Update: Divorcing Google

I had no idea.  I didn’t think this would be sooooo much work.  Have you ever tried removing one application from google.  It’s about as fun as uninstalling something from microsoft.

A few posts ago, I reported that I removed reader.google.com.  Today, to my surprise, my reader account was still active.  I tried removing my calendar.google.com today, and every time I selected delete – then got the popup “are you sure” – I would find that my calendar was still there.

It took about an hour to removed docs.google.com.  There was a lot of stuff there.  Some top-secret strategic information for a company that has since been acquired by a bigger fish, so it doesn’t matter,  There were also several resumes, several home finance spreadsheets, some personal stuff, some embarrassing stuff, etc.  Google had access to all of this stuff.  Not saying that they looked at it.  I am really very unimportant.  But I bet google has a way of parsing all of the kagillionzillion words posted in docs and doing something maniacal with it … like selling marketing or adsense or words or something.  Why did it take sooo ling?  You have to download and remove one file at a time.  Each download and remove takes around 30 seconds.  So, guess how many files I had up there?

So, another accomplishment, I am off docs.google.com

FYI … there is a 30 second approach from separating entirely from Google.  Just wipe out your username.  But doing so would defeat the purpose of this project.  The purpose, or my purpose, is to understand exactly everything that they have access to.  Understand how they could – not stating they did – use my information to categorize, bucket, understand and group me into a larger group by which they could monetize with targeted marketing and sales.

I also cut off books.google.com, but that was easy.