Escape google!

After pooling data in its myriad of services for over a decade, Mayank Sharma is trying to escape the clutches of the tech monopoly…

Even before they had a decent interface or useful features, it’s the convenience that online services offered that tricked the majority of us to entrust them with all sorts of data. So much so that the Internet giants that hosted them could create a ‘virtual identity’, even if depersonalised, from our correspondence and reading, browsing and watching habits.

Slowly however, under the garb of showing us better advertisements or weeding out irrelevant content, the free of cost services started imposing them elsewhere: down-rating, shadow-banning and censoring content and competition, abusing their reach to tear the neutral fabric of the web. Many believe Google has been abusing its monopoly on the web long before it dropped the “Don’t be evil” phrase from its corporate code of conduct sometime in 2018. The most successful internet search company by quite some distance, Google now dominates the smartphone operating systems with Android, web-based email with Gmail, online video hosting with Youtube and has its foot in virtually all technologies that are mainstream today or will be in the future.

In the first part of this feature we’ll speak to an open web advocate to understand how Google is leveraging its dominance to collate and monetise our private information. We’ll also look at some of the alternative services and platforms that promise to respect our privacy. By cutting down our reliance on the myriad Google services and moving to others that don’t incentivise privacy intrusion and tracking, we can drain Google (and its ilk) of the fuel that power its engines.

In the second part of the feature, we’ll help you host your own cloud to replace some of the oft-used online services. We’ll also show you how to make your Nextcloud-powered server omnipresent so that you can access services from any computer or device connected to the internet. By the end, you’ll be able to keep all your data under your control, yet access it via the same conveniences that you get with privacy-intruding services.