Anti-googlers: Web users take radical steps to protect their data

Opting out of tech giant services like Gmail, maps, and Chrome brings some privacy benefits, but it’s not easy to do.

In the small town of Newberry, South Carolina, it is very difficult to find Bob's Red Mill muesli. And this is a problem for the local resident Gregory Kelly, who simply adores them. He does not want to travel 60 km to Columbia to buy them, but he does not want to buy them through the company’s website, which, he claims, is full of tracking programs from Google.



And since he puts his confidentiality first, Kelly, reluctantly, periodically goes to Colombia - all the better than submitting your data to Google or revealing the purchase history to another online seller. “I just can't understand why Google needs to know what cereal I eat for breakfast,” says the 51-year-old citizen.



Kelly is one of those people who are doing everything to protect their files and online life from annoying snooping: they completely abandoned Google. And this means refraining from the most popular services on the network: Gmail, search, maps, Chrome browser, Android mobile OS, and even YouTube.



Such anti-googlers incite friends and relatives to refuse the services of titanium search and advertising, and some advertise this idea in social networks. Online instructions are appearing to help consumers untie themselves from Google.



These brave web users say they’d better put up with inconvenience than sharing their data. This means setting up automatic replies to Gmail and inviting friends to resend files or links to videos so that it does not require interaction with Google. In addition, this requires serious discipline.



People like Kelly are trying to get in the way of Google and other tech giants, mainly because of growing concern over massive data collection. One after another, the scandals surrounding the way these companies collect and use consumer data made many people think about what they sacrificed for the sake of customization and targeted advertising. For example, in a June study in the Washington Post newspaper, it was discovered that in just one week of using the web through the Chrome browser, the user received 11,000 requests for cookies to track.



As a result, more and more consumers are taking steps to regain control of their personal data, for example, by deleting Facebook and its Instagram photo sharing application. According to Kantar ShopperScape, about 15% of US households never shop on Amazon. Some voice assistants Amazon Echo and Google went to the trash. Some consumers save photos and other personal documents to external hard drives, and not to Google or Apple clouds.



Some brands are joining the new trend, promoting what they call superior privacy practices. At CES 2019, an Apple promise “Everything that happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” was posted on a billboard over Las Vegas, although many apps drain data from phones and track users. The number of requests to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-oriented search engine, has grown to 42.4 million, compared to 23.5 million last year - although this still remains a small fraction of the number of requests to Google.



In the last few months, Jim Lanz from Spokane. Washington systematically removes Google products from its online life, amazed at stories of how a Silicon Valley company collects and distributes user data. He also reads long confidentiality agreements and studies the legal pages of websites. “It's pretty hard to figure out what they own,” the wholesale manager said. “I don’t want to sell every bit of myself on Google,” he said. “At least I can complicate their task.”



In May, Google introduced new features that it said would help users protect their data, including storing a larger percentage of data on personal devices instead of cloud storage, and giving users more control over how and when cookies are used for tracking. The web search giant offers ways to permanently erase data, including search history and locations.



There was no publicly available data on how many users can opt out of Google, and the company does not provide information on how many people uninstalled their applications. “We want to help people understand and control their data, even if they want to give up Google,” said company spokesman Aaron Stein. He pointed out that Google has a service for downloading information stored in the company in order to use it elsewhere.



Joshua Greenbaum of Berkeley says he pays $ 100 a year for using Microsoft Office 365 software, which, he says, is better than Google to protect its privacy. “At Google, I give more than I receive,” said the 61-year-old technology consultant, who had begun phasing out Google services a couple of years ago when ads started appearing in his Gmail mail.



“Gmail helps the company to receive your email, Android - the location and use of applications in real time, Maps - more location data, Google Wallet - to look into financial information, Google Docs - personal and work history, Chrome - online history, your location, - said Greenbaum. “And I asked myself, what other data can they get to.”



It was because of all these consumer data that Google was on the spotlight by the US Department of Justice, which this year took the first steps to a potential antitrust investigation, according to Post. The White House is preparing its own probe to study Google and Facebook amid Trump's comments that the government should “sue” them.



Users say it’s hard to completely abandon Google. Greenbaum still maintains a Gmail account "for spam," as he says, and believes that if he wants to watch videos online, he won’t be able to get rid of YouTube.



For him, “improvements have come mainly in the field of self-satisfaction,” he said.



But for Janet Vertesy, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who has been avoiding Google in her personal life since 2012, this is not so. She said that it was a matter of controlling her personal data, which Google automatically distributes to all of its online holdings. For example, the data collected in Gmail is transferred to maps, is used by a user of Google Maps, or not.



“I want to know where my data is going,” said Vertesi. Sometimes this is expressed in requests for people to turn off their voice assistants or send documents in a format not related to Google Docs.



Google and other technology firms say that this data helps create more targeted advertising, and provide access to services that would otherwise not be free, such as email or photo storage.



This year, the European Commission fined Google $ 1.7 billion for allegedly stopping its competitors from working with other companies that have agreements with Google.