[paradite]

It's all too late.

If you are already depending on Google for email, contacts, map services, identification services(Google Plus login, Google Identity platform), then it is very hard to change the status quo. One problem is the compatibility/migration, another is lack of quality open-source/private solutions. Google gives you everything free so you wouldn't want to migrate to a paid service.

As an experiment, I tried de-activating my Facebook account, and I was surprised to realize that I am also losing half of my contacts (on Facebook Messager) and half of my music collection (on Spotify, with Facebook sign-in, which cannot be transferred to an email-only account).

I wrote a blog post on this issue and how to avoid being dependent, but the alternatives would not be applicable to Google products:

https://paradite.com/2016/02/18/stay-independent-problems-wi...

[runjake]

> on Spotify, with Facebook sign-in, which cannot be transferred to an email-only account

I did it.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Accounts-and-Subscript...

[paradite]

You cannot even login to Spotify without Facebook account being active, so your steps 3 and 5 would not work. Those steps require you to sign in with Facebook to the old account.

[deftturtle]

you have to create another account and contact Spotify support. Then they'll migrate your FB-created account to the new one, preserving playlists and followers and stuff.

[wingerlang]

So do this before you de-activate your FB account then?

[deftturtle]

yeah, make 2nd account, get in touch w/ Spotify support regarding closing, and then they help w/ transfer.

[goferito]

I agree that it's very hard at this point to completely remove Google from our lives. But we shouldn't do nothing and give up. The best solution is almost always something in the middle. That's what I aim for. Maybe I can't get rid of Android at this point, but maybe there are some configurations that might be an improvement, and have a bit more privacy on my Android phone. For example, I had to manually deactivate the location history (active by default), and all this tracking stuff you can see on the myactivity page that for me it's more intrusive than the benefit Google may give me from that data.

[Zelmor]

Funny how you tell people to become independent from services, then go ahead and advise techies to set up their own cloud on VPS.

[detaro]

You have to read it as "independent from specific services". The scripts configuring my VPS don't care what provider provides the VM below it. Keep a current backup in independent places and you can get your full set of services back up quickly. But of course it is overall more work, not always the same feature set (good and bad), ...

[paradite]

Yes. You have a point. What alternatives to VPS do you suggest for a poor student like me?