that makes use of proof-of-work instead of presenting a captcha. A non user profiling, no cookies solution.
BotDetect CAPTCHA - is one of the best reCAPTCHA alternatives when it comes to self-hosted reCAPTCHA. It uses images and audio, giving you more control.
To monetize your website or blog, there are several options beside Google Adsense. If you want to make use of more privacy-friendly approaches on earning money with your content on the web, making use of contextual ads may not be the best option.
Not all phones can be reliably freed from googles tentacles. These are the phones you can consider: