Welcome back to the next part in the series I’m calling “Encrypted Pigeons“. Why? Because it’s a frankly terrible name and I’m sticking with it.

At the end of the last issue, I was talking about my overall experiences with privacy, and how that has changed quite a bit. Roughly six months ago, I had no real understanding of digital privacy, and I was perfectly happy to keep going as I was. My main computer was Windows 11; I messaged everyone on WhatsApp, and practically everything I did backed up onto Google drive in some way or another. Google Photos, Google calendar, Google everywhere.

I was happy with that, because it all worked together quite well. I only had a vague sense that maybe my digital life wasn’t quite in my control.

In the last post, I talked about how Google’s lockdown of Android caused me to become sceptical of their processes and capabilities within the wider tech world. That really bugged me, but the final straw was even more of a direct attack, not just on privacy but on sovereignty as well. I’d like to say there was some grand realisation where I discovered just how much I was giving to big tech companies. Nope. Instead, I heard about a year prior, in February 2025, when Microsoft had disabled the official email of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, in order to avoid annoying Donald Trump, who had imposed sanctions on him. That got me thinking: I don’t want an 80-year old orange able to control my internet. So I started looking to stop my reliance on US Big Tech, and Google was the first to go. 🤣

It’s surprising the quantity of Google products that act as basic infrastructure. My first go-through on my phone stripped out Google apps from there. Messages, Calendar, Contacts, Maps, Chrome, Google Search, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Photos, Drive. It was quite hard to get rid of them too, as Android really didn’t want those apps to not be there. I had to download an app called Shizuku, which essentially gave me administrator access to my phone, allowing me to forcibly delete those apps.

After that, I then went deeper, and stripped out the data from the services themselves. I exported my contacts, my documents, calendar events, etc. all onto my phone, and then deleted the data from those services.

After about a week, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Then I tried to edit some contacts, add a calendar event, or backup a document, and I realised that I’d just deleted the ability to do all of that. I was left with all my data, but nothing to do with it.

That’s the one caveat I would say that might put some people off de-Googling — you need to have an alternative prepared. I didn’t, but rather than regress back to Google, I decided I have a go at actually controlling my data rather than handing it over to someone else.

So I turned to Europe, in hopes of a better future for my data.