alt Hacker NewsThis story is the one that finally pushed me to leave google. I moved off my ~20 year old Google account and deleted everything off their services including almost a decade of Google photos. I cancelled my Google one subscription for extra space. I'm now self hosting what I can and paying proton mail for everything else. I refuse to allow a company that will hand over data at the request of an administrative warrant to hold my data.
Replies
Migrating is such a good feeling. You don't have to do it all at once, either: I migrated to fastmail over the course of several years. Each time google did something that got my blood pressure up I went into my password manager and migrated another account. In aggregate it was a hassle, but these days I almost miss the feeling of being able to do something in response to stinky actions from google.
If you haven’t already, have a look at Immich. It’s a fantastic self hosted replacement for Google photos. They have pretty much perfectly replicated the UI.
Nice. I want to do the same too. What process/workflow did you use to move all the websites you had given your email addresses to, to move to your proton email? I am guessing it will take several years, but I would like to start the move of my gmail.
Are there good hosted options that will not respond to non-judicial data requests?
Someone is going to say self hosted is better and I don't disagree, but there's limits to how much time I can spend on self hosted stuff.
Use of Google seems to have become implied consent for them to use or give away any and all of your data, for whatever purpose, to any government, legal entity, or advertiser.
It was 13 years ago that Snowden told us they were using FAA702 as the #1 source of sigint to warrantlessly obtain any data they want from major service providers.
Did you not understand it at the time? Did you not see the news stories? This isn't rhetoric, I'm genuinely curious. It's been public knowledge for a long long time that Google hands data over to the USG without a warrant (likely without even Google eyes on the request, via automated means).
What changed that this story was the one that made you react?
Have you run into any serious complications doing that? I'm a bit worried that I've used my google account for so long and for many things that I might accidentally lock myself out of something important without it.
When did you find out about this? The timeline of this actually pushing you to do all that seems a bit unbelievable and difficult to take seriously.
It's good that people migrate, just remember that you haven't deleted anything. They have all of that data and so do various US government agencies and, who knows, maybe other third parties.
Also remember, that when you exchange email with people who use GMail, then they've got you again.
Apple and Microsoft are also subject to US laws. It's not like any company can get around this.
This. The real solution here is to keep your data, encrypted, on your own devices. The idea that everything needs to be in the cloud is absurd and naturally leads to concentration of power.