De-googling My Life

After a private conversation turned into ads, I set out de-googling my life—email, cloud, phone, and browser—without going off-grid.

For years, my husband and I lived comfortably inside Google’s ecosystem, until a moment forced us to confront digital privacy awareness head-on. What followed was a deliberate process of de-googling my life and reclaiming online privacy in a world shaped by surveillance capitalism. This post documents how I moved toward private data ownership using self hosted services, secure email privacy, and encrypted email providers, replaced Google tools with self hosted cloud storage, and adopted a privacy focused web browser and degoogled Android phone. It’s also about reality—balancing privacy and practicality in a modern web dependency on Google that still shapes website search visibility and Google SEO indexing tools.

They really were spying on me, I swear!

During lockdown, we were having an intense, emotional conversation with our best friends on Zoom about their cat, who had just died and been cremated. This was not a search. Not a text. Not an email. A spoken conversation with our friends.

About ten minutes later, I started getting ads for cremation services.

I was horrified. This felt invasive. They were literally listening to me inside my own house and using my friends’ grief to target me to buy things.

This experience made one thing abundantly clear: if I wanted privacy, I was going to have to actively take it back. So, I decided to remove Google from as many parts of my life as feasible—email, calendar, contacts, documents, browsing, and even my phone OS.

Email: de-googling my life with Proton

The first thing to go was Gmail. I moved my email to Proton, which offers end-to-end encryption and a business model that doesn’t depend on surveillance — you actually pay them. Money. What a concept!

Moving email providers also provided me an opportunity to finally put my custom domain to good use — why use “@gmail.com” when I can use “@williamsoutherland.com.” It’s actually pretty easy to do this, but doing it correctly means touching DNS which scares a lot of people unnecessarily. Here’s the basic shape of what I had to do.

• Create a Proton Mail account and add your custom domain.

• Verify domain ownership via a TXT record.

• Add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for deliverability.

Example DNS records (values will differ depending on your setup):

MX   @   10 mail.protonmail.ch
MX   @   20 mailsec.protonmail.ch

TXT  @   "v=spf1 include:_spf.protonmail.ch ~all"

TXT  protonmail._domainkey   "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIIBIjANBgkq..."

TXT  _dmarc   "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com"

Once DNS propagated, email just worked. Proton confirmed this instantly. Even better, Proton’s migration service inported all of my previous mail from my Gmail account. And importantly, it worked without ads, behavioral profiling, or creepy coincidences.

Nextcloud as Google Drive

Email was only the start. Next, I started de-googling my life in cloud spaces —documents, files, calendar, and contacts. For these,

• Cloud storage via web UI and WebDAV

• Calendar via CalDAV

• Contacts via CardDAV

• Easy sharing of files and documents, internally and via public links

One unexpected benefit: interoperability actually improved. My husband’s new iPhone supports CalDAV and CardDAV natively, so his calendar and contacts sync directly—no Google account required. Even better, our Home Assistant instance can pull CalDAV data straight from Nextcloud to populate our wall-mounted tablets with shared calendar information.

de-googling my Browser and Search

Next up was browsing. I had long ago switched search to DuckDuckGo. Now, I doubled down and moved away from stock Chrome to a de-Googled Chromium build, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. One great tip about data privacy I picked up along the way — decentralize. Don’t put all your data in one place, then its less easy to triangulate behavior.

Phone: LineageOS (With One Uncomfortable Compromise)

The most complicated step was the phone. I replaced the stock Android OS with LineageOS, which requires unlocking the bootloader and some adb/fastboot commands. Thankfully I didn’t brick my phone, and ultimately his succeeded in stripping out most of Google’s background services and gave me far more control over what talks to the network and when.

What I Still Can’t Replace (Yet)

There’s one place where I can’t yet de-google my life remains unavoidable: search dominance. If you run websites—especially professional or business sites—Google SEO is still the only game in town. My sites have to be searchable. My content has to be indexed. I still have to appease Google’s crawlers, metrics, and webmaster tools so people can actually find my work.

I don’t like it. But I accept it as a pragmatic boundary rather than total surrender.

De-Googling my life isn’t about disappearing from the internet or achieving some mythical technological purity. It’s about drawing lines—deciding what conveniences are worth the cost, and where they absolutely are not.

For me, the line was crossed the moment a private conversation turned into targeted ads. Everything that followed was just implementation.

This story originally appeared on https://www.williamsoutherland.com/tech/de-googling-my-life/