A valuable and in some sense courageous attempt to understand both the possibilities and limits of your struggle to remove your data trail. A couple of technical comments:

First, storing all your mail on someone else's mailserver isn't wise. You don't need more than 500mb to store mail if you are removing all but current mail to your own storage.

Second, having a simple phone that isn't your primary computer is easy; finding a freedom-reinforcing smartphone OS is hard. Do your computing on a laptop running free software and make use of your phone for the purpose of making and receiving telephone calls.

You learned in your first exercise that carrying and using money is not inconvenient, as you had been led to suppose. You learned in your second that there are alternatives to the data-miners. Computing in a sustainable and freedom-reinforcing way is no harder, I assure you. Your sense of technical inadequacy is false: you have already adapted easily and with intelligence to the challenges you perceive. Ditching the smartphone is no harder, once the fears of "inconvenience" instilled in you have been quieted. You live in a university, where people who know everything that is known reside. If you want to learn how to compute in freedom, you can do so easily.

My Breakup With Google

-- By JieLin - 03 Dec 2019

The biggest lesson I learnt from this course is just how little control I have over my own life – my privacy, my autonomy, my freedom. I have realized that I am so deeply entrenched in this network environment created by companies such as Google and Facebook that my freedoms have been slowly but surely chipped away, leaving me exposed and easily manipulated. Google turned from a company releasing useful products for my use to one that has ensnared me, and the internet as a whole, into its money-making, data gathering machine. Indeed, Google is pervasive in our digital lives in a manner no other corporation in the world has been. It is embedded everywhere. Personally, my laptop’s main browser is Google Chrome. My primary email is Gmail. My phone’s operating system is Android. To me (and for a lot others), Google is synonymous for search, maps, email, browsers, operating systems. Google has been recognized as a word in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2006. What its global dominance means is that there are not many well-used alternatives, especially for the privacy minded. However, what this course taught me is that alternatives definitely do exist, if I am willing to look for it.

Caveat

First Steps

Search Engines: Switching a search engine was easy once I started looking. DuckDuckGo? emerged as a good alternative, as a search engine that prioritized protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. It does not profile its users and shows the same search results for a given search term. Setting this as my default search engine was simple yet impactful. For example, a search of “Avengers: Endgame” on the Google search engine first showed me that it can be purchased from Google Play and YouTube? for $4.99. The same search on DuckDuckGo? pulled up a short snippet from Wikipedia. Disregarding the declared Ad for Disney+, the first link was of IMDb – the same link was placed 3rd on Google. By switching to DuckDuckGo? , I am no longer victim to Google’s prioritization of its results and bias towards its own products.

Google Maps: Switching to a different map provider was also easy – I already had alternatives such as CityMapper? downloaded onto my phone. I also promptly deleted the data Google Timeline had about my movements, and turned off my location history. However, what proved difficult was shutting down my use of Google Maps entirely. Because car services such as Lyft and Uber relied on Google Maps, I could not disable/ delete it entirely from my phone, as that prevented my use of such car services that I rely on to get around.

The Tricky Bits

The Biggest Challenge: My Phone

Conclusion

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