Why you should leave Gmail - from a German tech magazine

Well, everyone needs a trigger. For me it was a friend who suddenly deleted his Facebook account ages ago. Which made me thinking, why am I even on here (Facebook)... It's when it started for me. Then Google did some shit that got leaked how they are manipulating things and all the creepy monitoring that came to light and that's when I started slowly phasing it all out.

First to go was Google Search. It wasn't even good, we just all used it. Move to DuckDuckGo was so easy because DDG was jjst so much better and without bullshit personalized searches that fucked everything up. Next big one was GMail that took the most work and effort since I had to move all accounts to new ProtonMail address. But now that it's done, it was worth the effort. Next to follow was actually moving away from Android phone to iPhone despite hating Apple before because they were just stupid company. Solely just to get away from whole Google thing. That transition made me ditch centralized service dependency. iPhone was just a vessel that powered all the 3rd party services, be it multimedia, cloud storage, emails, messaging, all of it is 3rd party (none was from Google or Apple) and none of it is interconnected in any way. I've since returned to Android phone (Samsung where I use their services over Google's if required) but following same principles. Really only Google thing I even use is GooglePlay store that you need for apps and its account that's required. I've even gone as far that my Location Services has been just entirely disabled for few years now. I only turn it on when using navigation which is rare. Oh and I filter all my devices with DNS level filtering using Hagezi Ultimate filter list which is the most aggressive of them all. Considering I don't even get any false positives or issues with it tells me all the tracking and spying crap doesn't even affect me as whole and is just quietly filtered in the background.

I've minimized my online footprint to absolute minimum now and one might thik my life is difficult having to deal with so much privacy things, but it really isn't. Transition took time and effort, but now that I have system in place it's zero effort. It just works and moving between platforms has never been easier since I don't depend on any. I can move from Android phone to iPhone in like 1-2 hours and I'd instantly migrate it all in that time since I just need to install those 3rd party apps and services and login to them. Hell, I can run any of those 3rd party services across Windows, Linux, Android and iPhone all at once since they support all of them. It's really so cool and gives me so much freedom to just choose anything at any time with minimal effort.