... Google. (Don't you hate clickbaits?)
Today I finally completely ended my relationship with Google. After 14 months of transition, no one in my contacts list has my gmail account and none of my online or offline subscriptions uses that account anymore. I still have to investigate if I can permanently close an account on Gmail. But I have no need to look at it anymore and I removed any reference to it from my browser and the IMAP folder on my email client.
This ends a 12 year gmail account, created when the service was still beta and invite-only. I got the invitation by a friend of mine, then a student and today a teacher, at an University in Toronto.
When I took the decision more than an year ago to cut any ties with Google, I stopped using all of their services and software, except for gmail that required a transition period. The two exceptions are the web search engine that I still use by proxy through DuckDuckGo and, of course, YouTube, which I use rarely, but which I never created an account anyways.
The motivation was really never about their services, which do include some that I consider of value; Search, GoogleDocs, Gmail, YouTube, to name the most obvious ones. The motivation was always about removing myself from their servers and either see my web persona deleted, or forever frozen without any activity. I understand that in today's tracking web that is mostly outside the control of the end user, even despite tools such as uBlock Origin and Private Browsing. But that doesn't mean that something can't be done to minimize or even hopefully end it.
The immediate result I got of all this was the realization that Google services and tools are in no way necessary or mandatory for the web experience. The company doesn't really add any value to the modern web anymore, except perhaps on YouTube, which still lacks a real competitor. Google has lost that ability to satisfy needs, which is the center point of a good service or product, and is today instead merely a company that tries to create new needs, much like many others before it and that subverts all that is good about free markets and economies of scale. And with the exception of YouTube as mentioned before, which in fact Google wasn't the inventor of, there is no single service by Google that hasn't an alternative that is better, safer or more private to use.
This Google process that ended today, also ended a wider scope change of my computing habits, of which Google was merely one item on the list. I made a full transition to Linux last year, with Windows (v. 7) being today merely a VM on my Arch Linux box (last access time being Friday, 19 February 2016). Made many changes to applications I used to use also, moved to Pale Moon as a browser more than an year ago (and recently added Vivaldi as a secondary), deleted any web mail accounts and moved entirely to pop servers and software mail clients, stopped any development in languages with corporate control such as C# or Java, and moved entirely to community-driven languages (Python and C++), etc etc etc. Never used the so-called social web. So I never created accounts on services like facebook or tweeter, so that's not something I had to deal with.
With all this, I may not be it and maybe I'm misguided, but I feel a much freer man, one that just doesn't agree to the modern web and is profoundly critic of modern web economics, but still needs to use it and as such tries to do it on its own terms.
No matter what, I just know that I am today more invisible to the web than I was 24 months ago. That's a fact. And that alone is a victory already.
(Note: Tor is not an option and never was)