I really enjoyed the old Google, the nerd Google, the "don’t be evil" Google... Google Reader, Android, GTalk, etc. It made communication with my friends much easier.

I had already been moving everything away from the Google ecosystem for about two years, but Google Photos was the hardest part because it contained so many memories that I wouldn’t risk losing.

The final straw was when I accidentally subscribed to Google One with AI, which costs much more than simple additional storage. It’s not that much money for me, but when I found out I couldn’t downgrade, it became a matter of principle to do a Google Takeout of my photos and create a script to import them into Apple Photos (which is also not a nice company, none of them really are) without losing metadata.

I also moved them to Backblaze, where I have already had backups for more than five years, and to add even more redundancy, I backed them up to BorgBase using Borgmatic.

De-Googled! Now all my photos and videos are in the palm of my hand (~238 GB). My email client is not bloated. Well, assuming Apple doesn’t decide to shove AI down our throats in Apple Mail.

The only Google service I still pay for is YouTube. In exchange, I get zero unbearable ads, many of which promote illegal things like gambling websites. My ad blocker solves the problem on my computer, but on TV the situation is much harder, and I’m old enough to spend my time constantly finding ways around this stuff.