J. Souto - degoogling

They do, and evidently they have no qualms about using it to further their interests, which often go against the best interests of society, at least as I see it. This power comes from the fact that everybody uses their services, that they are basically monopolists. By avoiding the services of those companies, by not buying from the monopolist, one does one's little bit to support alternatives.
There is little any of us can do to influence what other people do—one can waste one's time writing this—, but one can at the very least stop being a bystander, a Mitläufer, a collaborateur. In more prosaic terms, one can just be a responsible consumer.

If you are European, and for that matter if you are not American, then there is also the issue of how you feel about giving so much power to the US government. At the end of the day, it is clear that US law is the only thing that limits what the US government can get from Google & Co. For years I was not worried about it—at the end of the day I don't obsess about how much power the French government has—but with Trump in power we have seen that US law might not be that much of a protection. We have also seen that the US government can come under control of people who actively want to change our societies in ways I don't like, and that have no qualms about using all tools at their disposal to get leverage and use it. Getting and using leverage is just a polite way of saying "to blackmail".

That blackmail is largely effective because we all are so dependent on Google and company. Degoogling is what one can do to reduce that leverage. It also makes one resilient against things that were unthinkable a while ago but now are imaginable. Indeed, it is imaginable—not likely, but imaginable—that the US government could decide that this or that company cannot provide this or that service in Europe. Self-interest and capitalist logic should prevent the US government from doing anything like that, but these people—led by hubris, in my opinion—have shown themselves willing to go against that logic. When corruption is so rampant, I am no longer sure how much one can count on the US government furthering the US's rational self-interest. I prefer not to have to worry about my digital life being dependent on the whims of whoever is sitting in the White House.

There is the dictum that

if you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Evidently, what is being sold is all that these companies know about you. All the data they have. I was never particularly worried about that, but at some point I thought that if I try to protect my daughter's identity online, by not sharing photos of her, referring to her as the being instead of using her real name, and not sharing much information about what she does, then I should also apply some of this caution to myself. I evidently share quite a few things online, like what I cook or what I write on my blog, but I do that being kind of confident that I am just not giving that data directly to say Meta. Since it is available online, Google's crawlers can find it, but that is not the same as just giving it to Google.

One of the points in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is that to actually own something, it does not suffice to buy it or use it, but that one has to understand how it works and care for it. To be willing to maintain and repair it. Although it is pushing it a bit, there is a related idea in English/Anglo-Saxon common law that you lose property over what you don't use or improve.

"As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property"—Locke.

According to those standards, we all have lost property over our digital lives. It feels empowering to reclaim it. It feels empowering to work a bit for it.

Well, that definitely depends on each one, but here is how I was googled:

• Social networks: Facebook.
• Instant messaging: WhatsApp.
• E-mail: for years I was a dedicated Gmail user.
• Browsers: Chrome, Safari.
• Search engine: Google Search.
• Calendar and agenda: Google Calendar.
• Editing documents and spreadsheets: Google Docs and Google Sheets.
• Watching videos: YouTube.
• Finding directions: Google Maps.
• Paying: Google Pay.
• Digital wallet: Google Wallet.
• Password manager: Google Password Manager.
• A myriad of other Google services that I use, or used from time to time, like Family Link, Analytics, Google Earth, Google Lens, Google Play, or Firebase.
• Cloud: My files were stored in Google Drive (and at some point in Dropbox). Photos were in Google Photos.
• Videoconferencing: Zoom, Teams.
• Web hosting: my webpage was a Google page.
• Operating system: for a long time I used to be an Apple fan, but at some point it drove me bananas that it was a closed system. I then moved to Windows.
• Phone: I never had an iPhone (the few people who remember still make fun of me for having had a BlackBerry with a physical keyboard), but that didn't last long because that thing was really bad. In some sense, since I upgraded from Nokia, all my phones/tablets have been Android.

I am sure I forget something, and I am sure that if other people made such a list, there would be a deluge of Apple products and apps instead.

Well, the evident reason is convenience, but there are also things like network effects and the power of the incumbent. It is clear that Apple knows how to make things very convenient and that it also knows how to make it very hard to leave the Apple ecosystem. This is also true for Google, although in a less crass way. These companies offer everything one needs/wants, together with many other things that one does not know yet that one needs/wants but that are there, an easy button press away, when one needs/wants them. And it is not only that it is available. The key is that everything is bundled and connected. That's why you only need to log into Google and all connects automatically. That's convenient.
Another point is that those services are free. That is also convenient.
Then there is the issue that everybody else does it. You are on WhatsApp because your friends and your mother are. Similarly for Facebook, Instagram and all those things. I watch YouTube because it is there where I find the videos I want. These are the network effects and the power of the incumbent.

Well, it depends. If what you want to do is start a revolution, then degoogling will not help, but it is definitely not hard to do something. At the very least, to partially degoogle. Like spring cleaning, a more thorough degoogling takes some more time, but this is mostly because one needs to figure out what to do and how to do it. I guess that I am writing this to show you what I did, in case it helps.
I have no idea how long I spent degoogling, but I started about a year ago and have been doing it in steps. By now, I am partially reliant on WhatsApp (mostly not) and fully reliant on Family Link. I often watch YouTube videos and sometimes use things like Chrome, Google Search, and Google Maps. Everything else is gone, and I call that success.

Just leave it all!!! At some point, Facebook was pretty good because plenty of people were there. Facebook would keep one in touch with people that either one knew a bit, or one used to know. By last year, when I quit, Facebook was covered with ads and slop. I cannot believe that it is any better now. Besides ads and slop, there was a lot of anger. Life is better without it. Leave all of that and go to a bar instead.

There are plenty of alternatives to WhatsApp, but there is the issue that everybody and their mother is on WhatsApp. In fact, it seems to me that having WhatsApp is pretty much unavoidable, but one can run other things at the same time as WhatsApp. There are things like Olvid and Element. I think that Element would probably be the most purist way to degoogle, but I didn't think that I could get my mother to install it on her phone.
What works for me is Signal.

• When it comes to chatting and video conferencing, it works basically like WhatsApp. The only capability of WhatsApp that I use and is not on Signal is the ability to send one's location—when I need that, I just use WhatsApp, and that's it.
• There are actually quite a few people on Signal, meaning that there is some network effect. For what it is worth, my mother is on Signal, and she installed it herself (after my prompting).
• Signal works on phones and desktops. It doesn't on Android tablets, but there you can use something called Molly, which connects to Signal, is fully compatible, works like Signal, and is again trivial to install.
• On WhatsApp there is the annoying, intrusive, and undeletable AI of Meta. I find it myself just annoying, but when it comes to the being, it kind of bothers me that she has it always there. On Signal there is none of that crap.
• Signal is run by a foundation; it is not-for-profit (financed via donations), it is free, it is open source, and while it used to be based in the US, now it is based in Switzerland and is primarily governed by EU law.

Getting a new email is trivial. The only issue is that one already has an email with thousands of old emails one has either gotten or written. A few thoughts about that:

• Evidently, you can forward from Gmail to whatever else you want. This is trivial to do. If you don't know how, ask AI.
• If you want to move out altogether, there is something called Google Takeout that allows you to download all your emails (when you do that, they stay in Gmail). You get a zip file (or several, depending on how big they are), and any email client understands them—there are incredibly many email clients, like for example Thunderbird. When you ask Google to prepare the takeout, it takes a while (hours, days, depending on the size), but once it is done, it is trivial, and AI is totally willing to give you step-by-step instructions.
• Alternatively, you can keep it all dormant in Gmail.
• Now the truth: I didn't want to clutter my email with all those emails, so I installed Thunderbird, did the Takeout thing, downloading 40,000 mails, moved them to Thunderbird so that I could just open it and find what I wanted, made sure that it worked (with AI it was trivial), and then I never opened it again. If I had to do it again from the beginning, I guess I would have just deleted all those emails.

For the calendar, it is the same thing, and you can also use Google Takeout to keep a version or to transfer it elsewhere. For Google Drive, the difficulty is that while many providers offer a free tier, it tends to be small. For Password Manager, there is the issue that before choosing one, one wants to know that it works well and is secure.

My solution was to move all these things to Proton:

• Proton is again a non-profit foundation based in Switzerland. It was founded by a bunch of people from CERN, and now seems to have 100M users. The whole focus of their existence is privacy.
• There is a free tier including Mail, VPN, and 1GB of storage. It goes without saying that 1GB is a lot if you keep your photos and videos elsewhere.
• I decided to pay for 2 people. I pay 180 EUR/year and get 2TB space and access for 2 people to all their stuff, including the password manager, which I like a lot. Paying 180 EUR is not nothing, but that is about a pint and a half per month, right?
• Proton Drive syncs pretty easily, so everything I do, and all my photos, are also there.

I started using several browsers at the same time. That is in fact absolute common sense if you want not to be bombarded by publicity: the cookies are browser-specific, so if there is only a browser where you search for products, then the ads don't follow you to other activities. In some browsers like DuckDuckGo it is trivial to delete cookies. DuckDuckGo is a bit too privacy-oriented for my normal use, and I do not want all cookies deleted all the time. I normally use:

• Firefox. Firefox used to not be good, but it works very well now. I do not notice speed differences with Chrome. You can also choose which search engine you want.
• Brave. It also works fine.

There are many more, like Opera, Whitefox, Qwant, Ecosia, and so on, and they all work fine.

Most searches go through Google, with Bing being a far cry behind. There are, however, alternatives:

• Qwant has its own index. It works pretty well if you are based in France.
• Ecosia, which uses profits for planting trees, uses/used to use Bing's index, but is teaming up with Qwant.
• Brave has its own index.

There are also Startpage (which uses Google's index but does not share cookies), Mohajeek (which I have not used), and DuckDuckGo (which uses partly its index, and partly Bing's).
It is still clear that Google is better, but I only use it when I am unhappy with what I find elsewhere. This is easily done if you use different browsers.

If you do math, most of what you write is in LaTeX anyway. Still, there are times when you need to deal with a .doc file, or when you want to use a basic spreadsheet. What one ends up using is Google Docs, Google Sheets, Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel. I find all these things annoying, but sometimes one needs them. Two alternatives:

• LibreOffice works pretty well.
• There is also OnlyOffice, but I find it more annoying.

In 2020, during the pandemic, Zoom was what everybody wanted and needed. It was what allowed one to stay home and still work. For years I had been using Skype and such to talk math with people, but it was directly clear that Zoom was vastly more efficient, and probably at the moment people thought that Zoom was going to take over the world. For whatever it is worth, Zoom's stock price went from $63 in December 2019 to $560 in October 2020. Then it fell, and since mid-2022 it has been in the range of $80-$100. I guess that what happened was that the pandemic was over, but also that Zoom competitors started growing like mushrooms. There are the likes of Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, but there are a myriad of others.

• If you are a French civil servant or work in a French university, then Visio is the way to go. As far as I can tell, it works as well as Zoom, and it is in fact much easier to connect to.
• Alphaview works fine, is free for meetings with up to 100 people in the free tier. German.
• HostpointMeet works fine, is free, does not need any form of registration, and there is no limit on the number of participants. Swiss.

In fact, if you search for "Zoom alternatives," you find incredibly many. As far as I can tell, there is no reason to use Zoom or Teams. A proviso is that I don't know (because I have never tried) how to hold huge meetings with many separate rooms and such. I just use basic things like screen sharing, the chat, pinning windows, etc. I think that once or twice I recorded the meetings, but I don't see the point of doing that, at least for the kind of meetings I have.

I used to have a Google Site. The basic reason is that I never liked the limitations and standards imposed by the computer services of the university, and that I don't want to have to read the emails they send. Ditto for the CNRS. So, a Google Site worked great, and getting rid of it was definitely not a priority when I decided to degoogle. Still, things like a Google Site tie you to the Google ecosystem because it makes integration pretty seamless with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and whatever else you want. As those companies work, if you want to integrate a Google Site with anything else, there is some amount of friction. Another thing that bothered me is that, although in a Google Site you can evidently do many things, the whole is largely out of your control, a bit like the difference between typing math in LaTeX and using the Microsoft Word formula editor: both work, but there is a reason why one uses LaTeX.

Writing a website:

Writing a website takes no time. You can either ask AI to do it for you, or you can go and copy one. For example, to copy this site here, which is definitively not protected by copyright, you do a right-click on your mouse and select "view page source" (you can also just press Ctrl+U). When you do that, you see the .html file, which you can copy to a file whose name ends with .html, and your browser can open it. That .html file contains, like all computer code (or LaTeX file), a bunch of incomprehensible stuff, but you can easily locate the parts you want to change. The only thing to take care of is that sometimes sites, like this one here, rely on external style files (.css). The .css is where you decide things like colors and such. Sometimes sites relies also on external JavaScript files (.js). Sometimes, as it is here, the JavaScript is included in the site (for example to make sure that the panels are closed when you load the page). The JavaScreipt is harder to manipulate, but AI can do that for you. In any case, you see all the files (.css and potential .js files) that are being used, and if you click on them, you can see them and copy them to modify them. All of this is not more difficult than writing LaTeX.

Finding a place for your website:

• Well, first, if you work at a university and don't have the same psychological issues when it comes to email as I do, you can probably just upload the .html, .css, and .js files somewhere, together with all other things you want to add, like pictures or such. The computer guy can either do it for you or give you the I-am-talking-to-a-moron level of explanations that thankfully computer guys give to non-computer guys.
• If you don't want to deal with the computer guys, you can sign up on GitLab or GitHub, ask AI what you have to do to get a webpage running, and follow the steps. It will ask you to type incomprehensible stuff in a terminal and press this or that button and create a key or something, but it all takes about 30 minutes. And then it takes absolutely no time to change whatever you want to change.
  An advantage of GitHub over GitLab is that on GitHub your page gets a nicer name, like https://fygouf.github.io/ or https://ludox73.github.io/. I am guessing that the x73 there is because you lift a stone, you find 73 Ludos underneath. Ygouf is a pretty uncommon name, but so would be Ludo_Battista if that guy had not been too lazy to type his own name.
• You can also just pay to host your webpage. There are plenty of hosting services which cost about the price of a beer a month (often they cost basically nothing for a year, and then the price goes up to the beer/month range). I host mine on OVH, which works fine, but I can't really recommend or not recommend it because I have not had experience with any other. The reason why I went there is purely romantic: I saw that the domain https://perlora.eu was for grabs, and since Perlora is what you might have heard referred to as the village of my grandmother, then I had to get it.

It is clear that writing one's website is more work than using Google Sites to create one, but it has something deeply satisfactory. Think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the idea that you own something only when you understand how it works, care for it, and maintain and repair it.

Besides those lofty philosophical ideas, in my personal case I have been having a lot of fun doing things like:

• Creating a site for my blog,
• creating a site for whatever I cook,
• creating quizzes for the being,
• and getting a site HyperMarimba to illustrate a paper I wrote with Ludovico Battista, also known as Il Magnifico, Gran Marimba di Campobasso, although in this case most of the work was done by Ludo and AI.

Once upon a time, I used Windows at home and Linux at the university. I then got sick of Linux because Windows was much simpler. Then I moved to Mac and was a Mac fanboy for a long time, until I got sick of Mac things only working with Mac things. So, I tried Linux again, and it was horrible because nothing connected easily, and I wasted prodigious amounts of time looking for drivers and trying to understand where to put them. I mean, typing "ls" to list the things in a directory is not complicated, but if you need to figure out where to install drivers, then Linux is a pain. So, I went back to Windows, and I stayed there until my recent crisis of faith.

Since a few weeks, I have been running Linux and Windows (basically because I have been too lazy to move everything over). Linux now works really well. I run Linux Mint. It takes really no time to get it running parallel to Windows, and once it is running, it recognizes all things like printers, webcams, speakers, you name it. If there is any issue and you have something to do with the system, you go ask AI and copy-paste in the terminal the gibberish commands it tells you to type. It is really easy, and then the computer actually runs faster than before. Linux was a nightmare when things didn't just plug in and work, and when you had to dig around to try to find out how and where and what to install. The first issue is now solved out of the box, or rather, solved from the USB key, because if you already have access to a computer, as you do, that is all the equipment you need (it is also free). The second issue is solved thanks to AI. I guess that there are limits to how much I want to take ownership of my operating system...

Well, I am probably not very logical, but I have fewer qualms about Android than about other things. Maybe it is also that I repeat to myself that the goal is to reduce Google dependency, not to do everything possible to avoid anything to do with Google. When I got my last phone (a FairPhone—I like it), I could have chosen it with the /e/ operating system, a degoogled version of Android, which is installed in the FairPhones sold by Murena. Well, I am not sure why I didn't do that. Maybe when my tablet gives up the ghost and I get a new one, I will go for it.