It took a few months preparation but I deleted all my google accounts today, and it feels good.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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A lot of (all?) email services will allow you to forward your mail from Gmail. My advice would be set that up, have all of them going to a specific folder, and only use your new email moving forward. No harm in allowing some email forwarding while you adjust for the next 6 to 12 months. But that way you can also immediately stop using Gmail itself.
Gdrive unless it is really baked into your daily life in a complicated way, it’s pretty easy to replace. Lots of great services out there.
Proton mail allowed me to export my Google Calendar over with just a few clicks. So that was pretty painless. I’m sure there are other calendar services like that. YMMV.
Google maps is tough lol
Just dug through a lemmy thread of recommended android apps a minute ago and found someone recommending Organic Maps. Pretty damn good compared to some others I’ve seen!
And of course, popping into streetcomplete here and there and contributing some data helps sharpen the data 🙂
You could try to see if you’d like Magic Earth. It’s proprietary, but has a good privacy policy, uses Open Street Maps, and has traffic data.
Though if you’re dependent on Google Maps for reviews and photos of places, then it’s much harder to replace. Though I guess you could just use the website to look that up.
Congratulations! That’s awesome! I’ve been Google-free for 2-3 years, but I haven’t been brave enough to finally delete Gmail. I keep worrying I might need the message history one day?
Regarding Maps: I use OrganicMaps as my main, & I reflex to Gmaps WV when something isn’t in OrganicMaps. I feel this is a reasonable privacy-friendly compromise.
You can transfer your entire Gmail email history to your new service very easily
Oh yeah? I didn’t know that. I’ll have to look into it, thanks!
I’m not 100% but I am close. Off gdrive, off gcal, off chrome, almost entirely off gmail. I’ll check out the maps!
For the google maps, it helps for us to contribute to Open Street Maps through recording with Mapillary or making edits in our community.
Is the app itself ready for prime time yet? Can I use it daily? I live in a small but major city.
If you can contribute, that would be great. Especially business names and addresses. The best thing I have found to do is get an address from a place via the internet and plug that into gps-coordinates.net and use the first 7 numbers like 31.12345 -82.12345 into osmand when navigating. Then when i arrive i add it to osm so nobody can claim i stole data from another mapping service.
Sounds good!
I have found it to be functional but very spartan. Maybe don’t drop Google maps in the meantime, but it’s worth testing out
There’s several apps to use open street map data. Organic Maps and OSMAnd to name a few. I use a bit of both along with Waze when needed.
I’ve tried them and prefer Magic Earth.
Also, you can contribute to make the maps more complete with Street Complete.
Magic Earth is proprietary FYI. Good privacy policy and good service, only real problem I have is its not FOSS.
Yeah, that is an issue. I just like its features and UI the most.
If you want a good comparision of the apps you can go to the open street maps wiki
Thanks! You too LWD!