The reason I’ll never pay Google a subscription fee is because they still spy on you and make money off your data even if you pay them.

The deal is supposed to be either:

• I get your service for free, you spy on me and sell ads to cover the cost of the service

OR

• I pay for your service, you will NOT show me ads or sell my data

Any service that doesn’t fall into one of those two categories can GTFO.

Thanks for the tips. Amazon/Alexa/Ring are next on my list after the de-Google.

Fastmail seems like it’s worth a try. Privacy from data brokers and ad companies is my main goal so Fastmail gets a green check mark there. It doesn’t seem like they claim E2EE but they do claim encryption.

I guess I was thinking Proton because the E2EE “we can’t even see your data” claim is appealing in an age where corporations are hungry for data to train their AI models.

I am also interested in the bundled VPN with Proton, but yeah the price is a little off-putting and it seems like it is going up.

Been meaning to check out Librewolf, but Vanadium has been pretty good so far.

I’ve been using it for almost a month and I’m a big fan. I was planning to wait for the Motorola phone but my screen on my old phone was rapidly becoming unusable.

I’m using it to divorce Big Tech. I created two secondary profiles, one for work and one for Big Tech. The Big Tech profile is where I’ll enable Google services and permissions. I don’t let it run in the background so once I switch back its like I turned off Big Tech. I can still use all the apps and services I’m used to, but I added enough friction that it’s causing me to explore alternatives every day.

My owner profile has Play and Play Services totally disabled. I get push notifications for Signal using Sunup for UnifiedPush. I get apps mostly through Accressent, Obtainium, and Aurora. If apps complain about missing Google services too much, they get relegated to the Big Tech profile while I find an alternative. Most of the apps that complain about it (like Ring) still work fine. Most of the “apps” I use are just PWAs that run in Vanadium and have icons on the home screen.

The biggest issues I’ve had were around RCS messaging. I was able to get it to work in the Owner profile, but it’s a known issue that it doesn’t work in secondary profiles. I’m just not getting group texts from iPhone users anymore. Oh well, everyone who matters will contact me on Signal or SMS directly. I was never able to get E2EE working over RCS with iPhone users anyways, even though my carrier supposedly supports it and the iPhones were updated.

It’s also exposing just how much I depend on Big Tech. I’ll probably be switching to Proton for mail, calendar, and VPN. My one gripe is they don’t have a way to sync contacts to my phone. Still, Ill happily pay $10 a month for storage and services that don’t spy on me for advertising instead of paying $3 a month for a service where I can’t expect any privacy.

I’m still using Big Tech while driving unfortunately, haven’t explored alternatives to Maps and Spotify yet.

I guess the only way to be sure is to watch live sporting events. Maybe one of the side effects of this LLM boom is that F1, MLB, NBA, etc will have more viewers.

Someone should tell the politicians of both parties that, because they are still bending over for big tech.