Semantic Nonsense: Adventures in de-Googling

Earlier this year, I decided that I was feeding too many algorithms on the Internet. I wondered, how much could I actually withdraw while still reaping the benefits I had come to expect from the World Wide Web?

I thought it might also be a good way to bring a forceful end to the many bad habits I had picked up over the years. Like leaving comments. Repeating passwords. Not making use of encrypted services when they are just sitting right there waiting to be used.

While in many cases the Internet is forever, and the endless buying and selling of data means surely the consumer profile created by inferences from whatever I remove will remain long after I delete the visible records… I don’t have to make it easy for anyone, nor do I have to throw good data after bad.

Now I had some practice scrubbing things before, albeit on smaller scales. The smallest such instance involved nuking my Livejournal. Frankly, all that thing ever did was magnify everyone’s misery. Twitter would be the next to go, well before an offer was even made to buy it. And most recently, I used Reddit’s API-overcharging debacle that ended with some very heavy-handed tactics deployed against the volunteer moderators who only asked their thankless non-jobs not be made even more intractable as an excuse to bulldoze my presence there, too. And that one might even have been noticed; I was in the top 1% of karma-earners and erased it all.

But before all of that, I quit Facebook. And I did it long enough ago that it wasn’t even for privacy reasons, but because they kept taking away the parts of the UI I liked and there were too many fights over nonsense going on (Man, I can only imagine what those fights look like NOW). And in the time since then, I hadn’t joined any of its related services. I’m already about as off-the-radar as anyone can be from Meta. It’s not a lot, as my family likes to tell Facebook everything I won’t, alas.

But on the subject of an Internet giant, I wondered how possible it was to shut out the rest of the Big 5: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Considering that Apple and Microsoft run the OSes and I work from home with specific platforms, eliminating them was immediately infeasible. Amazon also proved problematic. While it was surprisingly easy to shop elsewhere, the fact remains that Damage Control streams on Twitch. And also more than 80% of websites are hosted on AWS. Not much can be done there short of quitting the Internet.

So I set my sights on trying to move on from Google. Though my no discomfort approach to this probably dooms me to failure as I’d rather enjoy YouTube. But I’m taking one step at a time and I’ll see just how far I go.

Setting my video addiction aside (I at least wiped out my YouTube comment history), I needed to triage just how deep I was into Google’s grasp. My barely-used Google+ account wouldn’t be an issue; the last remaining vestiges of it were purged by Google itself in August. I have a few reviews on Google, including a scathing indictment of an apartment complex I used to live in which is probably unfairly maligning the new owners. There are some other reviews as well that were part of a short-lived era in my life where I tried to take such a thing seriously.

Going from Google Maps to elsewhere for my GPS needs was harsh. It was, genuinely, the better product. It took several attempts to wean myself off it, including one month when I did little more than shout obscenities at Apple Maps for lacking basic quality of life features and also accuracy.

Google Drive was next on the hit list, and there was a lot going on there. Google Drive was the scratch space and archive of all my Damage Control posts. It was the home of my shopping lists, to-do lists, recipes, project management trackers and innumerable shared files. Replacing it would mean also finding a new host for file sharing among DC staff, as I had carved out a spot for everything we needed to share and collaborate on in my Google Drive, after all.

Despite all this, de-driving myself was mostly easy. There were innumerable other services that would allow me to see and update all those lists from both my computer and phone. There were plenty of things that just plain didn’t need to be on Google Drive to begin with. Nearly all the files shared with me had long ago lost their relevance. And when I pulled the trigger on Proton to be my future Gmail replacement, it provided the means for me to share files with others via Proton Drive (though in doing so, I will need to give up being able to edit documents in the drive). But making that change from Gmail? Well, that’s the biggest task yet.

As a renowned engineer once said, “It’s not just the whales… it’s the water.” The problem with dropping Gmail isn’t dropping Gmail. It’s going to the hundreds of websites and other places that use that Gmail as my contact information, if not also my username. Compared to that, telling everybody I have a new email address is trivial.

As for the emails themselves, I can easily import them to Proton, and even graduate from using multiple Gmail accounts to one account with many aliases. But that’s still 4,246 emails on the account with the ‘net handle and 12,084 in the one with my actual name attached. I’ve never really had to think about it before, but that is a LOT of email.

Looking through ancient emails is a freaky and even dangerous pastime. And I’m not even talking about running into emails from those who have since died, or even emails from multiple exes (though it wasn’t fun). No, what’s freaking is reading me.

Now, the emails don’t go back to my college days as I originally signed up for gmail as a result of alumni getting pushed out of my college’s email system. So this stroll down amnesia lane is pretty much devoid of cringe and base immaturity. No, the problem is that I don’t remember any of them. These emails are the sole reminder of entire swaths of my existence. If I were to wipe them out, I’d have no other way of remembering those conversations. Sure, their absence didn’t bother me until I was made aware of it. But the thought that all that will simply be gone as though it never happened, that I would be actively removing the fine details of my lived experience forever… that’s heavy. Especially for a guy who so often thinks and writes about his past in these very blog posts.

A milder but still irritating problem is that I appeared to be sharper, more knowledgeable and less error prone in my older emails. I’m afraid I’ve made myself an old man before my time. But this old man still has a lot of work to do before Google is just a list of YouTube subscriptions, so let him get back to it.