There are two companies you should never trust with your data under any circumstances. They’ve left no doubt in my mind that they are the enemy of the customer whom they claim to value. Google and Facebook are data parasites.  

Both companies have very long histories of insidiously helping themselves to your private information ultimately so they can profit more from it.   I’ll talk about Facebook in another post. But for right now I just want to talk about Google’s Gmail service.   I’ve had a Gmail account since the mid 2000s. Back when Google was still an up-and-coming company and still largely adhered to their philosophy “don’t be evil”. Today, I think they are the largely the definition of evil. Google doesn’t charge for its email service. At heart, they are still an ad company. They make their money by learning everything they can about you and then advertising products and services to you. This includes accessing your information. Sure, they say they don’t actually read John Smith‘s email and go “oh, ah!  we can use this!”   In the game of big data, it doesn’t have to work like that for it to still be invasive and unethical. Your email is scanned, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications are applied to glean data from it and “Presto!” you now have dozens of ads being directed to you.  They are strangely about the same things in your email, your web searches, your browsing history, your chats, and documents you have stored and downloaded.   Unbelievable. 

You can’t rely on government to protect your interests. Big Tech is too powerful. The only solution to maintain the level of services similar to what you’re used to is to embrace decentralized tech.   In some ways it means dialing the clock back.  Remember when you didn’t use Google for anything except web search?  You had different companies for email, office suite, and maps?  That’s the idea…except don’t use Google for web search either, that’s a horrible choice.  

To that end, I have switched to the email service “Hey”.  Hey is by the creators of Basecamp, one of the world’s largest project management software companies.   It is a fresh take on email that also includes among other things the microblog service you’re reading right now. It’s called “Hey World”.   It’s very different from traditional email in some ways. In fact, it may be too different. It took me a few days to adjust to its way of organization and layout. I like it because it’s secure, it’s by a small private company that I am very familiar with, and it’s affordable.  Only a few dollars per month. Oh yeah, it’s not free. The old adage is true. If it’s free, you’re the product. You are what’s being sold.    And Google has been selling its users for years. It’s time to kick that abuser to the curb. 

Ditch Gmail for Hey, Protonmail or some other secure service that you have to PAY a little bit for.

Ditch Google Search for DuckDuckGo (same results as Bing, but not indexed or saved).

Ditch your free Google Drive, Docs, Maps…everything.  Google doesn’t deserve you as a user.