For quite a few years now Google has been having dubious and problematic behaviors. It’s been spying on users who opted out of data collection¹, secretly having contracts with the ICE² and the IDF³, to rigging the ads business with Meta to favor each other against other ad sellers⁴, and so much more, not counting the enshittification⁵ its products have gone through.

It’s in our best interest to move away from their services, but they’re entrenched in so many parts of our daily lives that it feels a herculean task to do so. If you use any of these, you are using a Google product or within Google’s control:

• Google search
• Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Drive
• “Sign-in with Google” buttons
• Chrome browser
• Any ads you see and interact with online
• Google Maps
• Google Translate
• All smartphones not made by Apple (even Samsung, Xiaomi, and all the other brands)
• YouTube
• and more

Migrating away isn’t easy and requires compromises.

In this article, I’m going to suggest alternatives that are as easy to set up and use as I could find. They may not be the most private, or they may not be the easiest, but I’ll try to provide you those caveats in each section when I’m aware, and color code them on difficulty. Pick sections of the article as you feel like, and even if you can’t migrate everything, doing the effort to migrate some of the things already has a large impact on Google and on your privacy.

Special mention goes to Janet Vertesi and her work The Cyber Cleanse - Opt Out Project. I took a bit of inspiration from there, and if you want a more thorough approach to fully getting rid of products from all biggest major tech companies, you should check her work. I’m also going to give a mention to European Alternatives, where I found a few of the suggested alternatives I mention in this article, and to r/degoogle on reddit, where so many of my searches for this article fell on.

Now on to the migration!

Search 🟢

The search engine is among the easiest things to change. A caveat is that most alternatives are just making your search in Microsoft’s Bing and returning you its results. Indexing all the websites on the internet is a long, slow and expensive process, and most alternatives try to work around that.

This means that unfortunately you’re switching from a large tech company to another different large tech company. It might still be worth it for the privacy preserving changes these 3rd parties do though.

• Qwant is a French search engine that has its own search index. It’s also the only search engine that I found that doesn’t fully rely on Google or Bing under the hood, having its own indexing. It only falls back to Bing when it doesn’t have enough information for your search.
• Ecosia is a search engine by a German non-profit that uses Bing and plants trees for every search you make.
• DuckDuckGo is an U.S. based search engine that uses Bing and anonymizes your searches so you can’t be tracked.

Switching in this case is easy. When you visit each one’s website, they will suggest you add their search engine to your browser, and all searches from then on will be done on it!

If you see this and think “oh I’m not going to use Bing, it sucks!” well… yes, it does, but Google’s quality got much worse in the last few years⁶ (and Google did it on purpose⁷). It got so much worse that by my subjective experience, Bing is roughly on-par with Google right now.

Note: there’s also Startpage, which anonymizes Google searches, but given it uses Google under the hood the same way others use Bing, I decided not to include it here.

Browsers 🟢

Chrome is a Google browser! Google is pushing for more tracking and more advertising in your browser⁸, with harder opt outs, and harming ad blockers on purpose⁹.

Almost all other browsers out there actually use Chrome’s code and adapt it a bit, so they run the risk of suffering the same issues as Google’s browser.

One of the bigger exceptions is Firefox, which has a completely independent source code maintained by the U.S. non-profit Mozilla Foundation (and for-profit Mozilla Corporation, it’s messy). While their parent company Mozilla has been struggling a bit to find a sustainable business model and doing some questionable decisions, like removing their promise not to sell user data¹⁰, I think their browser is still the less bad option. There are more private alternatives, but using them might cause websites to break too much.

Because Firefox might rarely not work with some webpages, having a backup browser is a reasonable option. Vivaldi is a Norwegian Chrome-based web browser, and while using a Chrome based browser isn’t as good as using Firefox, it’s a good fallback when Firefox doesn’t work, and it doesn’t send your data to Google.

To migrate all of your data you will need to use a PC. On first use, Firefox will offer to import all of your Chrome data from that PC. You can then use Firefox Sync to sync that data to your phone as well.

Note: One browser to avoid is Brave. U.S. company Brave Software is owned by Brendan Eich, who donated to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California¹¹, he is also a COVID denialist. While pretending to be a private browser, it also has been found in scandal after scandal breaking user’s privacy, scamming the owners of websites, or both. You can see a thorough description of the issues in Stop using Brave Browser.

Ads 🟢

You might be thinking, what do you mean, finding alternatives to ads?

Well, Google owns the biggest ad platform in the world, and because it uses the information from all its products to target ads to you, it effectively owns a monopoly in the ad industry¹². It is in their interest to spy on you to sell ads. Most ads you see on the internet or in apps will be chosen by Google for you to see based on the spying they do on you.

Because of this, blocking ads is a necessity to preserve your privacy. The only reliable ad blocker I can recommend is uBlock Origin, maintained by independent developer Raymond Hill. Most other ad blockers have deals with different ad providers to let them slip through or replace ads from one provider with others that will pay them instead of the website owner.

To install uBlock Origin go to the developer’s website, and it’ll offer you an installation process for your browser of choice.

Note that Google forbid the technology used by uBlock Origin from being used in Chrome⁹ to prevent ad-blockers in Google Chrome from being as effective, and recently even removed uBlock Origin from the Chrome web store¹³, so in the long term the only browser that will effectively block ads and tracking will be Firefox and its derivatives.

Password manager 🟢

You probably were saving passwords in Google Chrome, and might not want Google to have access to that information. The easiest option is to use Firefox’s password manager, it’ll be a similar experience.

A different alternative might be to use Bitwarden. It’s an U.S. owned password manager that uses cryptography to ensure that the company cannot see the passwords you save on it. This kind of feature, cryptography that allows you to save data online without the parent company knowing what it is, is called end-to-end encryption. It’s guarantees are better than any company’s pinky promise not to look at your data, and I will use this term from now on for other services that do the same. Most modern password managers do this, but the source code for Bitwarden is open and has been verified independently.

An alternative in Europe is Proton Pass, owned by Swiss non-profit Proton Foundation. It also had end-to-end encryption and the servers are fully located in Europe. Proton also has replacements for other Google products described later on. There are some reservations about Proton I will mention in the section about e-mail.

One important note about these services that use end-to-end encrpytion is that if you forget your password to access them, you lose access to your data, in this case, all your other passwords. Your password is used in the special mathematical formulas to keep your data safe, so it’s critical that you don’t lose it. If you must, keep it in a piece of paper, in a vault, locked in a private place.

To migrate you might need to use a PC, but there you’ll be able to export Chrome’s passwords and import them to your alternative of choice. Each provider has instructions on their website on how to migrate (Firefox, Bitwarden, Proton Pass). You can then install their mobile apps to auto-fill on your phone and browser add-ons to auto fill on your PC.

Note: Another tool to avoid is LastPass. For a long time it was widely used and famous, but they have suffered multiple security breaches since 2022¹⁴ and are not a good alternative.

E-mail 🔴 and calendar 🟡

This is where things start to get tricky. There are quite a few alternatives, but switching e-mail providers requires creating a new e-mail and a long process of updating all online accounts and informing all your contacts about the new e-mail. We’ll get back to this in a moment.

First, some alternative providers:

• Tuta is a German company that provides e-mail and calendar with end-to-end encryption on email contents and calendar events.
• Proton is a Swiss non-profit that provides e-mail, calendar, drive, password manager and a few more services. Like Tuta, they also have end-to-end encrpytion on email contents, calendar events, cloud synced files and password data.
• Startmail is a Dutch based provider that provides an e-mail service.
• Mailfence is a Belgian e-mail and calendar provider with end-to-end encryption for email contents.

Creating an account should be the easy part. But that is not enough.

To make things easier, you can import all your existing e-mails from Gmail to either Tuta or Proton, and you can set up a redirect so all emails from Gmail go to your new e-mail (Tuta, Proton). Their websites have instructions for each one on how to do that. This way you don’t need to use both Gmail and the new provider, you can rely on your new provider to manage all e-mails.

The part that will take more time will be to go over your online accounts, one by one, and updating it to use the new email, and to notify all your contacts as well. Take your time on this, don’t rush it. If you do it slowly over the course of a few weeks or months, you can get most of your accounts moved to the new e-mail! You can update them one by one by checking your password manager for the places you need to update.

All of these services also provide Calendars, and allow you to import your existing Google Calendars with ease.

Disclaimer about Proton: in December 2024, Proton’s CEO Andy Yen praised the republican choice of Gail Slater as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division¹⁵ for being more inclined to take on big tech monopolies (which is false). Proton quickly distanced itself from the CEO’s position and from being pro-republican. Although historically it seems that Andy Yen and Proton’s position about this subject does not reflect their overall position on human rights, this might still discourage you from using it. If there are other practical alternatives for e-mail, calendar, password management and cloud file syncing you can vouch for, let me know so I can add them 😁

Sign-in with Google 🟡

You’ve seen those buttons on websites, next to the login box, that say “Sign in with Google” or Meta, or other big providers. To move away from Google, you also need to replace those sign-ins with alternative approaches.

To find what websites do you sign in with Google, follow go to your Google Account > Security > Your connections to third-party apps & services. Here you should have a list of all websites.

Now, for each one, you should visit the website, go to its settings, and find a way to set a new e-mail and password (which you can save in your new password manager), and when that is done, unlink it from Google.

Each website will be unique, some will be easier, some will be much trickier to take care of. But although it might be a long process, it should not be impossible. When you are done, all of those websites should use your new email, have a unique password saved in your password manager, and no longer use Google to sign in.

Drive 🟡

Google Drive allows you to sync files and photos over multiple different devices. It’s quite practical.

I could not find a lot of more independent alternatives, but what I did find was:

• Proton, once again, has a service in this area with end-to-end encrypted documents.
• Mailfence also provides a service in this area.
• Murena is a French company that builds privacy-centered phones and also has a service in cloud storage. It seems their cloud storage is not working at the moment.

Migrating your own files should be easy. Proton has instructions on automating the migration process for their service, and copying things from Google Drive to your PC and from your PC to your new alternative should be easy, if a bit slow.

Migrating shared files might be more complicated. If you can get away with sharing links, you can inform people of the new link for the files they need from your cloud storage. If you need the other person to also be able to modify the files, they will need to make an account there as well.

Docs 🟡/🔴

Google Docs is a bit tricky to migrate away from…

If you don’t need the real time collaboration features, you can get away with using your drive space from the previous section and a local document editor.

One option is OnlyOffice Documents, a Latvian-based open-source office suite available for both PC and mobile.

Alternatively, there is LibreOffice for PC, which is a fully featured open-source office suite maintained by an independent community and led by a German non-profit. And Collabora Office for mobile, a product from a British company, based on the LibreOffice code.

If you need the real time collaboration features, OnlyOffice Docs seems the most fully featured of the options. Proton Drive has limited support for written documents, but no spreadsheet or presentation support. Murena also supports real time collaboration, based on the OnlyOffice code.

The biggest caveat is that for people to do real time collaborative editing, they will need to make an account in the platform you use, which might be a source of attrition. If you have existing documents or receive documents owned by other people, you might not have a choice but to use Google for those specific documents.

Photos 🟡

If you own a non-iPhone, you probably have an Android-based phone, and it probably has a Gallery app. It might be the manufacturer’s app, or it might be Google Photos, that neatly syncs photos over the internet.

But Google scans your photos for criminal content (which has led to false child abuse allegations in the past¹⁶) and possibly also uses them to train their AI models (they don’t explicitly mention it, but they also don’t deny it, and it wouldn’t be the first time Google was caught using data without permission¹).

The first thing to do is to disable Google’s Backup and Sync by going to the app’s settings. Then you should install an alternative app.

Alternatives to the Google Photos app are Aves Gallery and Fossify Gallery. Both of these make their source code available, and don’t do anything to your photos besides showing them to you.

To replace the cloud sync, you can use one of the Drive alternatives from before. Proton Drive has the ability to automatically sync photos to your Proton account, others should also have similar features.

If you don’t want your photos to touch the internet at all, you can use a tool to sync them to your PC when you are on your home Wi-Fi. There’s Danish FolderSync and German PhotoSync. I have not used either product so I cannot vouch for their quality. There also used to be the open source tool Syncthing, but the Android app stopped being maintained. If an alternative syncthing app for Android appears, I will update this article.

Notes 🟢

Google Keep is very practical, but there are alternatives!

• Joplin is a note taking app with end-to-end encryption, maintained by British developer Laurent Cozic.
• Standard Notes is the app developed by Proton with end-to-end encryption. Disclaimer, unlike all other products in the Proton family, this one requires a separate subscription for the paid features (but it does have a free tier).
• Obsidian is a Canadian end-to-end encrypted note app with cloud sync support.

Both Standard Notes and Obsidian provide ways to import notes from Google Keep (Standard Notes, Obsidian).

Translation 🟢

Google Translate is ubiquitous, but there are quite a few reasonable alternatives.

If you just need webpages to be translated, Firefox supports on-device translation. This means translations happen on your PC, without ever going to the internet, and all of them are private. It’s easy to use, it is private, and it works well!

To translate other snippets of text, German-owned DeepL is a set of high quality translation models, with mobile apps you can install. Unlike Firefox’s on-device translation, this will be sent to their servers to translate, but it is the most convenient high quality option I could find for mobile at the time.

If you’re not afraid of software still under development and prefer on-device and open source alternatives, you can try and download RTranslator, an app from independent developer Luca Martino.

Maps 🟡/🔴

Finding a good alternative to Google Maps was a pain. To understand the scale of the difficulty, a good alternative has to:

• Have accurate and up to date maps of all over the world.
• Provide good driving and walking suggestions.
• Have an extensive knowledge of the public transportation system of most cities to provide good public transport suggestions.

The first two requirements are already difficult to fulfil, but the 3rd one makes it almost impossible!

Eventually I found a reasonable alternative that seems to check all the boxes, at least where I live. HERE WeGo is a very complete maps application owned by Dutch company HERE. It is actually the successor to Nokia Maps! In my recent experience with it, it was able to provide accurate information, good routes, both walking and in transportation, and the mobile app feels polished and useful.

If you don’t prioritize public transportation so much and want to use a more community owned alternative, OpenStreetMap is a community based map people can contribute to like in Wikipedia, and it has multiple mobile applications, with the most famous and most polished probably being Dutch OsmAnd. While it is an acceptable alternative in some cases, its coverage of public transport is spottier and it might be a deal breaker for some people, as it was for me.

As far as I was able to check, I didn’t find a way to import Google Maps lists to none of the options here. In addition to that, the information on the various places and businesses might not be as complete as in Google Maps.

Android 🔴/⚫️

I have bad news, every single alternative has serious compromises here. You can switch to Apple‘s iPhone, and accept giving your data to another big tech company, as well as to deal with their walled garden.

You can use EFF’s privacy guide for Android phones, but it has minimal impact and doesn’t actually prevent Google from spying on your phone.

If your phone allows it, you can switch to a Google-less flavour of Android, such as “e”, LineageOS, or others. But installing a new OS on your phone is not an easy task, it might not be possible depending on your phone brand, and if you do it there’s no guarantee that all functionality will continue working bug free.

Even worse, almost all Android apps, with very few exceptions, were forced in some way or another to use Google specific code in them to be able to have the functionality they need. This is called the Google Play Services, and it is used for location information, notifications, and many other things. If one of the applications you use depends on this functionality and you try to use it in a Google-less Android flavour, the application might be buggy or not even work at all.

And to make it even worse than all of this, many banking apps (and a few others) are now using a feature in that code called the Google Play Integrity API. This anti-feature checks if your phone’s operating system was modified in some way. And if this feature finds out you are using a phone where you installed an alternative flavour of Android on, it’ll fail the check and the app will refuse to launch.

This is one of the worst user-hostile anti-features that causes a lock-in to Android as made by Google, and prevents people from leaving it, resulting in a true monopoly.

While moving to Apple might not be much better, it might still be an improvement, and their privacy settings actually work. If moving to Apple is not an option, by principle or in practice, you can consider installing a Google-less brand of Android on your phone if you don’t have apps that depend on Google features. The third option is to get an old-school feature phone and put the smartphone in the drawer to let it gather dust.

There’s no easy solution here, and until larger governments such as the EU or the US decide to actually force Google to detangle Android from themselves, or a new alternative gains traction and becomes a real alternative, it won’t get any better.

Youtube ⚫️

And YouTube is not much better. Hosting a video site is expensive and migrating away depends on the creators you follow having alternative sources for their videos somewhere else.

The best solution will be to check what each creator promotes. Some have paid tiers in Patreon where you can see the videos before they’re released. Some have their own websites where you can subscribe to see videos there directly. Some might be on alternative platforms such as Nebula.

Some people might also want to consider PeerTube, which is a decentralised alternative to YouTube developed by a French non-profit. Its user base is much smaller than YouTube, and the number of creators there is minimal in comparison, but if you’re looking for any videos in general, you might find what you’re looking for there. FediVideo curates high quality instances and accounts in PeerTube that you can follow.

Cleanup and conclusion

After you finish each one of these migrations, you will probably want to go over each of the services you just migrated, and clean up all the data you have there.

In an ideal world, you might get to a point where you are sure you deleted everything, and delete your Google account altogether. In reality, you might take a lot longer, or you might have blockers that prevent you from migrating 100%. That’s okay though, any changes to your habits where you use less services or use them less often are an improvement. Even those small changes have an impact and reduce Google’s revenue and influence.

And if you feel inspired, you should continue detangling your life from other big tech. Look at The Cyber Cleanse for an overall guide, consider moving away from Microsoft, Amazon and Meta services and products. Look for privacy preserving alternatives to the tools and services you use, and take back control of your life.

If you like my article, comment on it on Mastodon!