Breaking up with Google

Why am I doing this?

It’s hard to explain without sounding like a paranoid fool, but basically, Google has access to a lot of my personal data (which I’ve provided them with) and I don’t agree with what they’re doing with that data.

My main concern is with Gmail, which I’ve used as my primary email service since it was in private beta. It’s been ad-supported for as long as I can remember and I’m completely fine with that. Advertising is a necessary evil and it’s how Google makes most of its revenue. In fact, Google made 96% of their revenue from advertising in 2010.

The fact that someone wrote an algorithm to scrape my personal emails for keywords just rubs me the wrong way. What makes this whole situation even worse is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his thoughts on privacy and data.

Here are a few quotes from Eric Schmidt in an interview with The Atlantic’s James Bennet.

“We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less now what you’re thinking about.”

“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”

He may not be the current CEO, but he’s still the Executive Chairman.

We’re doing it for you

In this video about Ad Preferences, Google basically says that they provide personalized ads to benefit the user and that you can also opt-out of said ads at any time.

First of all, I can’t think of anyone I know that would willingly click on any ad (especially some of those shady Google Adwords ones), so I find it hard to believe they’re doing it to benefit the user. I think it’s also safe to say that most people hate ads no matter the medium or relevancy.

And secondly, I opted out of these ads long ago, yet I still get ads that are based on private content from emails. This could very well be a bug, but if it is, they’re in no hurry to fix it.

Getting the hell out of Dodge

I have to congratulate Google for their efforts with The Data Liberation Front. It’s sole purpose is to provide users with a hassle-free way to export all their data and move it elsewhere on the web (even if it’s a competitor). Not all apps are supported yet, but a lot of the major ones are.

Below is a list of all the Google products I use and what I’ve decided to do with them.

Email

iCloud will be used as my primary email service because there are absolutely no ads. Also, the user interface is similar to Mail.app on both Lion and iOS.

Calendar

This will also be replaced by iCloud. I’m really not a fan of the “real-life” calendar interface here, but it’s a small price to pay to have email and calendar together.

Search

This one is kind of a lateral move because it still has targeted ads, but I’ve been using Bing as my default search engine for about a week now. The desktop version is nothing special, but the mobile version has a Metro-inspired layout which I absolutely love.

Social

I was lucky enough to get in on the Google+ beta. I actually like it and find it much easier to use than Facebook. The only problem right now is that it hasn’t been widely adopted by the general public. I still haven’t decided on what I’m going to do with this account. (I’d actually like to get rid of my Facebook account too because of targeted ads, but that’ll be another day.)

Others

I have a YouTube account which I use pretty much for subscriptions only. I also have a Reader account which I use only because Reeder requires it. I’ll be keeping both of these accounts for now but I’ll be paring back whatever personal information I can.

Google isn’t evil

By no means is this meant to be an anti-Google post, so I truly hope it doesn’t come across that way. I don’t believe that they’re “evil” or anything like that. Eric Schmidt, however, does creep me out quite a bit. Sorry, Eric.

Google has very talented people working on some awesome products and they seem to finally understand that software design doesn’t have to be boring. The recent design refresh we’ve seen across its suite of products is a very welcomed change.

Google relies on advertising to stay in business, but in my opinion, they’ve crossed a line by using personal data for advertising and then saying it’s to benefit the user. A person’s private data and trust are not things to be taken lightly.

Hopefully this post will make you question what personal data you’ve provided companies with and what they’re doing with it.

Hitting the ground running

A little history lesson

The previous version of this website first appeared around the beginning of 2007, right after I graduated from college. The whole purpose of the website was to showcase my graphic design work, try to land a few freelancing gigs and blog about graphic and web design.

The website achieved all of those things, but it was quite obvious that the blog was an afterthought. I probably wrote about a dozen articles or so, none of which were spectacular or really said anything unique. The problem, was that I had originally decided to start blogging because a lot of other web designers were at the time. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t contributing anything useful to the web and was just creating noise where it wasn’t needed.

I ended up taking the site down in early 2009 when I was hired by Barking Dog Studios as a front-end designer. The blog had been neglected for quite a while and the rest of the site wouldn’t be needed anymore, so I replaced it with a “coming soon” page (which was actually still online up until a few weeks ago).

Starting over

When I first started redesigning, I was too caught up with what the rest of the web was doing. I was adding features I didn’t need, trying to go after a certain “look” and using shiny new technologies just because they were available. I went through a number of designs and even got to the coding stage a few times before completely scrapping them.

It took me a while to realize that all of that stuff didn’t matter to me. I wanted my website to be a place where I could write about the things I love and share things that interest me with like-minded people.

Once I knew what the purpose of the website would be, it wasn’t so hard coming up with an appropriate design for it. It’s far from perfect but I’m quite happy with the result so far.

So, what now?

First things first – no promises. I’m not going to tell you that I’ll write a certain number of entries per month or anything like that. I’ll write when I have something to say. It could be an idea, a review, a suggestion or even a frustration (hopefully not too often). I imagine that most of it will be web or technology-related, but don’t hold me to it.

Also, this website is very much a work in progress. I wanted to launch it as soon as possible so that I could start writing, but that also meant I had to leave some things behind (for now at least). This included a fluid grid layout and also support for media queries so that the site will be more usable. Hopefully those features will be added back in the near future.

Also, this site will never have comments, but if you ever have questions or thoughts you can reach me on Twitter @matthalliday.

Thanks for reading.