[Animats]

It's not that hard to do without Google, except for search. My phone has all Google user-facing services removed. Mail is on an Sonic IMAP server and accessed with K-9 mail. Browsing is is with Fennec. Apps come from F-Droid. Navigation is based on Open Street Map. GPS assistance comes from Mozilla's location provider. No Facebook on mobile. Messaging is SMS and email.

On desktop, documents are in Libre Office. Privacy Badger blocks most of the junk. Browsing is with Firefox. Mail is via Thunderbird, talking to the same IMAP server. Haven't looked at Facebook this week yet.

ISP is Sonic.net, which just moves bits, and doesn't MITM anything. They're pro net neutrality.

Who needs Google?

[kristianc]

This article suggests that completely cutting Google out of your life is actually really really hard and breaks a lot of things unexpectedly:

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-u...

If you think its easy, you've probably only cut out the most obvious vectors.

[fixermark]

Part of the issue the article notes is: once you start with Google (or any large, interconnected service ecosystem), there's quite a bit of activation-energy cost to leaving it.

Consider Drive as an example. You can download the entire contents of your Drive at any time. Where do you upload it to? How many services will provide a clean and easy way to import all Drive documents? Will they maintain folder hierarchy? Individual files in Drive can also be shared with zero, a few, or all users with a given URL---can your new collaborative document editing tool be set up to manage that state? Is it automatable, or something you'll have to set up by hand for 10s - 100s - 1000s of documents?

This is the kind of thing an enterprise can pay someone to sort out, but individual users really have to care about leaving a service family (that one assumes at some point in the past they were already happy with the privacy / security tradeoff) to invest the time and effort to do so without data or functionality loss.

[Animats]

I didn't "leave". I didn't "enter" the Google ecosystem.

[fixermark]

Based on the article title ("Why no one really quits Google or Facebook"), your experience doesn't align with the scenario the article is talking about; it's scoped to people who already adopted these service ecosystems.