Progress so far

I’ve managed to close quite a few accounts, including some of the bigger ones like Google+ and YouTube. There were also a number of accounts that I had forgotten about and some I didn’t even know that I had, like Picasa.

Any others that somehow managed to survive the cut (Reader, Webmaster Tools, Profile and Gmail), have been stripped of any optional personal data. In most cases, all that remains is my name and gender.

Gmail

Yep, I’m still tied to Gmail, but it’s on its way out the door. I knew that this would be a slow and painful process because of all the data accrued over all the years of use, but I feel like I’ve made a pretty good dent so far.

In case you were wondering, here’s my process for (slowly) moving away from Gmail:

1. Is this a legitimate email? Do I know this person or did I sign up for this newsletter?
2. Am I still interested? Do I still keep in touch with this person or do I stil want to receive this newsletter?
3. Update my email, but only if I’ve answered yes to the first two questions.

Overall it’s a pretty short process and running through it a few times a week isn’t hard at all.

Pro-tip: This also a great way of getting rid of unwanted newsletters and notifications from social networks.

In the nick of time

Shortly after I published my article, Google announced its new privacy policy. My understanding is that a bunch of individual privacy policies will be going away and Google will be merging whatever personal data it can. So basically, any personal information you have in Google+ could essentialy end up in your YouTube account, or vice-versa.

And then just yesterday, The Guardian published an article on how Google was tracking Safari users, purposely bypassing Safari’s own privacy settings.

Of course, this wasn’t just limited to the desktop either, it affected iPhone users too. This is especially bad when you consider the following: the current iPhone market share, Safari being the default browser and Google being the default search engine.

Update – Feb 20, 2012 Microsoft published an article today on the MSDN IE Blog stating that Google is doing the same thing with Internet Explorer, but using an entirely different method to bypass the browser’s security settings. The article, posted by Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer says:

“We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.”

I’d be curious to see if this is also happening with Firefox and Opera. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the answer was yes.

Not everyone is bad

About a week ago I discovered the search engine DuckDuckGo and it’s been my default search engine since.

There’s a lot to love about DuckDuckGo: an adorable mascot, a simple-yet-beautiful UI and search suggestions that are actually helpful. But that’s not why I like it so much. On they’re homepage, DuckDuckGo clearly states that they don’t track or bubble (personalize) your search results.

Finally, a company that gets it.

So, mission accomplished?

Sort of. I still have a lot of work ahead of me with Gmail but I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made so far. It felt really good pressing that “Delete Account” button a bunch of times and in all honesty, I haven’t missed Google once since I started doing this.

Probably the best part of this is finding out that good, honest companies (like DuckDuckGo) are out there and that they’re on our side.