It's hard to keep the idea at bay that we're actually living in a cyberpunk dystopia.After all, we're all living under a small handful of trillion-dollar mega-corporations that seem to have a huge amount of clout, and a very unhealthy interest in knowing absolutely everything we do every day.Worst of all, we didn't even get the cool '80s synthwave aesthetic in this deal.
Google might be the one company with the most ways to track what we do.Most people use phones that run on Google software, or cloud apps that Google owns, and even when you get in your car, it's likely Google technology takes you where you want to go.Is there any way to remove Google from your life? What about paying for the privilege of privacy? Kagi Search You gotta find stuff somehow I covered Kagi back in 2025, and was quite impressed with this privacy-focused, paid search engine.
This is a search engine designed to treat you as the customer, and not the product.For $5, you get 300 searches, and if you cough up $10, you get unlimited searches.You will see no advertising, and your searches are not tied to an account.
Kagi has its own indexes, and when it queries other search engines, it anonymizes your search first.At the very least, you should consider that $5 tier for those searches you really don't want Google associating with you.Proton Mail Plus Maybe email shouldn't be free? A lot of folks in the tech journalism sphere have switched from Google to Proton, and this email service has some of Gmail's best features already.
The free Proton Mail service is already great, and much more private than Gmail.If you're willing to pay the €4.99/month (around $5.69 USD as of this writing), then you get quite a lot more.You can have 10 email addresses, which is a powerful privacy feature.
There's one custom email domain included, and email client support.Which you don't get with the free version.Ente Photos Duck that surveillance We consider Ente Photos to be the best Google Photos alternative that doesn't require self-hosting.
If you are happy to self-host, then you might want to consider Immich instead.There is a baseline free account that comes with 10GB of storage.This includes the core privacy features as well.
Any AI that runs on your images happens on-device.So no facial data, for example, goes to a central server.Ente calls this "Zero-knowledge AI." Encrypted photo backups are a given too.
The primary thing you get by paying is more storage space, but you also get a family plan feature and human customer support.Paying also allows you to store 1000 items on Ente's other service called Locker, which is a private document storage platform.CryptPad Keep your writing between you and yourself I called CryptPad "The best private alternative to Google Docs and Sheets" and it delivers on that promise while giving you much better privacy.
Proving that Google doesn't have a technical reason to see the inside of your documents in order to let you collaborate with others.The free tier offers the same end-to-end encryption and collab features, but a small storage allocation of just one gigabyte.If you pay for the Personal, Duo, or Team tiers, you get more storage, but also more "drives" that allow for multiple users on the same account with separate storage.
Not to mention, you'll get support with higher priority.Support is only available in English and French, however.OsmAnd Maps+ Your destination is your business Close Despite having a name that trips (ha!) me up every time, OsmAnd is proving to be quite a popular navigation app among my colleagues, and a GPS service you pay for takes me right back to the early days when you actually had to pay for your maps upfront, and your GPS device didn't even have access to the internet.
You can use it for free, and my colleague Joe Fedewa thinks that OsmAnd's offline maps put Google Maps to shame, which is an amazing endorsement from someone so well-versed in the world of Google.That free tier lets you download seven maps, and you can do offline navigation.If you pay for Maps+, the number of maps you can download becomes unlimited.
However, the big deal for me would be CarPlay and Android Auto support, which is a paid feature.You can even pay a one-off lifetime access fee for Maps+ if you like.The key privacy feature here is that OsmAnd never tracks your live location data and doesn't store it.
There are no ads either, so it's well worth trying as an alternative to Google Maps.Sometimes money is the solution The funny thing is, I actually do pay for my Google services through Google One, but somehow I don't think Google is spying on me any less than if I wasn't also forking over some cash.In the case of these services, your fee is going towards an agreement that's, if not totally private, at least significantly more so than Google's business model allows.
Imagine if Google had a "don't spy on me" subscription tier!
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