Alex Williams

Today I unofficially filed my divorce papers from Google.

At this moment, Google seems to have access to almost every aspect of my business and personal life. In the past, this was all nice and cool because Google was awesome. Now it feels like they just want to know everything in order to serve some custom targeted advertisements. It’s actually kind of frustrating to look back and realize what I’ve given them access to: spreadsheets, written documents, email, blog stats, search history, chat conversations, my calendar, mailing lists, source code, and much more.

Who’s hating?

The reason I want to create a layer of separation between myself and Google is that I can’t trust them. I don’t think they’ve become “evil” yet, but I do think they will, eventually. For the time being, I feel safer knowing that I control who has access to my data. I don’t mind being responsible for backing up my email, synchronizing my calendar and maintaining my source code repository.

I love Google’s idea of having everything under 1 system, and integrating different applications to create 1 super mega application (i.e: search + chat + gmail + calendar + rss + igoogle), but at the same time I hate the idea of them knowing everything about everything. A decentralized open source solution, as proposed by Patrick, would be the holy-grail of all web applications. I’ll do my best with what’s available right now.

The process

My first step in separating myself from Google was getting my email out of their servers. On the plus side, I never used my gmail address as a primary mailing address, so I simply had to change my forwarding address, so I thought… Unfortunately I was also tied up with their “Gmail for your domain” service, which means I first had to specify the new mail server for my domain, then I had to re-create the email accounts and aliases. I also took this opportunity to try out the new Thunderbird 2.0 (which is totally AWESOME btw).

Next, I went in my Google Account Settings and disabled web history, removed all my spreadsheets, documents and disabled chat history. It requires a lot of clicking and focus because Google has no “disable spy-mode” button.

My final step will be to completely remove all the email from my Gmail account once I’m sure no more messages are forwarded there.

Obviously there’s more to it than that. I’ve switched to iCal for my calendar, Vienna for reading news, NeoOffice for documents and spreadsheets, Adium for chat, and svn+ssh for my repository. To top it off, I’ve got a backup solution to make sure I don’t lose any data in the event of a disk crash. I know this seems like a step backwards from the awesomeness Google Apps has brought us, but I think it will be worth it for the time being.

As usual, feel free to post your questions and comments below. Thanks!