Why I am leaving Gmail
I have been a Gmail (gMail?) evangelist since I started using it a few years ago. I've undoubtedly converted more people I know to gmail than to Jesus. As an email client, gmail completely and totally rocks and is worth using at every level. As a company, though, Google scares me. Yeah, I'm behind the times there. Google has been scaring people for a few years now.
I'm not saying this is something rational, but I'm definitely playing it safe here. I think that the more times we compromise for the sake of convenience the closer we are to just handing over our lives to someone else. Hey, I'm all about driving a car and not walking, or for big trips, flying instead of walking. That's convenience. And at this point Google doesn't own any airlines. Yet.
I'll say as a caveat I don't by principle do illegal things. Not just because I could get in trouble but I'm not really interested in doing most of the illegal things, even the fun ones. But, I do like my privacy and if I decide I want it in, say, 2025, I better start fighting for it now. If I wait until I've already handed it over to the Bad Guys, I'm not getting it back.
But my fear is as follows. Google knows:
- What I search for (according to this: google never deletes any record of any of the 100+million searches done per day)
- What videos I watch
- What private documents I've created, and what their contents are
- What emails I get (and which ones I read, and which ones go into my trash and which ones are saved)
- What blogs I read (via Google Reader)
- What bookmarks I have (via Google Bookmarks)
- What addresses I look up (... maps)
- What picures I take (picasa)
- And there is more.
And, I noticed that while I was using gmail on my phone, google "nicely" intercepts any time I click a link in an email and go to that web site. They kindly take that site, pretty it up for my phone, and send it to me. I don't doubt the sites look better on my phone because google does this. But, I also don't doubt they are saving every little thing about what I did there. I can do without that, even if the site is just espn.com.
So, I'm spreading the love, moving my blogs, my reader, my bookmarks, using a different webmail and searching for stuff anonymously (well, as anonymously as I can, at least I won't be handing the info to them via being logged in at youtube or gmail; I do understand about how much we're tracked online). You can forget about Chrome. I'll go back to Lynx first.
Google's original slogan was "Don't be Evil." I'm not saying they are; they have all the signs of just being a really well run company that innovates well and stays ahead of everyone else. Probably a lot of better Christians than I, those that actually evangelize for Him and not just gmail, work there, too. My problem really isn't google per se, (I like google, too) it's more about having my complete online profile in one place, so easy to put together a Big Picture of who I am. Shouldn't it be a little more difficult than that? Shouldn't companies have to at least buy that from other companies? With a little diversification, at the expense of a little convenience, I should be able to keep at least a semblence of privacy in this less and less private world.
