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Re-Googling my life

${ Giving up some privacy for convenience 😔 }
2025-07-25

I’ve spent the last few years on a mission to de-google my life as much as possible. The goal being to purge as many giant tech companies from my life as possible.

Today I write this as a mini-surrender.

How far I got

I went pretty far down the de-googling, privacy focused, anti-big-tech rabbit hole.

Running Lineage OS on my phone. No Google services. No Google play store. Running Linux on my computer. No chrome-based browsers. Hosting all my own stuff. Ad block everywhere I can, a self-hosted DNS blocker everywhere else. And so on…

What happened?

This has been on my mind for a while now, but it came to a head when I was in London for work a month or so ago.

I was there with all my colleagues and I felt that my phone was utterly useless. The main things were:

  1. I didn’t have Google maps, so I couldn’t find anything. I was relying on other people to lead the way
    • OpenStreetMap is good, but not good enough - especially searching for places
  2. Notifications simply didn’t work at all since switching to LineageOS, so I missed invitations to group activities
    • I feel this has also impacted my personal relationships: I would see messages hours after they were sent (at best)
  3. Since my company stopped giving out physical company cards and switched to virtual only, I can’t pay for stuff with the company card: no Google Pay

I just got this feeling of “what am I doing this for?”

This wasn’t the first time either, just the most obvious. On Fridays afternoons we have a session to get together and play some games with colleagues. Whenever it’s a mobile game it never seems to run properly on Lineage OS. Then I have to go and explain “ah, it’s because I use this other operating system instead of Android or iOS, so it doesn’t work for me…”.

And forget it if the app wasn’t free. Since I was using Aurora as my app store and I didn’t have a Google account, there was no way to buy apps.

The terms of my surrender

I decided it was time to re-evaluate what I’m doing and make some changes. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to avoid as much big-tech and invasive tracking as possible, but no longer at the expense of everything else.

These experiences have made me realise that the alternatives to some* “big tech” tools just aren’t good enough for me yet. That’s fine. Maybe in a few years they will be and I can re-evaluate this again.

* (note that some are! For example, I use ProtonMail and that is flawless)

But the main things I wanted to change were:

  1. Run “standard” Android with the “standard” Play Store
  2. Set up a Google account on my phone so I can use some Google services (mainly maps and pay)

But, I still kept a lot of my previous steps to minimise the impact of the above.

  1. I got a Nothing phone, partly because the Android OS doesn’t have too many custom tweaks or bloatware
  2. I created a new Google account specifically for my phone, linked to a Proton email alias
    • I don’t use this email for anything at all aside from this
  3. I turned off every tracking/history/advertising option I could find in my Google account
  4. On my phone I uninstalled everything I could, then disabled the rest - mainly Google apps I have no interest in using
  5. Keep using a DNS-based ad blocker, but switched to NextDNS

I feel this has left me with a good balance of a phone that is useful, but doesn’t destroy my privacy too much.

The measure of my success is that I actually like my phone now. I feel it’s a useful tool again and I actually get notifications when someone messages me! 🙌

// the end