It seems that I’m the most effective (my geeky things) when I‘m procrastinating (my studies).
Apart from flooding helping out a bit with plans on FreedomBox 1, catching up on some FOSDEM videos 2,
talking about porting Neo to Slovenian, starting to form team Charming etc., I decided to continue my “holy war” on removing accounts of services I don’t need and/or don’t agree with their ToS and/or PP.
So my today’s victim was my Google account (including Orkut, which I thought I’ve removed already years ago).
Here’s some general reasons:
- I never really used GMail → my inbox is hosted by someone I trust and in a secure physical place;
- I find Google Groups amongst the worst mailing list solutions out there (and to be honest, that’s what they are);
- I stopped using Orkut almost a decade ago.
- I usually go months without visiting YouTube and in all its years of existence I barely ever felt the need to
feed the trollsparticipate in the discussions below the videos; - I use a XMPP server I trust more;
- I know there are also other Google services you need an account for, but I don’t use any.
The above, for me, is reason enough to stop using it, but if you add to that profiling, some privacy hiccups Google regularly has and (again) the issue that US embargo applies to its services, you’ve got more than enough.
hook out → just finished one exam today, on to two more
P.S. This post was (blind)typed entirely using the Neo ergonomic keyboard layout. Hence the proper punctuation, since Neo also comes with many more (special)characters then your average keyboard. ⇒ Hook ♥ ℕεο ☺
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BTW FreedomBox Foundation has just formed and is accepting donations to help it start. ↩
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e.g. about Seeks, PageKite, SmartCard security, Moglen’s keynote … ↩