I’ve finally come to the conclusion that Google, try as it might to ‘do no evil’, has been progressively falling into the monopolist’s trap of doing whatever the hell it feels like doing. It’s latest arbitrary change of terms and conditions, in which it reserves to itself the right to “combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services”, is the last straw for me.

It means, essentially, that every Google service will track you and keep a history of what what you’re typing whenever you use one of them, sharing the information (for Google’s monetary reward) with all the others. If you’re logged into Gmail, every search on google.com you perform in a different browser tab will be attributed back to your Gmail account. If you just want to upload some photos to Picasa, tough: that has to be associated with your Google+ account… and so on.

Already, Google have built up a pretty accurate picture of me:

The new terms and conditions can only mean more information will be fed into producing this sort of thing, whether I really like it or not. (Check your own profile out by logging into, say, Gmail and then visiting this site).

Well, I’ve had enough of this. I “repatriated” my email server to my own domain’s server a few weeks ago: where before everything went via Gmail’s servers, lately I’ve only used Gmail to read the contents of my own pop3 servers. Its spam filters are excellent, so there was method in that particular bit of round-about madness. But no more even of this minimal Gmail involvement: as of yesterday, I now read my emails in Evolution directly, relying on my email server’s Spam Assassin and the Evolution client-side junk filter.

The Google Chrome web browser is also being de-installed from all my PCs. In its place, Opera. That used to be a bit of a risky choice, back in the day. But nearly all websites are HTML-5 compliant these days -or getting there- and so they generally work pretty much identically across all browsers. I don’t get all the extensions that you can plug into Firefox, it’s true. But I do get adblock and script blockers if I want them, which suits me. As a bonus, I get Opera’s simple way of synchronising bookmarks between different PCs (I have never quite understood why Firefox’s should be so complicated!)

What about the biggie? Search, that is. Well, I’ve switched to using the rather ridiculously-named DuckDuckGo. It’s an incredibly clean interface (Google used to have one of them, if you remember, before it got greedy) and the search results seem fine for me. What about the convenience of just typing in a search term in the browser’s search panel or even in its main address bar? Easy: Opera comes with a DuckDuckGo selector for the search panel. Just click Opera > Settings > Preferences > Search then double-click the entry for DuckDuckGo, click the [Details] button and switch on the options to make DuckDuckGo your default search and Speed Dial engine.

(If you had decided to use Firefox as your main browser instead, just add yourself a DuckDuckGo Search Extension. That gets the Firefox search panel going to ddg by default, but to get the address bar doing the same thing, you need to open a new tab, type about:config, agree that you’ll be careful, find the keyword.url setting and alter it to read http://duckduckgo.com/?q= …problem solved.)

What else? Ah yes… Picasa. That’s tricky. Flickr is the obvious free photo-hosting replacement here, but it’s part of the Yahoo! empire -and I regard them as not much different from Google in their desire to insert their tentacles everywhere. They’re just not quite as good as Google at doing it! So, I’d prefer to give Flickr the flick. There’s always photoshop.com, of course: you’d expect Adobe to know how to handle photography! It does mean having to use Flash in your browser, though, which I’d prefer not to have to do. And so this one is tricky: I honestly don’t have a definitive answer to it as yet. Maybe I’ll have to repatriate this to my own servers, too, in the end (Gallery works quite well, for example).

Of course, my Google+ account will be going the way of the dodo in the near future. I have a Facebook account, but they’re actually much worse than Google, so I don’t exactly use it very often! Maybe I’ll just have to be antisocial for a while.

I know of no good alternatives for Google Maps or Street View (not ones that don’t involve using Microsoft’s efforts, anyway). But at least doing everything else I’ve mentioned in this post, my use of these tools won’t be attributable to me as an individual.

Paranoia, I hear you say? Yeah, probably. But you take your stand on these things as you see them. I disliked Microsoft ruling the roost a few years ago; I now run a mostly Windows-free home. Now I am nervous about Google’s ambitions and its proposed privacy infringements to achieve them; in response, I simply choose to switch off as much Google infrastructure in my life as possible. Not something everyone will do, I realise. But maybe everyone can at least think about the issues!