- [Kashmir] I'm on a mission
to cut all of the big tech companies,
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple,
out of my life.
This week I'm taking on Google.
- Google has been catching some serious heat lately
for its desire to suck up
as much data from people as possible,
most notably for capturing location data
in unexpected ways.
Practices that Google has abandoned
after being exposed.
Still, I was apprehensive about the Google block
because the company is basically
an extension of my brain.
- [Google Maps] Head south on Buchannan Street,
slight left to stay on Buchannan Street.
- [Kashmir] Google Calendar tells me what I need to do
on any given day.
Including get this haircut.
I use Gmail for both work and personal email.
Google Docs is the home of my story drafts,
half finished zombie novel,
and a running tally of my finances.
- [Ellev] I want some milk.
- [Kashmir] You want some milk right now?
And, of course, there's that comforting white bar
that has all the answers.
Seriously, I don't understand how people raised children
in a time before Google.
[Kashmir] Hey, where you going?
Despite all that, I am pleased to say that cutting
Google out of my life took just a few painful hours.
I migrated my browser bookmarks over to Firefox.
Firefox welcomed me with the message: "It shouldn't be
that hard to own your life online,"
referring to its recent decision to block ads and
third party trackers by default.
Hell yeah, I'm liking this already.
I changed the default search engine on Firefox on my
iPhone from Google to privacy-respective DuckDuckGo.
I download Apple Maps and the MapQuest app to my phone.
I decided to give Apple's calendar app a whirl.
I created new email addresses on Proton mail and
Riseup.net.
It actually felt wonderful to start fresh.
My devices have already pinged Google servers almost
as much as they pinged Facebook servers all of last week
and it's only been a few hours.
The infinite space offered by the tech giants has made
us all digital hoarders with data stacked up in various
places that we're loathe to throw away,
even though we haven't used it in forever.
Until last year, Google was scanning the content of those
emails to place targeted ads.
While I can choose not to use Google products,
that doesn't mean Google won't still try to collect my data,
or make money off of me by displaying ads.
That's why the blocker Dhruv has built for me is so crucial.
By blocking Google's IP addresses and keeping the company's
servers from communicating with my devices, it will
hopefully block Google's trackers and ad networks
from seeing me.
For now.
But it'll be a lot harder to avoid Google's gaze in
the near future, when its sister company, Sidewalk Labs,
starts doing IRL data collection in our cities.
On the first morning of the block, I realize I have
quite a few tabs open in Firefox as they're trying to
ping Google servers.
AirBnB can't load its photos without Google's help,
NewYorkTimes.com is desperately trying to load
Google analytics, Google pay, Google news, Google ads
and a double click tracker.
By 10 am I've already pinged Google's servers 10,000 times.
Throughout the week almost every site I try to open
loads incredibly slowly.
Often because it uses Google fonts.
Which are downloaded from Google's servers and then
cached in the browser.
It reminded me of when I first got on the internet
in the 90s.
The kind of like messages in the bottom left hand corner
saying, "trying to connect to Google API, trying to pull
down Google fonts and trying to connect to Google analytics."
It was like, I felt the web of Google all over the
internet, all week.
- Yeah I feel like that's kind of a revelation,
is how many sites rely on Google for their fonts or
their CSS.
- Is any actual data being sent?
- It'll definitely send your IP address and also what
font it's trying to, what like resource it's trying to grab.
It saves it temporarily and it only really uses it for
debugging.
So in the realm of things that Google collects, I feel like
this is not them at their most evil.
(laughter)
- The tech giants have helped create a faster,
more efficient internet infrastructure but one that is
littered with their trackers and ads.
Blocking Google causes some serious workflow
problems for me.
For example, we use Kinja.com to publish blogs here
at Gizmodo Media Group and Kinja offers just three
log in options:
Facebook, Twitter, or Google.
I use Google, so I'm locked out of the blogs for a week.
I've been using Dropbox to send videos about my tech
blockade to our video producer, Myra.
But when I go to Dropbox I discover I can't sign in.
Dhruv tells me they're using some kind of invisible
captcha that relies on Google's API.
On the last day of the block I needed to head downtown
for a meeting.
I left with enough time to get there via Uber but when I
opened the app, it wouldn't work. Same thing with Lift.
They're both dependent on Google Maps.
Which means that I couldn't enter my destination
with my blocker so I had to take the bus
and wound up late to the meeting.
So yeah, these are the tolls of a life without Google.
Google is a real giant when it comes to maps,
even its mortal enemy, Yelp, uses it to render maps
on Yelp.com.
Alright. "MapQuesting it," I love it that they think
that's a thing.
So I'm using the MapQuest app.
I was pleased to discover that MapQuest still exists
and it's funny, the route it's given me does not seem
to have taken into account traffic at all.
Google realized early on that maps would be a huge
business and everyone else is still trying to catch up with them.
Alternatives exist for many of the services Google offers
but they seem to raise an eyebrow with people.
And even though everything I used this week was free,
some services wouldn't be if I became a heavy user.
Making the switch to decentralized, privacy focused
companies means you might actually have to pay
because they're not monetizing your data.
Three weeks in, the tech blockade, while seriously
inconvenient at times, has been good for me.
Because I couldn't access services and apps for weeks
at a time, it's broken me of some bad habits.
It made me put my phone aside at night.
I thought there'd be something important waiting for me
in my Gmail which I hadn't been able to check for a week.
I discovered over 100 new emails in my personal email
and over 200 new emails in my work email.
It was all junk. I deleted it. Next up: Microsoft.