Dear Diary,

We are officially separated. It’s been a week since I kicked chrome and google search out of my house. I’m beginning to feel liberated. There have been some small differences to get used to when using Firefox and duckduckgo. However, it’s nice not having things I’ve searched for chase me all over the internet. Gaining this freedom has not been easy, and I have lots of work left to do.

I’ve spent this week breaking up with Gmail, by doing unsubscribes and updates to Protonmail. However, I’m still heavily reliant on my google account to host my contacts and calendar, and of course there’s the purple elephant in the room - google photos. I use these services primarily on android, which is the next thing I need to quit.

I know it sounds drastic to quit android, after all it is an open source platform. But I’m not really quitting android, I’m quitting Google’s perverted version of it that fills my device with invasive features and distraction inducing app notifications. Look at this screen shot of google keeping tabs on me.

I don’t have any choice if I don’t want my every moved tracked. LineageOS is another flavor of android that can be installed without all the google bullshit. After an embarrassing amount of research, I purchased a OneTouch 5T to install it on. A quick search on duckduckgo supplied me with step by step instructions on how to install it. It was actually quite easy and took about 30 min. Which leads me to the pink elephant in the room (yes there are two elephants in this room), how can I keep everything synced on this new phone?

Remember Diary, the little black book of phone numbers I had back in High School? If, after mustering the courage to ask a girl for her phone number, she obliged - I would have to fumble to get a pen out, pull my little black book from my bookbag and write the name and number down. Then, I would have to pray that I could actually READ my handwriting should I ever get the courage to dial it. There was no “text me your vCard” at that age. I can also remember having to type those names and numbers, one by one, into any new devices I would get. Nowadays losing a number isn’t really a thing, and if I did lose a number, a quick email blast would help me get it back. But I’d rather not lose them, and I don’t want Google to be the single source of my contacts. Really, it’s those kinds of first world problems that Google solved and made it so easy for them to completely invade my life.

Thanks to the open source community there’s NextCloud, an easy to use file hosting service. This is how I will sync my calendar, contacts and photos. I know what you’re thinking - that sounds expensive. Google loves to tout their ‘free’ services. But why would a company, that is seeking to make a profit, sync and store people’s photos, emails, calendars, texts, music likes, video preferences for free? I now understand that it’s not ‘free’, you make payments with the meta data on your life. So how much is Nextcloud?

You know I love my AWS solutions, and I could easily set up NextCloud on an AWS EC2 instance. But that would get expensive quick. So, I need something cheaper than EC2, reliable, secure and easy to own and manage. Enter the Raspberry pi. For $40 and a bit of tinkering, I was able to set up one of these on my home network. I followed this guide to get set up. The guide probably needs refreshing, but it was enough to get up and running. The hardest part was getting a domain, SSL certificate and all the configurations set up properly.

The best part is, I can use AWS S3 for storage, so I don’t need to manage the disk space on my pi. I know what you are thinking diary, how do you know it’s secure? I guess you could argue that something as important as security would be a barrier to entry for anyone looking to do this themselves. I would argue it’s hard to do worse than these public companies offering websites and apps. Heard about any data breaches lately? I think I’m up to 8 years of free credit monitoring at this point.

Maybe I’ll write a blog about all I’ve learned about encryption and security. But for now, I am going to move my contacts and calendar to my Nextcloud, I’m going get started on moving my photos, and I’m going to start using my new phone without any google integrations.

Just another step out of this toxic relationship.