I first signed up for a Gmail account at an internet cafe in Vietnam in March 2006. Like many at the time I had been a Hotmail user for years, but Gmail felt cleaner and simpler (and cooler) by comparison.

This was back when Google was still a relatively new company. Gmail itself had only been released two years earlier (on April Fools’ Day, 2004), and the rest of Google’s product suite didn’t yet exist.

Skip forward 20 years and Google had come to dominate my technological life. I had three Gmail accounts. I used the Google Chrome browser and Google search engine. I did most of my writing on Google Docs. I made presentations on Google Slides. I had a personal website on Google Sites. I had a subscription to Google-owned YouTube and YouTube Music. I paid Google for cloud storage. I made video calls on Google Meet. I used Google Calendar to organise my life. I used Google Translate for my Arabic studies. I used Google Wallet to store and scan digital event tickets. I used Google Pay instead of my bank card. I used Google Maps for directions. I used Google Fit to track my exercise. I used Google Drive to store files. And I still have a Google Pixel phone.

Google’s domination of my technological life aside, the extraordinary thing is that most of those services were free. Cloud storage and YouTube/YouTube Music were the only two services I paid for. Despite that, they all worked wonderfully well. Google’s products are fast, well-designed and seamlessly integrated. It was totally convenient ecosystem. But most Google products are free for a reason: the company makes money by harvesting and monetising your data. You are paying for Google with your attention and with your behaviour.

None of this is new, and wasn’t new to me when I decided recently to de-Google my life. So why de-Google now?

There wasn’t one single factor that led me to de-Google. It was the culmination of concerns that had been growing for years about the digitisation of human life and the influence of technology — and technology companies — on our personal and political lives. Recently, those concerns became more urgent, and led me to re-evaluate my relationship to technology. What were the concerns, exactly?

Like many, I’d come to the view over time that algorithm-driven technology platforms, and social media platforms in particular, were now more dangerous than they were fun. That they had started to warp — and deliberately manipulate — fundamental aspects of human socialisation and interaction. That real-world identity formation and interaction had been dangerously marginalised by their digital alternatives. That the master slave relationship between human and technology had been inverted. And then came artificial intelligence…

Recently, I was searching a popular jobs site for roles that required Arabic as a skill. It’s a language to which I’ve dedicated years of my life studying. Many of the jobs advertised were posted by AI companies looking for Arabic speakers to train their AI language models. One AI company — Mercor — was seeking multiple “Political Bias Experts” to help train AI models to “reason clearly and fairly about politically sensitive, socially complex and ideologically charged topics”. The core responsibilities of the role were to “guide the development of politically neutral, robust frameworks for addressing controversial or culturally sensitive issues”, to train the AI model to align it with “evidence-based, critical analysis – not social popularity”, and to help it to “reason clearly across political spectrums without slipping into dogma or relativism”. How Orwellian.

Then there were the concerns about the nexus between big tech and politics. The largest seven tech companies in the US now account for 34% of the S&P 500. The recent scenes of sycophantic tech chief executives grovelling before Donald Trump at a White House dinner were deeply disturbing, as were their donations to his most recent presidential election campaign. So too is the relationship between many technology companies and the state of Israel. Google has been listed as a pressure target by the BDS movement since 2021 over its relationship to Israel (as have other major tech companies like Amazon, HP and Intel). And during the current genocide in Gaza, Meta has actively suppressed pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide content on its platforms.

All of these factors and more came together into a realisation that I needed to re-orient my relationship to technology. To be more deliberative in everything I did online. I should state here that while it’s true that some social media companies have tried to suppress Palestinian content, it’s also true that their platforms have provided a critical mechanism through which Gazan journalists (and Gazans generally) can tell the truth about the genocide and the Palestinian cause more broadly without the filter of mainstream media. So, accepting that there have been significant benefits to these social media platforms, even as the companies that own them seek to suppress the truth, we must ask: how do we build a more just, trustworthy and sustainable technological model?

Back to my de-Googling.

Owing to its inclusion on the BDS list, Google was the first target of my technology re-orientation. Having decided to de-Google, I started searching online (not “googling”!) and found the de-Google “sub” (forum) on Reddit. This helped guide me on the decisions I would make as I started to extract myself from the Google ecosystem. The process of de-Googling is ongoing, but I’ve made significant headway in moving to alternative platforms that are both secure and private.

Given the content of this article, it’s fitting that I am writing it on one of those alternative platforms. Beyond Google, I’ve already taken steps to start to de-Meta my life. Like many, I am a heavy user of Meta-owned WhatsApp and Instagram. I have already migrated two WhatsApp chats across to Signal. Instagram will be more difficult. I use it a lot to monitor developments in Gaza and elsewhere. Thankfully, a lternative platforms are already being developed.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.