Google is like a household name to a lot of people that use the computer. For the price of 0 DOLLARS the registered account gets access to free email. Email is essential for authenticating accounts, messaging freinds and a lot of things. So you need a email and you just turn to google.
I remember being super young and someone brought up having a email. Saying: "You can't make a google account without being over 13!"
I thought this was strange and wanted to see if this was true. Going to my computer I tried and was locked from making a account, just because I was 8 years old and not 13. What I didn't know is all the information I just gave to google right the and there. I gave my real birth date, name, last name probably home address. Everything.
Now imagine this scenario with people actually use the google service.
With google you get a LOT of services. Each and every one of them is proprietary. Each and everyone of them gives your data to google. I want in this article to go over them and show some good alternatives.
This is a tough cookie to get away from. A lot of privacy/GNU/Linux enthusiasts even use gmail. Email is not secure. Go to searx and find out why. So you might be thinking why not use gmail? All your messages go to google's services as well as using proprietary software just to create a account. Even if you used proprietary software to create it a long time ago and are sitting nicely with a gmail drawer of emails in your email client. Your still having all your emails able to be read by google. That is not fun at all.
The solution this is using a alternative mail service. There are a couple at the time of posting this article that I think are good.
Youtube is terrible and I bet it will be a cause for the death of humanity. I covered out more reasons and how to switch from youtube to something else in this article: Do not use Youtube.
Google's g suit is a set of office tools. A obvious and really great alternative to this is [[https://[libreoffice]]. Libreoffice docx exports to g suite products from my experience in the past were good.
Google is named by its search engine. The alternatives to google's search engine are a LOT.
The best alternative to it is not waze that is literally also owned by google apparently. The best alternative is openstreetmaps. It for sure isn't a perfect solution. But at least you will find yourself using googlemaps/waze less.
There is absolutely no reason to use chrome. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/chrome.html This article does a great job explaining how bad it is. There are very few browsers left out there that are decent even.
Nextcloud does a lot of things but primarily its supposed to back up files and be a google alternative. https://github.com/nextcloud/providers Here they show all the public instances, but you can obviously host your own
Fdroid is a libre software focused app store for phones.