It’s been nearly two weeks since I began a migration from the usage of services and patronage of stores, both online and brick and mortar, run by companies whose values don’t align with mine. The list of companies on that list is constantly being scrutinized and vetted. Here are some successes.
Amazon: Prime account closed, as well as Goodreads. I haven’t shopped at Whole Foods since my embargo, either. This is not proving to be terribly challenging. As I’ve written before, it’s just a matter of conscious decisions.
Target: Nope, haven’t been there either, or ordered from them online. They’ve received nary a penny from me.
This one’s more complex because it’s not a simple decision to, say, start using a different email client or maps service or search engine. Well, actually, taken individually, they maybe aren’t too difficult. Take search, for example. I switched all my devices’ and browsers’ defaults over to Duckduckgo and that was that. But I have a lot more skin in the Google ecosystem than that and the process to leave is ongoing. But, honestly, given that it’s just been a couple weeks, I have to say that there has been a welcome amount of alacrity towards my stated goal of saying buh-bye.
Here are the G services I’ve successfully moved on from that were mostly painless and mostly simple: Search, Keep (notes), Maps, News, Tasks (reminders). These were the quickest and easiest, and among the first to drop off my radar. With the exception of News, I have basically embraced the similar apps in the Apple roster.
A quick aside regarding Apple: Aren’t they just as evil and deranged as, say, Alphabet (Google), Meta (fb, Instagram, Whatsapp), and Tesla? Perhaps. But maybe not quite. It’s really a bit of the “lesser of two evils” idea. I believe Apple’s privacy and security policies are more robust, am under the impression that they are still honoring their DEI policies, and have a slightly better commitment to clean energy running their server farms. I’m not interested in not having a smartphone in my pocket, and if I’m not interested in using Android (owned by Google) then Apple’s my only option here in the U.S. (or maybe anywhere, for that matter — I don’t know of an alternative smartphone OS to Android or iOS).
Here are the G services I’ve fully moved on from that were less easy: Calendar, Photos, and GoogleOne or Drive or whatever they call their cloud storage. Let’s break it down because these need some elaboration.
Calendar: This one was way more time consuming than it should have been. Going into Apple’s Calendar app on my Mac and selecting Calendar>Add Account… brought over my Google calendars that I created. Missing were my two most-used calendars that my wife created and shared with me. One is shared between her and I, and the other between her, her ex-husband, and myself for keeping tabs her son’s schedule, including when he’s with his dad, and when he’s with us, for example.
I finally resorted to consulting the internet and found a seemingly hidden calendars sync page that isn’t obvious in the Calendars settings pages. Once I got the appropriate calendars synced and refreshed my Apple Calendar, boom, there they were. Then I did the same on my iPhone. That one thing was particularly vexing because it wasn’t the least bit intuitive and so I was resigning myself to the fact that calendars created by someone else, and share with me, just won’t sync to a third-party calendar. But I knew deeply that that couldn’t be the situation and so my stickwithitness paid off.
Photos: Getting my 42,000 plus photos exported from Google and imported into Apple Photos was pretty straightforward using the export tool that’s part of the Google Takeout service and a piece of the Digital Transfer Initiative that Apple and Google jointly developed. It took over 30 hours but was seamless. The bigger problem was that my old Mac Mini doesn’t have a very big hard drive and the resulting “Photos Library.photoslibrary” file ballooned so much that I had to move it to an external drive, which took more time and was slightly less straightforward because there’s some monkeying around with Apple Photos’ settings to get it to point to the library I wanted it to. Also, now Photos runs pretty slowly due to the fact that that external HDD is also pretty old —even older than the Mac — and due to be replaced by a SSD whenever I get around to it. Hopefully that speeds everything up.
Google’s cloud storage service: I perseverated for a bit if only because cloud storage is not free and I wanted to make an informed decision. Finally, after consulting several online reviews, I settled on IDrive. This is not an Apple service and not to be confused with iCloud. In fact, I thought iCloud would do the trick so I ponied up for their 2TB option ($9.99/month) but soon realized that iCloud mirrors what’s on their server with a folder on your desktop. Given the lack of available storage on my hard drive, this was absolutely not an option. IDrive, like Google’s cloud storage service, is exclusively on their servers, with an option to have a portion of that storage mirrored on your local drive, but I get to control how much is in there, so it’s doesn’t impact my local storage any more than I allow it to. IDrive is very reasonable with some very competitively priced storage options. I opted for the 5TB level at $99.95 per year ($69.95 for the first year). That matches what I was paying Google for 2TB, so that’s a win for me. The service works on my Mac and iPhone both, backing up anything I tell it to on my Mac as well as the two external drives I have, plus all the photos and videos on my phone as well as contacts and calendars.
The last thing on this post’s list is email. This was by far the most time consuming of all of the services I’ve switched from the Google ecosystem if only because I’ve been using my gmail address for around twenty years. It is incredibly time consuming to change your email address with all of the online services I use. These include — and this is in no way exhaustive — insurance companies, financial institutions (Venmo, Paypal, my bank), local utilities, ride shares, airlines, my library, music and video streaming services, museum memberships, and the myriad other accounts I’ve set up over the years.
And then there are all of the email newsletters I’ve signed up for. To be sure, there are many that for various reasons I no longer care about, but there are several dozen that I do care about and look forward to. This was also very time consuming.
Once I felt comfortable that I’d successfully changed my email address on the vast majority of important accounts and newsletters — which to be clear, took several days, over a week, in fact — I went into Google Takeout and exported my entire mailbox into a “.mbox” file that I could import into Apple Mail. It was important to me that I didn’t lose all those emails I’ve saved for whatever reason. They are now tucked safely and snugly in an “On My Mac” box in Apple Mail and totally searchable. That’s how I went from having over 12,000 emails in Google to none but they are all accessible to me if I need them.
I will still continue to monitor my old gmail address for probably several months before I actually delete it for good, which — the actual deleting for good of the Google account — will be a subject of a future post, no doubt, as well as the one service I have yet to talk about much, Google Docs and its alternative of choice.
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