However, assuming you’re willing to pay for privacy, switching e-mail is super easy. For example, from the Fastmail UI, you literally log in to your Google account and all your mail is transferred to Fastmail.

Switching to DDG? It’s 95% as good.

Switching to Apple Maps or OSM? It’s 95% as good.

Google Drive? There are 100 competitors.

There is one site you cannot do without, and that is YouTube. Everything else from Google can easily be ditched, the only two things in your way could be a reluctance to pay money and a slight feeling of unease at having to get used to something else.

I would say for personal stuff (ie, non-programming) it is. For programming, I continually have to switch back to google. DDG is way worse for me. Maybe it's just me, but the types of things I search for just don't work on DDG and I've wasted way too much of my time looking for answers using DDG, only to find them quickly with Google. It totally frustrates me, because I would much rather use DDG.

Critical operators like "site:" are not available in DDG.

The user pays for Google in the end, just not consensually. It's a closed loop. All the money ultimately comes from the users. Product or politics, all advertisers are expecting to get some return.

Unfortunately it's in human nature to not want to pay. Search needs to be a utility that we all fund to make it the best tool for society.

All the money comes from some of the users. Sure Google is collecting everyone's data, but in the end the vast majority of it is worthless. I'd be surprised if even 1% of users are profitable for the ecosystem. The tiny minority clicking on ads and buying products is subsidizing everyone else.

So I have to recoup that cost. I pass that cost onto all of my customers by mixing it into the cost of goods and services. If you buy things from me, even if you are not a subscriber to google/yahoo, you have in effect paid for those services. This is somewhat invisible to the people with those email addresses but does actually affect them, if only a little bit.

Google would tell you that you can simply start with a low volume and ramp up slowly. In reality this is simply not practical for most businesses. This gets into discussions around queue-per-domain management and rate-limit-per-domain, but quickly falls apart when you have to notify a large number of your customers on a time sensitive transaction that is out-of-band from their web browsing experience. A modern work around is to have a cell phone application for notifications rather than email assuming you let your own customers choose that over smtp in their profile. Another work around is to use an email campaign provider that already pays into the whitelists, but then I have to give your email address to a potentially shady company that may cross-sell / cross-market to you.

Android has proven much more difficult to drop, although I'm hopeful that Librem and PinePhone are paving the way for an eventual alternative. I'm still using Android for now, but I at least try to source my apps from F-Droid instead of the Google Play Store.

Maps and YouTube have been a little difficult. I'm trying to use OsmAnd on my phone, but I still find myself going to Google Maps somewhat frequently. I've replaced the YouTube app on my phone with NewPipe and I try to watch content on alternative platforms when possible, but there's a lot of stuff posted exclusively on YouTube.

Same. Paid Protonmail was quick and easy to get my domains working, and DDG works 90% of the time. I occasionally have to throw things to Bing or Google but DDG is pretty good.

For any readers I strongly recommend buying a domain name and then trucking it to whatever email provider you want. Jonny-C-Doe.com let's you keep the same front end name while changing the back end if, say, you don't like protonmail.

And with the blackhole that is Google support, what's the point in feeding the beast? We're all better off using Open Street Map and not rewarding Google for their poor behavior.

[1]: https://osmand.net/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OsmAnd/comments/l17r3l/any_updates_...

[3]: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/3391

For email: Most people have multiple emails - work, school, personal, from the early 2000s. It's not out of this world to switch to an encrypted email service.

Android: Never used it because I like iPhone. And, iPhone is a pretty great alternative to Android - definitely more private. But isn't there GrapheneOS and LineageOS?

FYI, Ads company brought up Startpage. Despite their public statement with privacy for Startpage, I don't trust them since they can 180 it without any repercussion.

"Marketing messages can claim almost anything, but a privacy policy has legal status." - Robert E.G. Beens, Startpage CEO and Co-founder

If you have questions, let me know.

If I can't ssh into their servers and have a look-see or run my own instance, then their claims are unverifiable.

And, it happens that System1 is interested in "capturing" that revenue from contextual advertising.

"System1 is interested in Startpage's ad revenue, not its data," the company said. "The reason a company like System1 openly owns other search engines and consumer tech products like Info.com and Mapquest is that they want to capture that ad revenue that is slowly shifting to private search engines. There has been a steady increase in people using private search engines and therefore a steady increase in their revenue. It is a growing market that they feel will continue to thrive and grow." (https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...)

That being said: At the end of the day, it all comes back to trust. Even with OSS, you have to trust that they won't change the code. And, you should use products that you trust to best protect your privacy.

Advertising on a search engine is main form of revenue > pays employees > updates > keeps current users and gets new users. You could make the argument for crowd sourcing, but it doesn't always work.

Email is generically really great in this regard. Very little lockin.

I hate filtering spam, but it's outright dangerous to not have an effective spam/malware filter for my parents and children.

Android: iPhone. I don't know if I trust Apple more than Google, but at least on the surface level our interests align better. Might try a Librem 5 or Google-less Android in the future.

Google search: DDG. Agreed with your points there, sometimes it's tempting to go back to Google.

Gmail: Hey.com commercial account, plus a custom domain and individual aliases for each service I give my email address to. That helps with portability somewhat, in the future at least.

Maps: Apple Maps has been pretty nice. Might give OpenStreetMap a try.

YouTube: Invidious.

Android Auto: Apple Car Play. I wish there were a better option that didn't depend on Apple.

Google Drive: OneDrive, but I'm looking for alternatives.