If you care about your privacy online and off, you should try to minimize your use of the big players in the data-mining business. These include Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. There are typically good alternatives to all of these, but today we’ll talk mostly about Google.
Google is most well know for their search engine, but there are plenty of alternative search engines available. Some of which include duckduckgo.com, startpage.com, and searx.me. We’re going to focus more on their gsuite product line today.
In the gsuite product line we have things like gmail, google drive, google photos, contacts, calendar, etc. Most of these can be replaced by Nextcloud. Nextcloud is on open source alternative to many of Google’s products. It’s intended to be self-hosted so that you are in control of your data. This can be done on a home server or in the cloud with the use of a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or similar. It can even be run on a Raspberry Pi, although it wouldn’t be able to handle many users at one time.
The idea of setting up a server yourself is a daunting task for most people. Luckily you don’t have to, if you aren’t ready to tackle that just yet. You can use a Nextcloud provider like disroot, woelkli, or one of the many providers listed on Nextcloud’s site.
Nextcloud can offer you a multitude of different services to replace the gsuite line of products. Things like file/photo storage, contacts, calendar, notes, and photo gallery all seem to come standard with most providers. There are other options depending on your provider and if you decide to self-host, such as email, RSS reader, Office products, video/voice/text chat, and many more. Depending on your provider you may be able to completely stop using gsuite and use Nextcloud without any additional work.
Probably one of the trickiest gsuite products to find an alternative to is Google Maps and Waze (owned by Google). Many people depend on it for navigation every day. There are alternatives like OsmAnd and Here, but you’re unlikely to get the real-time traffic updates that Google offers. This is because Google has such a large portion of the marketplace, they can use data from other people using maps for navigation to estimate and report delays in a route. Hopefully with people switching to alternatives, we can negate the imbalance Google currently holds on the navigation market. Apple maps is also an alternative to Google Maps, but Apple tends to require you to own an iPhone in order to use it (which might not be such a bad idea if you’re willing to switch).
I’m getting a bit off topic here, as the post is about switching from gsuite to Nextcloud to gain a bit more privacy in your online life. I could give you screenshots and tell you all about the differences, but I suggest you jump out to one of the providers and get yourself a free account to try out. You might be surprised with how much you like it. If you enjoy it and decide you want to sync the calendar/contact information with your android phone, I suggest using DAVx⁵ from F-Droid, but you’re also able to pay for it on Google Play (Google charges to offer the app on their store, and without ads to monetize, the developer has to cover the costs).
Links from article for convenience:
Nextcloud
Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi
disroot
woelkli
Nextcloud Providers
OsmAnd
Here
DAVx⁵
F-Droid
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