Ever since I get a chance to actually own a smartphone (When I got into University) I have used an immesurable amount of Internet services. Among them one truly stand out on its own, the entire ecosystem that leverage around your daily life starting from the one simple search engine.
Google
Well, if this does not ring a bell in you then you seem to be either not knowing much about Internet yet, or you have not even used Internet (Maybe). However I'm not writing this to tease you for not knowing Google or something, If you have not use any of Google services -> Good, you might don't need to. If you gave up from Google successfully -> Very good, I truly want you to share your experiences with everyone.
I originally wanted to compose this entire process into a video documentary series, but I have yet to figure out on how to build up scripts and prepare everything for recording so I might put it together later.
Google have a series of applications that hanging around your daily life, and it has been "The most used" services among the globe. Including but not limited to:
Google - The search engine itself.
Gmail or Google Mail - The most popular e-mail platform.
Google Drive - Cloud solution for storing files.
Google Maps - The most popular Map application.
Google Photos - Default images and videos solution pre-installed in many smartphone around the world.
Google Play Platform - The main platform for sharing apps and contents through Android, its a complete package of:
Google Play Games
Google Play Books
Google Play Store
YouTube - Acquired by Google in 2006, The most popular social network platform using Videos.
The above list is pretty much all the popular and most used Google services that one person with a normal smartphone could have used and stick with it. I generally have no problem because these applications works really well, since Google took a very long time to maintain and update those apps to fit every users possible.
However, there is only one thing that recently concerns me about trapping myself in the Google Ecosystem.
Privacy
Normally I am not a kind of person who would care too much about privacy, after all you are still exposing yourself online, no matter what kind of bs that you have put up to protect yourself, like VPN / Proxy, open-sources softwares, bla bla bla......
If you want to protect yourself from the Internet sniffing on your secret folder of "British Boardcasting Chickens", you should not even get into Internet at the first place.
But if you emerged yourself into an online ecosystem like Google, it is really hard to escape from it, and when they decide to lock you out of nowhere for doing something seemingly wrong, you are screwed, as you may get locked out from the entire series of other online services that linked to your Google email / account.
"Why you suddenly bring this up? If you do nothing wrong then you don't have to worry about it, right?"
“The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break, and you also break all the eggs”
I do not encourage the idea of doing illegal activities on your well-being, but having another person sniff on your back and immediately kick your ass out seems a lil'bit dangerous, when that person is holding a crucial key to most of your credential.
This is just a small amount of grains in the entire bag of rice that contain Google privacy concerns. I generally don't really care much about Google wanting to sniff on my collection of anime girls and "top #N Light Novel / H*ntai" in my life, but recently:
I do admit that this incident happened because of my own human error that I will be cover on another article, but I truly believe that Google at some point is unfair and not having any detailed explaination on anything when I need to, I tried to get in touch with Google Play Team and they just simply copy and paste the response over and over. (This dispute is still going on imo)
This is when I notice a key point in Google wording: "Please do not attempt to register a new developer account"
Strange, how could Google knows that I will register a new account, unless they have something to track me down...... There are "MANY" of them (°ロ°), may include but not limited to your identification data that was used to verify the account.
Now I have notice a very very very serious issue with being stuck in this ecosystem, not only they reserve the full right to kick me out for no reason (refer the previous part), they also have the resources and power to sniff my stuff even after I'm out.
That eventually build-up my mind and finally coming to the final conclusion of moving away from Google, this is not easy, but I will make it if I have enough time and the gut to do it all by myself.
The process
This is a long and complicated process, so it is better to have a good plan in mind to nail it perfectly:
Pre-Preparation (Of Rite): What you need
A beautiful and patience soul.
A working brain.
Preparation:
Your current data from Google.
A list of services that will be your alternative. (In my case the first pick is Proton Mail)
Actual Process:
Analyze and cleanup your data.
Creating a new profile on your service of choices.
Slowly working on migrating all the existing online services that bound to your email.
Delete your data one by one per service in Google once you complete all the migration.
Delete your Google Account (If you want to) I personally chose not to because of Google Play Games
Profit! o((>ω< ))o
On Part 2 I will get into details on how I export my data, a list of alternative services and how to perform the migration.
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