Recently it has become apparent that Google, Facebook and other mega-media providers are not only data mining our lives but they are using that data to influence our lives, politics, etc. For me this is a situation that is unacceptable. What can we do? Well today I took a few steps to wean myself from the clutches of Google specifically.
This article will be a work in progress and I’ll update it as I make my life changes.
- I went onto eBay and bought myself a BlackBerry Q10 (Verizon Model). It may not be the fastest or have all of the bells and whistles that my Galaxy Note 8 has, but it won’t be running Android and it will be secure.
- I downloaded Firefox browser. Firefox (Mozilla) is a browser I used to use, but then Google sucked me into the abyss that is Android. Surprisingly enough, Firefox is awesome and it has some really nice, out of the box security features. For instance by clicking on the menu button (top right) I was able to set my browser to stop tracking. They even have a Private Browser feature that completely eliminates any sort of data collection from sites you visit. The other thing that I did with my Firefox was change my search engine from Google to BING (Because it’s not Google).
*** Firefox and BING update *** Well that didn’t go very well. Firefox won’t properly display several sites I go to and BING is horrible at search results. Very sad day.
Again I’ll continue to update this article as I make changes.