Breakup planning: saying goodbye to Google and Meta

I have a goal. It’s small, and personal, and life admin-y, but it’s one hell of a long-tailed beast. I want to quit Meta and Google.

These two companies are so profoundly, demonstrably evil, and I am well-resourced enough now, that I feel it’s time for me to walk away. And I hope to walk together, with as many of you as can afford it.

Dumping Meta

Meta is by far the easier of the two. Meta owns a bunch of social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reels, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger; as well as a couple of virtual reality platforms: Occulus VR and Reality Labs.

I was never an Insta user, so for me, this simply means:

• Deleting Facebook.

• Switching from Messenger and WhatsApp to a different social messaging platform (I’ve chosen Signal).

I’m almost there. The hardest part is that social media only works if everyone you talk to comes with you, so the main thing was to make it as easy as possible for those not on Signal yet to join it, or to negotiate other ways of connecting with them.

So the main groups of people I connect with on WhatsApp and Messenger are now either with me on Signal, or down to communicate in other ways, like text and email.

Once I’ve worked this out with all of the people who matter to me, I’ll delete the remaining accounts.

Dumping Google

This one, as you can imagine, is nothing like so clean a break. I’m still not sure it’s possible for me yet. Google’s apps are everywhere, and in everything. Aside from Google Search, there’s Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, the Chrome browser, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Wallet… and all the rest.

There are some hefty barriers in the way of this breakup:

• Maps and YouTube are both platforms I gravitate towards daily, and neither one is easily substituted.

• I have a Gmail account, which of course comes pegged to Calendar, Drive and several other apps; and there are decades and gigabytes of data coiled up inside it.

• I’m also an Android phone user, so Google apps are default in my phone as well. That will take some unpicking.

• And, of course, many employers use Google apps as part of their enterprise ecosystem.

What I’ve done so far is switch:

• From Chrome to Firefox as my default browser.

• From Gmail to Proton Mail as my personal email platform.

Both of these come equipped with various tips and integrations for converting smoothly, like importing bookmarks and setting up forwarding. Proton Mail includes a calendar and a couple gigs of file storage. A lot of websites aren’t tested with Firefox in mind, so you do see buggy code sometimes. Firefox does have a concerning financial dependence on Google, which is… relatable.

There’s also an unsurprisingly complicated process involved in getting my data out of the Google systems. This Gizmodo article talks you through some of the steps to do this cleanly.

It’s not much. There’s still a long way to go. I haven’t switched search engines yet, and I need to figure out the limits of doing this, given that so many Google Search things are finely threaded through so many other things in ways that are not always easy to recognise.

I may also be unable to quit Google for professional use. At the moment, one of my university employers uses Gmail for staff email accounts. I can probably get it forwarded through another service, but it’ll still be powered by Google, and I don’t want to abandon work I’m passionate about.

Will you join me?

Breaking up with tech doesn’t have to be complicated.

Want to dump Google, Meta, or (good luck) Microsoft? Here’s a simple flowchart with five yes/no questions to help you decide what you can do about it.

Obviously, individual actions are easiest, but the power of these platforms is in their ability to control communities, organisations and societies collectively. So walking away is rarely an act we can undertake alone.

So where can we start?

Talk to your friends and family.

Who are the most important people in your life, the ones you can’t afford to lose in this breakup? For me, there was a genuine fear that they would choose the platform over me.

They didn’t.

In the first three days of transferring my social messaging to Signal, I was joined by my wife, brother, sister-in-law, my (divorced) parents, a dozen good friends and a professional community of practice that had previously been on WhatsApp.

You matter more to them than the platform.

And if you don’t, either there is something more sinister at play, or they are less important to your community than you perhaps thought they were.

Rally your professional community.

As I mentioned, one of the first cohorts to move across to Signal was a community of practice. This was made up mostly of people I have never met in person, all of whom lead educational practice across Australia. They didn’t move just for me, and the idea had already been percolating. Yes, that was a stroke of luck for me. But it does also serve as a reminder:

Other people want to get off this ride too.

Start by asking. If they’re not already aware of the problems, share what information you can. The tricky part (believe me, I know I’m very bad at this) is not making people feel you’re shaming them for their current platform choices.

This is hard for all of us, and it starts with acknowledging that. Both Meta and Google have been engaged in antitrust practices (buying up and monopolising their markets, so that there are no alternatives) for years.

Quality alternatives are starting to rise. I’ve not done a lot of exploring yet, but as I mentioned, I’ve switched to Signal (for social messaging), Firefox (for web browsing) and Proton Mail (for personal email).

Share what works.

Readers, what other alternatives do you recommend for unseating Google and Meta platforms?