De-Americanising my life.

Just over a year ago I wrote a post about moving away from Google services. This post is going to be similar, but instead of just Google, it's going to be about American owned companies.

To prevent this post from being a copy/paste of the Google services one, I am going to just summarise the things I talked about in the previous post, and link to the relevant parts, and then talk about the new stuff below.

Email - I switched from Gmail to Proton Mail, owned by the Swiss company Proton AG.

Drive - From Google Drive to Proton Drive, owned by, you guessed it, the Swiss company Proton AG.

Calendar - From Google Calendar to Proton Calendar.

Documents - Google Docs to LibreOffice, developed by The Document Foundation from Germany.

I jumped from Google services to alternatives back then to prevent data loss if Google ever decided to ban me. Today I am talking about the alternatives I switched to, to get away from American companies.

Photos

To start, let's talk about Photos. While I did mention I moved to Immich, I also continued backing up my pictures and videos in Google Photos. It's important to have multiple backups of your data, and up until recently, Google Photos was my additional backup.

Google Photos has always bugged me a bit, because it's not private at all, none of your data is encrypted, and while Google doesn't share your data with anyone else, they do use it to train their AI and they can access your data if they wanted to. This is how they justify giving everyone free storage space because they are profiting from your data.

While I am not interested in any company, regardless of their country of origin, to have access to my data at this level, I think it's especially bad for a country threatening mine to have access to this data.

This is why I've switched to Ente.

Ente is a fully open source and end-to-end encrypted photo management service. Essentially a private Google Photos. While it's possible to self-host Ente, I would suggest self-hosting Immich if you're interested in a self-hosted solution.

Ente is a great Google Photos replacement if you're looking for a simple and private solution. Just sign up, pick your plan, and start uploading your photos and videos. They even have a guide on how to import your data from Google Photos to Ente. As well as a guide for Apple Photos and Amazon Photos.

They also have a great referral system that gives you a permanent extra 10GB once you sign up for a paid plan, which can help take the sting away from all the "free" Google storage.

Here's where the elephant 🐘 shows it's trunk. Ente is now based in the US.

Ente was started in India, but has since switched it's headquarters to the US, with it's servers based in the EU. While this doesn't fully accomplish my de-americanising efforts, it is a lot better than supporting Google - a fully American company profiting from your private photos and videos.

Immich is still my preferred option as it's fully free and open source, and your data is only located in the countries you decide (since you have to self-host it). It is important to note that the maintainer of Immich is American, and the company that purchased Immich - FUTO - is American, but with Immich being self-hosted, they don't have access to your data.

Music

As someone who was forced to switch to Spotify when Google Play Music was shut down, I have hate-used Spotify for years. It's a buggy mess that is missing many basic features. But since it's so popular, Spotify doesn't really care to fix the issues.

I know what you're saying, Spotify isn't American, it's Swedish.

You're right.

However, Spotify donated $150,000 to the Trump campaign, which is strange for a non-American company to donate money to US Politics.

So that's why I switched to Deezer.

Now listen, there's going to be a bit of a trend here. Deezer is French, but an American company now has majority stake in Deezer. The American Company, Access Industries, also donated to Republicans in 2015.

The sad truth is that there are pretty much no music streaming services that aren't American. YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal are all super US-based, which leaves me with either Spotify or Deezer, and only one of which hasn't donated to the orange cheeto that is threatening my country. So I pick Deezer.

Mobile Operating System

Quite a lose-lose situation here. There are 3 options for mobile, which are iOS, Android, and Linux.

iOS is American owned. Android is American owned. Linux mobile is not a viable alternative at this time.

I am a Google Pixel user for many reasons, which in this case is both good and bad. The bad part is that I am directly supporting the worst American company by buying their very expensive and overpriced phones, but the good part is that I can install GrapheneOS to my Google Pixel.

GrapheneOS is an open-source privacy and security focused ROM for Pixel devices. The founder is Canadian, but since this is an open-source project, it's contributors are from all around the world. GrapheneOS is free and essentially de-Googles your Google phone while still being useful (unlike Linux based phones)

Desktop Operating System

This is less of a lose-lose situation. Windows is horrible for privacy, which is nothing new, and MacOS limits you to specific hardware, which is not cool.

That's where Linux comes in. You can install it on pretty much any hardware, there are many distributions to choose from.

Linux has the same "problem" as most open-source projects, and that's that contributors can be from anywhere. That being said, even if a Linux distro is "American", it is fully free and open-source (depending on distro) so you're not directly supporting an American conglomerate, or having your data spied on by Americans.

So to get away from the spying mess that is Microsoft Windows, I switched to Nobara Linux.

Why Nobara? Mostly because it's based on Fedora, has a lot of great features out of the box (like Davinci Resolve Installation Wizard), and runs really well with modern hardware. It's also pretty cutting edge and supports Wayland out of the box.

Other distros that I really like are; Zorin OS and Linux Mint.

Final thoughts

Did I succeed in de-americanising my life? Kinda.

While it's really hard to de-americanise, I did accomplish what I set out to do. Move to alternative non-American services where possible, and switch to private and encrypted American services where not. If American companies need to have my data, at least they can't see or do anything with it. I would prefer to not give them a single penny, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Next time don't threaten to annex my country.