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After writing my recent post about an editorial on the Google I|O conference, it was suggested I write about what ultimately led me away from Google entirely. I originally wrote this article on February 7th, 2012 on my personal blog and am going to edit pieces of this only to reflect time that has gone by.

Why I Deleted Google From My Life

I used to be a Google supporter. I’ve owned Android phones and Android tablets. My business website was hosted through a provider who used Google for their @email addresses. I didn’t even care that they provided ads based on scanning the content of my personal/business email. But slowly my tolerance began fading. My transition to Windows Phone was strange at first because the platform is completely different, but truly enjoyable. Android was no longer consuming my life with crashing apps, malware, bad battery life and I was tired of constantly flashing new ROMs.

Around the September 2011 timeframe, I began slowly training myself to use Bing searches instead of Google. I also forwarded all of my personal Gmail to my Windows Live address. I thought about actually deleting the Google account entirely at that point but decided it just wasn’t worth taking the time to go through everything. My stance, however, soon changed. It was the day Android Central reported that Google had been collecting not only business WiFi SSID’s from Android Devices that had localization settings turned on, but personal SSID’s as well. That the only way to have your SSID removed from this database was to change your broadcasted ID to include “_nomap”. A BIT in my head flipped that day. It was the BIT that didn’t care about all the data I already knew Google was collecting. That BIT went from ’1′ to ’0′ very quickly. I immediately took that stance and said Google doesn’t own my router. They didn’t pay for it. I, as the owner of the router, did not grant them the right to track the SSID. While my Android devices had been connected and I as the owner of such device granted Google access to MY location, I didn’t want them having MY SSID, or any of my friends’ for that matter, information or location.

That very day I took my HTC Flier and turned off all location services off and began formatting the device. I had already been on Windows Phone for 5 to 6 months so didn’t have to worry about repeating this process with a phone. I eventually shut that tablet down for good and sold it. I also took my Weebly account, which I purchased a domain through and whom utilized Google for Analytics and email for my business, and moved to a new host and registrar.

I haven’t used Google.com to search for anything for 10 months now.

The thing is it took a lot of time before I could actually delete my Google account for good! There isn’t a ‘one click solution’ to get everything moved to a new account. I had to go through every single email and determine if it was spam or not. I had to change logon information to sites that used email addresses away from my Gmail address. Some of those sites I even had to email to have them change on the backend because there wasn’t a customer friendly way of doing so. I monitored the email that was coming in to my Gmail account for almost 3 months to make sure I got everything! It was time consuming, but worth it in the end. Most people wouldn’t go through this much effort. They would continue to allow Google to ‘own’ their personal data and keep their account active. I decided that, given Googles recent ‘updates’ to their privacy policy,  I wanted completely out! Their business practices feel so far on the other side of shady that my personal trust in them had completely gone.

Though time consuming, I feel like I made the right decision. I don’t miss the Android OS or the services Google.com offers. In the end it boils down to my data and what’s being done with it. It’s important to understand the privacy policies of a company who relies heavily on cloud resources to draw in customers to trust their data on their platform. It’s important to know what they can do with it just by having it on their systems. To me, having the rights to anything beyond serving my data up to my devices and backing it up on their systems, incase they have system failures, is cause for concern. Know what you are getting yourself in to and don’t be afraid to take the time to change if something doesn’t sit right.