DeGoogling - an important step for achieving online privacy

CCTV head

Google is in almost everyone’s lives more or less nowadays. This is normal, as they are one of the largest corporations on the planet and their products are being used by billions of people. They have a monopoly on the mobile phone market (through Android and their Play Store), the search engine market, the content creation market (YouTube), the browser market, the smart wearables market and many more. As their primary business is connected with data, this monopoly turns out to be a danger to the privacy of users as they become targets for data harvesting. In this two-part article, I will explain my motives to decide to remove Google from my life and how I did so.

When I was younger and not so passionate for privacy, I liked Google. I used most of the products in their ecosystem, because they were superbly integrated with one another and made it easy and possible to connect and collaborate with friends and to find and enjoy content online. When I started to be more cautious about my online privacy (this was hugely influenced by the revelations about PRISM from Snowden back in the day), I managed to discover some disturbing coincidences over my online behavior and the advertisements that I was getting in YouTube. I also didn’t enjoy the fact that megacorporations were making money off my data and that this same data could be given to a foreign entity at any point in time. The problem was that I had integrated Google so deeply in my life and I was so used to the convenience that it provided that it was hard to avoid it: I used an Android phone, YouTube, Chrome, the whole GSuite (Drive, Docs, Slides etc.), Maps and so on. So I just consented to this spyware behavior. Last year, I finally decided to ditch Google, because of the reasons listed below.

Mass surveillance

Andy Rubin, the co-founder of the Android project said back in 2013 the following phrase:

We don’t monetize the things we create…we monetize users.

This is a statement I fully agree with. Google’s business model turns users (and not only) into products themselves. They are given free services, but their data is harvested and sold for a profit. More than that, even if you are not an active Google user (you don’t have a Google account and don’t actively use their services), you are still getting profiled - by searches in their search engine, videos that you are watching in YouTube, social plugins in different websites and so on. This data is then getting sold to whoever pays for it, advertising companies mostly, and used for building a full user profile - political views, sexual preferences, interests and so on. This happens without your consent and is directly invading your privacy. This is not the only data that Google gathers, however. If Snowden’s word is to be taken seriously, our mobile devices are always listening to us and recording our conversations. While Google and other tech companies deny this, I have observed proof for it and it really freaked me out. I had just terminated work relationships with one of my previous employers and was talking to my mother on the phone about it. Fifteen or so minutes after hanging up, I got bombarded with ads on Facebook and Google about platforms for job searches and freelancing. Keep in mind that I had not begun searching for a new job just yet.

The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system of freely communicating parties. Nowadays, this is not the case, as everything revolves around the major players in the game. We can change this by not giving them more data to process, hitting their pocket and making them rethink their business model.

Obstruction of freedom of speech

The last couple of years, I saw how Google and the other tech megacorporations were reacting to non-mainstream information and basically shutting down any form of discussion that they deemed “unsafe” - be it in the form of not showing posts in the search results, demonetizing content or straight up removal of differing opinions. Silicon Valley companies started acting like online police and their behavior was influencing what people can say online. I find this as active obstruction of freedom of speech. One might say “yeah, but this is their platform, they are free to decide what they want to keep on it”. This is true. However, when you are a monopoly in a certain area, this right can degenerate into the policing behavior mentioned above and this should be forbidden by law. Private companies should not have power over what people say and how they say it and it is sad to see people who disagree with that.

Monopolizing the technology landscape

There is another aspect to Google’s monopoly, though - the technological one. You have probably used at some point a browser based on the Chromium engine or are using one right now. This is not surprising, Chrome is the most popular browser in the world at the moment but this popularity brings a problem - all websites must play by its rules and this allows Google to make changes to open standards without going through the W3C just by implementing the changes in their browser engine. This gives them the power to literally reshape the face of the web to their own liking by bypassing the official entity for standardization and website developers can either hop on board or risk losing business because their websites are not rendering properly on the most popular browser engine. Notice how I am saying browser engine and not browser. This is because Chromium, the browser engine used for Chrome, is also used by other browsers such as Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and many others, as well as for application frameworks like Electron.

Final words

Google has changed the way we view and use the Internet. In some countries, they have become synonymous with the word Internet itself. They have given a lot to the community in the form of standards, technologies and advancements, so they are not all bad. However, as I have already said above, their main business model is based on data and they are turning their users into products. A lot of people will surely say that they “have nothing to hide and thus nothing to worry about”. A crude counter-argument to this statement: you all lock the bathroom when you go in public places, right? If you have nothing to hide, why do it? Why don’t let the government or a megacorporation install a webcam in your bedroom as well? Everybody has something to hide and everybody has the right for it to stay hidden. I think that Snowden said it in the best way possible a couple of years back:

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

I think that this is a suitable end of the first article of the series. Stay tuned for the next one!

Interesting resources

These are some resources that I recommend as they go into even more detail about the topic:

#technology #privacy