Here’s my project to extricate myself from free services. I’ve got an Android phone. I use gmail. And Hangouts. And Google Maps. And Google News
Google Now watches where I go to frequently and it thinks it knows where I work. It sees the purchases I make and gmail tells it when they are being delivered. It sees the places I go and makes suggestions on where to go. It’s a little creepy
As such I feel motivated to do something about it.
Following in the footsteps of Bryan at Bad Voltage, I’m taking steps to extricate the “free” services from my technology life. Starting today I’m moving away from GMail. It’ll be a slow transition because it’s not a 5 minute job. iPhone email and webmail are working. But I think I want a more complicated configuration; multiple email domains, virtual users, etc. That’s obviously part of the hook with Gmail and it’s Software as a Service model. All that hard work is done for you.
(The irony that most of my mobile technology posts are pro-Android but from a security and privacy perspective, Apple’s mobile OS is probably much better for you – well that’s not lost on me. I’m just sulking about it)
This is the second step I’ve taken. The first was to give Firefox yet another go. I’ve got a post brewing for a while about why Firefox is really the only browser to trust and the steps you can take to make it even more secure and private. Back to the “too many eggs in one basket” theme of this post however – the summary is that nothing is free, there is a cost to everything.
But is it worth it????