I’m thinking of deleting my Google account. I’ve downloaded all my Gmail data. I know I have some services that use my old Gmail address. I need to think about how this might affect my interconnected system of Internet services that have dependencies on my Google account. Changing my email on services still using my Gmail is mostly trivial. I just have to remember/find out what all those services are. I can peruse through my Gmail archive that is mostly spam or unwanted email and see if there are any critical services I’d have to change my email address for. I figure going back about six months through my Gmail archive would suffice. Any entity that doesn’t contact me during a six month period likely doesn’t have any important tendrils attached, and I probably don’t want anything to do with them, either.

I would also lose access to my YouTube account, which is fine, because I don’t mind using it without logging in. If need be, I can use Invidious during times when the Invidious devs have the upper hand in the arms race. I can also use it with youtube-dl + VLC or something.

I’ve been able to download my ebooks from Google Play Books and put them in a Calibre library. If I want new ebooks in the future, I’d like to find a non-big-tech service to download them from via the Calibre interface. However, since I have and frequently use an Amazon account, I suppose Amazon will become my new ebook supplier for the time being. I also don’t know if any non-big-tech ebook services I might find would have the ebooks that I want available in their catalog.

I’m also trying to have just one email address. I currently have four, besides the Gmail one, that are in use by various services. Three of them are all part of my Proton Mail account, so they all go to the same inbox.

• verandis@protonmail.com: permanent, main Proton Mail account.
• hyperreal64@pm.me: part of my Proton Mail account, but I’ve been trying to phase it out.
• hyperreal@moonshadow.dev: permanent, in use as a custom domain for my Proton Mail account. I’m trying to make this my main one.
• hyperreal@fedoraproject.org: an alias from the Fedora Project that is provided to Fedora contributors. It forwards to my Proton Mail account. It was mostly just for bling to represent my involvement with the Fedora Project. I still consider myself very much part of the Fedora community, but my personality/neurodivergence/what-not is such that I can’t make a monogamous for-life commitment to any one distro. I feel more comfortable making a for-life commitment to the broader free and open source movement.

I now use GrapheneOS on my Google Pixel 6, so in some sense there are still some minor Googly tendrils stuck in me. The Google Pixel 6 is getting old, but it still works tolerably well. Perhaps soon I will get a PinePhone or some other non-big-tech device to run GrapheneOS or PostmarketOS. It’s a matter of whether my cellular carrier supports it.

I’m sure there are some other things I’m missing here in my personal tech ecosystem bubble that depend on me having a Google account.