We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
Do you also know any resources that explain how to delete your Google data?
if you just want to delete data associated with a google account, you can delete it from https://myactivity.google.com/. i think it would be best to delete your account altogether and just use a new one if you still need one for anything. but i know that’s not best for everyone.
remember, your google account is used for a lot more than just google.com and youtube, you also use it to sign up to all sorts of websites. your google identity is still linked to you through those. if you want to do a deeper dive on clearing up your online identity, check out this video. techlore’s ‘go incognito’ playlist is a really easy beginners guide