long post alert; forgive my mistakes, not a native english speaker, also, this is my first post on Lemmy, I come from Reddit where I deleted my account >0-0<

some years ago, I stumbled upon digital privacy related forums and I started to realize the deep hole I was stuck in.

My digital life was totally reliant on Google and its multiple products: Google Photos, Gmail, Google Chrome, Chrome Passwords, Youtube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Pay, Google Android, Google Sheets, Google Chat/Hangout, Google Keep, Google Maps, Google Search.

Just writing all these names makes me re-realize how a single advertising company holds so much control on our digital lives.

It has been a long 6 years journey to reach pretty close to complete deGoogling. This journey has been filled with lots of ups and down, philosophical questioning on what digital freedom is and whether it truly is important, and lots of despair also (questions such as “what is the point of it all?” that I am sure many of us ask ourselves).

I am a normal “average” human being whose intention of having digital privacy is to ward off advertising companies, and to not be a pawn in their big money game. My intention and requirement is NOT to become anonymous.

My digital system is as follows now:

Google Android: Used LineageOS for a long time on an OnePlus device. It worked fantastic, zero troubles at all. But when my phone died, I switched to an iPhone to avoid the long term hassle of flashing.

Google Chrome: Firefox with uBlock Origin on Mac. Safari private browsing on iPhone. App Limit of 1 hour per day to reduce my problematic time-consuming browsing habits.

Gmail: iCloud Email for banking/finance. Proton Mail for everything else. All existing emails from Gmail transferred to local folders using Thunderbird, backed up on external hard drive and Filen.io.

Google Photos: Direct transfer from phone to computer in year-month folders, encrypted rclone sync to work OneDrive (multiple TB free space), and regular backups to external hard drive. I am still looking to move away from the rclone encryption (which works perfectly btw) to a more simpler, less complicated, cloud service but I have not finalized on one yet.

Chrome Passwords: KeePass! It is amazing!

Google Drive: Combination of external hard drive, encrypted rclone remote in OneDrive, and Filen.io.

Google Docs: Word documents or text files backed up using encrypted cloud.

Google Sheets: Excel files backed up using encrypted cloud.

Google Chat/Hangout: WhatsApp, Signal. WhatsApp is almost impossible to get rid of despite how clunky and disgusting it has become.

Google Keep: Apple Notes and plain text files.

Google Maps: Use it logged out. Tried OSMand, but it is not as good as G Maps yet.

Google Search: Still use it without loggin in, and sometimes DuckDuckGo.

Youtube: Still use it in private window, without logging in. I use it as if it is Wikipedia. My Youtube usage is very low.

Music: Apple Music.

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Hopefully this is helpful to some. Please feel free to provide suggestions and/or ask if you have questions on how I made any of the above transitions; I would be happy to help since I have learned so much from the broader privacy community.