| I have been on a similar journey to distance myself from Google and my Google account for a little more than a year now. It's taken longer than I thought to get to where I am now, and now I'm skeptical that I'll ever be completely Google free. My steps so far have been: 1. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail. 2. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my new FastMail powered email address. 3. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I would need it 4. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone 5. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone A few tips I can share: * If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services. * You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address. The things that I've found hardest to migrate are: * iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID. * GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake. * YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube? |