Memento Mori

a rant about google and my effort to degoogle

it's been a while since the last time i write here and i still have a whole lot of backlog story i haven't completed yet, including the aftermath of my interview. i'll write it next time but in short: i passed, cool. ok then let's go to google rant.

in the past year, i've been into digital privacy, big tech shenanigans and everything entails. i watch and follow a lot stuff regarding it. louis rossmann, muta, gamers nexus, etc, etc. i've switched to linux as my daily driver and windows on winboat. that's a whole another blog for the entire big tech escape in general. i want to dedicate this blog for whatever google has been doing right now.

long story short, i plan to migrate my dad to onedrive completely and leaving google drive & photos. for a while, he has been paying for both services which is leeching his wallet unnecessarily. oh yeah, before that i actually was included in his 365 family plan but i opted myself out and switched his plan into the business one so that it'd be much more efficient (only his personal and his biz email). the process of me moving out my files from one drive was as easy as clicking right, and click save on the pc. wait for half a day and boom, 300gigs worth of my entire cloud was saved into my pc. after that, it just a matter of unlinking the pc with my account and purge it all with a single delete button. onedrive, despite being owned by another big tech, has a decency to let people leave as easy as they can, but the process of leaving google drive and photo is nothing like that. it's like trying to leave your abusive, gaslighting ex. they make it so that the onboarding is as smooth as possible and if you're knee deep into their service, you're in for one of the most infuriating time.

every single android phone that ships with gapps (which to say, every single mainstream brand) will have google photo as the default album and while setting things up, they'll offer you with that "backup to google photos" option. for most people, they'll just agree to whatever google's offering but little did they know that they're being nudged and trapped into google's upsell. the free tier gets full really fast and even worse, the storage is shared with every single google service so you can't receive email while google tries to upsell you. oh, and their "free up space" button? it's a bs tool too. it doesn't let you pick anything you feel like removing, not on your term, but on their term, like "large file" because obviously they know what's best for you, right? they know you better than you yourself. even after you removed those files on their term, it will only shave a few gigs, which will get full in no time if you keep the backup on.

again, i think most people, be it young and old do not turn that off because they just don't really understand what that even mean. years of making tech frictionless but also dumbing it down really helps them big corpo because they profit from people not knowing how stuff really works. the cycle goes on until they either stop the backup or getting roped into google's upsell.

case on point, my dad. he has been subscribed into the 200gb plan for years now. i've moved him to onedrive but i need to back his google data first bcs there might stuff exclusively stored there. i went to google takeout, checks drive and photos. grand total 333 something gigs. i picked the 50gb parts each to keep my sanity intact with one too many files. they ended up shipping me an 8 pieces part. i've downloaded it all over three days. when i try to extract it, only 3 out 8 were not corrupted. now, i'm in the process of downloading 1/4 corrupted, which is my third try bcs the second try had it failed in 80%. also, google gives me a deadline before the download expire in like a week since it is provided so it's two days remaining to download the rest before i have to ask once more and the jigsaw pieces will have changed. oh yh i forgot to mention, as i said jigsaw, it really is a jigsaw because the archive part they provide is not a straight up zipping files in one archive, but it is a lot of .json part that needs to be reassembled once every part is downloaded. i think that's the last string that gets me fully radicalized against this b tier bond villain.

about degoogling, for those who don't know it basically means opting out from every single google service (also from other proprietary big tech app and service with a bad privacy and anti consumer practice in general), minimizing dependency on their platform. there's a lot of motivation for people to degoogle, but the biggest ones are privacy concern and frustration with their anti consumer behavior. i have both of them as my main concern as you can get from this blog. i'm currently using a cheap vivo phone from 2022 and the thing with this phone brand is it's the fully locked kind where unlocking bootloader is almost impossible, and subsequently, no full degoogling can be done in it. the most i can do is to uninstall non essential oem and google apps and replaces it with an alternative thats privacy conscious and foss. some of them are bloatware and baked into the system where i can't do much with it, but with the power of shizuku and apps that utilize it like canta i can weed out most of them. so far i've replaced:

some app i'm still struggling to substitute completely i just use it side by side like:

as of oem bloatware junk, i removed:

some oem junk that just can't stay uninstalled, i use greenify to hibernate them so that it wont be active in the background, like vivo services. my phone update has been long abandoned by vivo, might as well just cut them off from my phone.

some of you might think "why go this far?" even after that long rant i write. for the curious crowd, as i said, privacy and anti consumer behavior. staying with google and other big tech means you're giving up your internet identity in exchange for their "free service". your credential being passed around from one company to another like it's nothing. that creepy advertising about something you typed privately to a friend in whatsapp or even something you think you just muttered yourself will continue. if none of that budges you, i assume you're the "i don't have nothing to hide crowd", then i'm not here to convince you not to give up your internet cookie. i'll just say with privacy conscious app your machine runs much better because they're not running in the background, harvesting every single behavior observed from you. after this poor man's degoogling, my phone noticeably runs faster despite the aging machine.

giving up on big tech can be really hard, especially if you're neck deep within their service, but trust me, it is worth all the pain. my next step is to remove all my internet footprint from my google's acc. it is already turning into my burner but i haven't had the chance to do a deeper cleanup. i think that's about it for my rant today. sorry for the messy typing, i'm not built for blogging, but i just want to vent. thanks everyone, until next time!