I use Google Wallet.

That’s a bit of an issue for me, because I’d quite like to stop using Google’s products.

One year ago, even six months ago, that was not an issue though. I was happily living my life, safe in the knowledge that everything I did online was safely secured in someone else’s servers… that I paid an additional plan to benefit from… that didn’t really let me leave that ecosystem without putting up a fight…

A while ago, Big Tech was everywhere in my life, and that was fine. But then I heard a news story that Google was “locking down the Android app ecosystem.” I didn’t know what it meant, so I read the article. Turns out Google is restricting every Android app to be registered with Google before publishing, meaning paying a fee to Google, handing over banking details and personal information to Google. As someone interested in programming, I had often considered the possibility of making an app, but this seemed to suggest an option I had considered previously free, would now cost a lot more. (As a side-note: I now know that previously it wasn’t free to publish anyway, but I didn’t know that at the time, which was the driving factor).

This made me wonder just how Google or Microsoft or Meta have managed to insert themselves into the very infrastructure of the digital world, to the point where the things we as people can and cannot do is dependent on them.

So I did a bit more research.

I found Google’s data collection systems from every service it provides, the enormous quantity of behavioural and contextual information generated by Google’s ecosystem and the power that gives the company. The way Google, Meta, and Microsoft build advertising profiles of you as you browse Instagram from Chrome, whilst signed into your Outlook, before then allowing advertisers to use that info.

Then I found the way Google gatekeeps features I feel the entire internet should have access to, under the pretence of “security”. I read about the promotion of Google services on Google Search before anyone else’s. I looked at the way Google Play Services is baked into Android with data collection at its core. All of that is a violation of basic digital rights, in my opinion.

And how do they get away with this? They put a little banner at the bottom of the screen saying “Cookies”, give you a large, friendly button that makes accepting everything considerably easier than understanding what you’re accepting, and call that consent.

So I don’t hate Google because it is a large American technology company. I don’t even think Google is uniquely evil. I left because I decided I didn’t want one company to be simultaneously my operating-system provider, search engine, email provider, browser vendor, identity provider, map provider, photo library, payment platform and advertising intermediary — particularly when I could separate those roles between companies I trusted more, or run some of them myself.

The privacy benefit was almost a side effect. The real benefit was getting my digital life back into separate pieces. Yes, I may have had to do more work to reconnect them, but it’s work that I understand, that I control, and that I have the ability to turn off. I didn’t have to go and live in the woods without technology and communicate solely through encrypted pigeons after all! 🤣

But yet Google Wallet is still there, taunting me from my phone’s app drawer. And to explain why, I’ll have to tell you what changed between six months ago and today.