A while back, I made the choice to get away from using Google services as much as possible. It was a choice made for personal reasons initially, but really gained traction when I realized how much (and why) I didn’t align with the overall business model of companies like Google.
I remember way back when Facebook first opened up to the public and pretty much everyone was blown away and enamored with the platform, my self included. As it grew I remember a quote being recited a million different ways by a small group:
If the service is free, YOU are the product.
Even back then, in the infancy of massive social media growth, I think I understood that. I just don’t think I really cared. Who cares if this company sees my dog pictures? Why does it matter if a company can somehow profit off of me posting a ‘Happy Birthday’ message on someone’s page? What harm does it cause me?
In a literal sense, back then… I don’t think there was much reason to worry. The service was simple and relatively harmless. It was a neat way to see what friends were up to and share memories.
I obviously don’t need go through all that’s changed since then. It’s beyond A LOT. All the kinds of things that make the whole “User is the product” model abundantly clear if you bother to think about it. Your facial data is used to identify you. Your location is tracked. Your scrolling habits are analyzed. The list goes on and on. All of this data is used to build a profile, to feed an algorithm, to show you an infinitely scrollable view of things to keep you active on the service… giving it more and more data… so it can make more and more money from selling access to your eyeballs.
It sounds pretty dramatic and bleak when put like that, huh? I’m not even saying the massive companies that follow these kind of practices are bad or “evil”, though you could certainly argue that opinion. I think I’m more saying I understand their model, and I don’t agree with it or want to take part in it.
So, I started with Facebook. I hardly used it at that point anyway. I hated opening it to see what crap would pop up in my “feed”. Many of my friends weren’t active on it either. It was pretty easy to all but close that up. I kept the profile, but removed pretty much everything other that my name and picture.
I did similar things with a few other services before eventually realizing that Google, a company of which I made use of almost all of it’s services, was perhaps the most clear case of me being the product. I stored all my photos where it’s AI was trained to recognize faces and objects. I kept all of the contacts I accumulated over decades. All of my documents. All of my chats. All of my search history. All of my email.
It was a service that was a massive and essential part of my online existence. Getting off of it is no easy feat. In some ways it’s almost impossible depending on how deep you are in the ecosystem. I can assure you, I was deep.
Nevertheless, one by one, I pulled away from each section of Google that I could. I moved my photos and documents to a home server with encrypted backups. I switched to a privacy focused search engine. I no longer store my passwords on it’s servers. While I haven’t pried myself from YouTube quite yet, I found it nice that I can turn off my activity history, disable the algorithmic “feed”, and only see content from those I subscribe to.
Each step felt tedious, but relieving in some ways. Each time, I’d have the feeling of it being such a chore to remove myself from a service. And each time, I realized that the main reason it felt like such a chore, was because I’d allowed myself to get swallowed up in their entire ecosystem. I was the ultimate “product”. Leaving it was difficult by design. Not because they literally made it difficult, but that it’s difficult to motivate yourself to leave such a convenient ecosystem. You need the will and intention to upend something you’ve relied on daily, for free, for years.
I’d pretty much stricken all of myself that I could from Google when I finally arrived at my email. The gmail account that I got when it was in beta. My first “serious” email address, and the one I’d used exclusively since. Every email correspondence. Every online account. Every contact, meeting, chat, event. Everything.
I knew right away I couldn’t really close it. It’s been my one solid and consistent point of contact for almost my entire time I’ve been online. Email, as old as it is, is still quite the anchor of online identity. So, I instead set up forwarding to a new email address. One which I pay a company I trust for email storage and services. One which makes use of the very domain name you’re reading this on. An “@sto.sh” email. I feel varying amounts of vain about that.
There is a reason behind that, however. For such an anchor of online utility, it feels odd that it’s usually tied to a specific company. @gmail, @yahoo, @icloud, @outlook… I’m not saying there’s anything wrong in particular with the companies associated with these,. Instead I’m asking, for such an immobile pillar of online identity, why must you pledge allegiance to one company in particular? Your (cell) phone number, on the other hand, can stay yours for as long as you want. You can move it from provider to provider, no matter where you move in the country. If you want to change from traditional email services, you really can’t, unless you’re willing to change your email. If you switch to another traditional email service, you’ve just put yourself in the same situation. The only way I could see around this, was to “own” the entire email address, domain and all. So that’s what I did! Now, if I decide I don’t like my current email hosting, I’m capable of moving to another provider, while retaining the same email. Convenient!
As I’ve found the time and energy, I’ve transferred my online accounts to my new email address. This is each time again quite tedious but fulfilling. Each account is now no longer sending emails to a service that does everything it can to profit off any data it can scrounge up on me. I’ve reached a point where there’s not really any service I currently use that has my old gmail address. I haven’t closed the account. I’m not sure I ever will. I don’t think I really can without potentially losing access to some service I forgot about, or some long forgotten contact that decides to reach out.
So now it sits, forwarding on the odd email it still gets. And now I sit here, writing a blog post about a ~year long journey that I’ve been on, weening myself from services I no longer align with. It’s the kind of post I might’ve shared on Facebook in the past. Now, instead, I post it here, where who knows who will stumble across it. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the process has been a bit of a waste of time and energy. At least I can wonder about it here, on something that’s mine.
I do have to say, with most of this journey complete, I have been feeling more energized recently! I’ve been taking on more freelance post sound and recording work, starting new projects, and of course working on some new Collected Transients Libraries 😀
If you read this all, I hope, if anything, it’s made you consider the way you use these kinds of services. I’m not trying to change your mind. I don’t think it’s “bad” to use them. I don’t think everyone should do even remotely close to what I’ve done. I just think it’s worth considering whether you’re OK being the product.