Today I want to talk about something I’ve seen happening a lot in the privacy bubble, people saying “oh yeah I only send messages using PGP over whatsapp, therefore I don’t care if they collect my data or not” and similar, I just cannot get behind this mindset, using Google services is like having a really hot psycho-bitch as your girlfriend. You get to have amazing sex every once in a while, but 99% of the time you spent with her, you’re just being abused.

If you don’t like what a company is doing to you, or at least trying to do, then DON’T USE IT. If nobody’s gonna stop using it, then nothing is going to change, even if you as an individual think that it wouldn’t change the world if you stop doing it, you’re going to be an example to others, showing them “Hey, I don’t use Google services and I still get my job done”. And if nobody is ever going to start to show some resistance, it’s never going to stop.

The advantages that most of these services present to you, are solutions to problems that don’t exist. You don’t need to be online to have a healthy social life, you don’t need to watch YouTube videos at all, at least not on youtube.{com,fr,en,etc}. You don’t need to be on WhatsApp or Facebook to stay in contact with your family, just remember to call them every once in a while, and if you wouldn’t stay in contact with them if they weren’t on Facebook/WhatsApp, you should either probably change something about that behavior or otherwise accept that you’re just not really interested in interacting with them.

This was a rather short blog post, but as always, if you made it to the end, thank you, and have a nice day :)