Google has been doing some pretty underhanded stuff lately, from sharing AI object-recognition data with defence contractors, to elevating its AI slop in its search engine, to making users jump through 500 different hoops in order to opt out of things that they got silently opted into, Google is the corporate feudal state. Also, given current events in the North American political scene, Google is definitely getting its hands dirty, making it an even greater security risk than it was before.
Being the monopoly that it is, Google has spent big money trying to convince you that there's nothing you can do to mitigate its hold on your technology and you shouldn't even try... but all propaganda is hollow when you look beneath the surface. The facts are that you can ditch Google and it won't even require you to sacrifice anything.
We've already covered the advantages to using Mozilla Firefox in Part 4, but I'd like to bring to your attention just how many browsers there are that are based on Google's Blink/Chromium engine.
- Chrome (of course)
- Microsoft Edge (since 2018)
- Brave
- Vivaldi
- Opera
- Samsung Internet
- DuckDuckGo
That's, quite frankly, chilling. At this point, the ONLY other choice is the Gecko-based Firefox. An internet browser duopoly where Google holds the market share. Even Microsoft gave up and went with Chromium!
Several months ago, Google started to police Workspace files for NSFW content; not only pictures and video but text as well; and locking accounts where it was found. Fanfic writers started complaining mightily on Tumblr that their entire Google account had been locked because they had been writing erotic fiction. This is what a monopoly can do; deprive you of your rights and escape consequences, leaving you no recourse except to try and recreate that data elsewhere. Apart from this, Google has also started using Workspace files to train its AI model, Gemini; as far as anyone can tell, the available "opt out" has no actual function since Google built a backdoor for itself into its terms of use, allowing it to use your files in any way it pleases.
So, what can you do? You can change word processors, that's what. Not to Microsoft Office (which also acts as morality police and AI trainer), but to The Document Foundation LibreOffice. If you recall, we discussed this program briefly in Part 7; it's a freeware desktop publishing suite that can do everything Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides can do. LibreOffice Impress is about as much like Microsoft PowerPoint as a drymark board is like a cave wall, but if your concern is being able to write the raunchiest ship yaoi of your life without being censured by the morality police, LibreOffice Writer is there for you.
You may have been drawn to ChromeOS because of its compatibility with Android apps and its relatively low price point; even though Chromebooks may look like laptop computers and may, in some fashion, behave like laptop computers... well, they aren't laptop computers. Using a Chromebook as your personal computer opens one heck of a security vulnerability, insofar as it has more in common with an Android tablet than a Linux PC. While this isn't the rule, most Chromebooks are incapable of dual-booting, so it won't be possible to install Linux on it like a Windows PC. Fortunately, you can find a refurbished Windows 10 laptop for dirt-cheap online or at your locally-owned computer store and, as we saw in Part 10, all it takes to install Linux Mint 22 is a flashdrive.
That's all well and good for computer users. And I know the title of this section is "How to Use a Computer", but even I can see that computer adoption is still pretty low amongst people who are most vulnerable to Google's monopolistic ways. So, let's talk about the smartphone for a moment. Be vigilantly on the lookout for a new app to be automatically installed on your Android device called Android System SafetyCore. You'll need to go to the "Apps" section of your Settings menu to find it (fortunately, beginning with "A", it's pretty high up in the list). Despite its impressive name, this is effectually an AI-trained smut detector, designed to automatically blur any content on your device that Google thinks needs censoring. For the moment, it can still be uninstalled by scrolling down to "Downloaded from Google Play" and tapping it to follow the link to the app on the Play Store, then choosing "Uninstall". If this doesn't work, disable it instead. This is a very temporary solution for which I'm still researching a permanent fix. In Europe, SafetyCore undoubtedly violates some part of the GDPR, but American users have no protections against this kind of morality enforcement.
Beyond this, however, there is an open-source app store called F-Droid which will help you find spyware-free FOSS analogues to all the apps you routinely use, including workalikes of Google products.
Relative to completely supplanting the Android operating system: the 2 most feasible options at the moment are called LineageOS and GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is only compatible with Google Pixel phones, while LineageOS has a wider spectrum of compatibility that even includes the Nintendo Switch and certain Raspberry Pi deployments. However, in most use-cases, these assume that your device was released within the past 5 years. Fortunately, wireless carriers still tend to offer free phones if you're willing to sign another multi-year contract with them, so if you're like me and still running Android 9 on a Samsung Galaxy Note8, you'll probably want to take advantage of that. As far as installation goes, both Lineage and Graphene provide detailed installation instructions which, so long as you follow to the letter, carry an extremely minimal chance of damaging your device (so low, it may as well be zero). In most use-cases, you won't even need to root your device! It should be mentioned, however, that LineageOS is not compatible with a lot of mainline Android software (i.e. stuff available from the Play Store), in which case you will need F-Droid.
| Computers | Android | iOS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Android OS | - | LineageOS | - |
| Chrome | Firefox | ||
| ChromeOS | Linux Mint | - | |
| Play Store | - | F-Droid | - |
| Search | SearXNG | ||
| YouTube (App) |
FreeTube | NewPipe | - |
| Youtube (Site) |
Invidious | ||
| Docs Sheets Slides |
LibreOffice | ||
| Keep | Joplin | ||
| Gmail | Proton | ||
| Drive | SD Cards & Flashdrives | Proton | |
| Maps | OpenStreetMap | OSM Dashboard | ? |
| Sites | Neocities | - | |
| Translate | ? | ||
| Fonts | FontSquirrel | - | |
On Android, use only the Proton website to check your email, as the app is not available from F-Droid.
Also, on Android, it may be necessary to have OpenTracks installed in order to use OSM Dashboard.
I'm unprepared to recommend Apple Maps as a replacement for Google Maps, because of Apple being another trillion-dollar corporation. Not being very familiar with iOS anymore (my last encounter with it was in 2018), I'm not qualified to make any recommendations for Google Maps alternatives here.
I'm currently searching for a machine translator that does not use AI. You'd think such a thing would exist, considering how long Google Translate existed before analytical AI was ever practical, but apparently not. The problem here is not that the result is generated by AI, which it technically isn't, it's the immense power requirements needed to train the models in the first place. This is the reason I dropped my recommendation for DeepL.