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 title: "De-googling my Life"
-date: 2022-02-04T00:21:37-05:00
+date: 2023-06-05T13:00:00-05:00
 draft: true
 ---
 
@@ -10,8 +10,16 @@ This is a one-off piece not intended to be the second article referred to in my
 
 ## Introduction
 
-I started my journey to disconnect myself from Google as much as possible around 1 year ago at the time of writing this piece. Looking at where I am today, I'm fairly content with the progress I've made so far. Before I started this project, I used Google for everything. Search, entertainment (in the form of YouTube), an email provider, storage solution (for random files *and* my photo gallery), Calendar provider, etc. You name it, and it was very probable I was using a Google service to fulfill the need. Now, don't get me wrong, Google is ***very*** convenient and is perfectly adequate for 99% of the population. It's just for people who tend to overthink about their privacy.... it can be an absolute nightmare. Putting all of your eggs into one basket is kind of scary to me. For example, what if Google goes down? This is a very, *very*, unlikely scenario, but it does happen. About once or twice every few years it seems (it doesn't seem to be published information, so take this with a grain of salt, it's my best estimate). No computer system, no matter how redundant, is infallible. Things will happen. Last time Google went down was the end of 2020 for about 1 hour. During this time, it's safe to say a good portion of at the very least the U.S. had to stop functioning. Imagine, business emails powered by Google, not able to send or even look at new messages. Even if they could, it wouldn't matter, anyone using Gmail had this same issue. Almost no one could get to their email, nothing could be done. Any data on Google Drive is suddenly inaccesible. Eventually, half of the internet is inaccesible due to running on GCP. When Google goes down, a good portion of the internet goes with it. Everyone's eggs were in a singular basket, and when that basket broke, everyone's eggs fell out. Now, I'm not saying that moving away from Google will instantly solve this issue. Not in the slightest. You are still running on *some* computer, whether it's one you rent or one you own. However, the benefits are that you won't be at the mercy of whatever may be happening somewhere you don't have control over, especially if you host things personally.
+I started my journey to disconnect myself from Google as much as possible around 1 year ago at the time of writing this piece. Looking at where I am today, I'm fairly content with the progress I've made so far. Before I started this project, I used Google for everything. Search, entertainment (in the form of YouTube), an email provider, storage solution (for random files *and* my photo gallery), Calendar provider, etc. You name it, and it was very probable I was using a Google service to fulfill the need. Now, don't get me wrong, Google is ***very*** convenient and is perfectly adequate for 99% of the population. It's just for people who tend to overthink about their privacy.... it can be an absolute nightmare. Putting all of your eggs into one basket is kind of scary to me. For example, what if Google goes down? This is a very, *very*, unlikely scenario, but it does happen. About once or twice every few years it seems (it doesn't seem to be published information, so take this with a grain of salt, it's my best estimate). No computer system, no matter how redundant, is infallible. Things will happen. Last time Google went down was the end of 2020 for about 1 hour. During this time, it's safe to say a good portion of at the very least the U.S. had to stop functioning. Imagine: business emails powered by Google, not able to send or even look at new messages. Even if they could, it wouldn't matter, anyone using Gmail had this same issue. Almost no one could get to their email, nothing could be done. Any data on Google Drive is suddenly inaccesible. Eventually, half of the internet is inaccesible due to running on GCP. When Google goes down, a good portion of the internet goes with it. Everyone's eggs were in a singular basket, and when that basket broke, everyone's eggs fell out. Now, I'm not saying that moving away from Google will instantly solve this issue. Not in the slightest. You are still running on *some* computer, whether it's one you rent or one you own. However, the benefits are that you won't be at the mercy of whatever may be happening somewhere you don't have control over, especially if you host things personally.
 
-Secondly, which I feel is the most important part: Google is an *advertisement and search company*. It's in their best interest to know everything about you so they can give you the most relevant search results and advertisements. This can be inherently useful to getting you relevant information fast. However, as this is Google's main source of revenue, it is really in their best interest to know **as much as possible.** Where can they collect this data? Anywhere you use their services: Google itself, YouTube, Android (as a platform itself, Google is baked quite deep in there), Gmail (all that online shopping you did? Google knows what you bought now!), Chrome (ever notice it absoutely *begs* you to sign in, sometimes signing you in browser-wide without your consent as soon as you sign into **any** Google service? Well, I wonder why. Maybe it has something to do [with this](#NEED TO RE-FIND SOURCE)?). Anything you do under Google's eye can be used as more data points against you. Not only that, but websites serving Google Ads will also contribute to data collection, though to a lesser extent with tracking cookies being mostly eradicated very soon, though that doesn't mean it's impossible to track you still.
+Secondly, which I feel is the most important part: Google is an *advertisement and search company*. It's in their best interest to know everything about you so they can give you the most relevant search results and advertisements. This can be inherently useful to getting you relevant information fast. However, as this is Google's main source of revenue, it is really in their best interest to know **as much as possible.** Where can they collect this data? Anywhere you use their services: Google itself, YouTube, Android (as a platform itself, Google is baked quite deep in there), Gmail (all that online shopping you did? Google knows what you bought now!), Chrome (ever notice it absoutely *begs* you to sign in, sometimes signing you in browser-wide without your consent as soon as you sign into **any** Google service? Well, I wonder why. Maybe it has something to do [with this](#NEED TO RE-FIND SOURCE)?). Anything you do under Google's eye can be used as more data points against you. Not only that, but websites serving Google Ads will also contribute to data collection, though to a lesser extent with tracking cookies being mostly eradicated very soon, though that doesn't mean it's impossible to track you still. Finally, with the advent of AI that started with the release of ChatGPT (not exactly, but it definitely came to the forefront with it) I am begining to have more and more reservations about storing all of my data (like photos and emails especially) with companies that are pushing to generate better and better AI models for themselves, because I wonder where the training data comes from.....
 
-I thought to myself "Why do I need to give up all of my privacy?" Is it really worth the extra effort to run my own services to keep a portion of my privacy? To me, it really is. It's more for the principle of the matter to me. I should be able to choose who gets my data and what I give them. No more, no less. So, how exactly did I get Google (mostly) out of my life?
+I thought to myself "Why do I need to give up all of my privacy?" Is it really worth the extra effort to run my own services to keep a portion of my privacy? To me, it really is. It's more for the principle of the matter to me. I should be able to choose who gets my data and what I give them. No more, no less. So, how exactly did I get Google (mostly) out of my life? It really just started with wanting a solution to host my photos and grew from there.
+
+## Photo hosting
+
+Around the end of 2020, Google announced the end of Google Photos' free tier to be June 1, 2021. What this meant was the Google Photos backup that I had running on my phone in the background for the better part of 3-4 years at this point was about to start counting against my Google account's storage, which is 15GB. 15GB doesn't really go too far anymore, especially when you use Google Drive to store a random assortment of files as well, because it was "so convenient." I really didn't feel like paying Google *and* compressing my images, and with the falling costs of HDD based storage, I figured I would try to do it myself and see what happens.
+
+In comes [Photoprism](https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism), a FOSS image hosting solution that fills in the niceties of Google Photos quite nicely. Album creation, face detection, location based image searching, and live photo previews, to name a few features. They have a docker image, so it was easy enough to get running on my (measly) hardware, which was a Raspberry PI 4 (4GB model) at the time. So, I downloaded the Docker image, got my reverse-proxy set up to properly redirect the traffic to the instance, and downloaded my entire Google Photos library. Once I had it downloaded, I simply took the zip file, put it on my server, and extracted it to an ingestion folder as specified by Photoprism.
+
+Once it was all ready, I started the Docker container and just let it churn through my photos, which admittedly took the longest amount of time (about 8-9 hours). However, this is a one time task (at this scale) that had to categorize, run facial and object recognition, and generate metadata for quite a few photos (I do not have an exact number anymore, but it was probably close to 4000 photos/videos.) Now I have auto-backups set up through [Photosync](Google play link) that uploads photos during the night as my phone charges to Photoprism's WebDAV endpoint.