Is De-Googling Actually a Waste of Time?

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]You've seen the videos. Get rid of Chrome. Switch your search engine. Maybe flash a different operating system onto your phone. Congratulations. You have deooled. Or did you? I hope you're ready for nothing. While you've been busy swapping out apps, self-hosting, and buying Faraday cages, cameras and stores you've been going to have been uploading your location. Wi-Fi signals have been mapping your heart rate. You might have diabetes, and only the Wi-Fi knows about it. Your TV was logging what you watched. Unless you're PewDiePie who's hosting his TV on his Steam Deck.

[00:00:30]>> I'm sorry. What are you talking about?

[00:00:31]>> Your employer is inadvertently while simultaneously advertently handing your name, phone, email, social security number to some random payroll company.

[00:00:40]And data brokers probably have all of it. Deging, as it's been covered, adnauseium is solving about 1% of the actual problem, maybe more. And the more I dug into the other 90%, the more I realized you may be misinformed.

[00:00:54]of the >> Are you sure about that?

[00:00:58]>> The people going down the deing rabbit hole are ignoring some facets of the state of MASTER and tracking you. There's more you need to do to de Google your life and remove yourself from every other company's gaze. So, you want to see the whole machine that we live in. Then, and only then, we'll ask the question that matters. Is doing any of this worth it?

[00:01:20]Or does it all go too deep? And we're all uh [ __ ] >> That's been my mindset lately. When people say deoogle, they mean reducing one specific company. Google knows about you. There's Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, which is what you're probably using. Yes, you.

[00:01:42]And even Android as an operating system on your phone is owned by Google. Even Apple has a Google search because Google gave them a massive bribe. You have people tell you, >> "Move your search to something that doesn't fingerprint you.

[00:01:54]>> Change your browser. Change your OS. Get Linux graffine OS. Edward approved it.

[00:02:00]Start a private email. Self-host your files, your password manager, your AI, your mom, and that's it. That's the whole game of cat-and- mouse with Google trying to eat your soul. And it does mostly work for what you're trying to do. Google sees less. Okay. So what? Google is just one company. There's more. Google is owned by a company called Alphabet. Alphabet in September last year became only the fourth company in human history to cross $3 trillion in market value. $3 trillion buys a lot of subsidiaries >> and surveillance. Under Alphabet, you've got Google itself and the whole list of things. They're a massive advertising network whose sole purpose is to fingerprint you. Their free services are not free. They're selling your data.

[00:02:46]Google Ads serves most of the internet ads and ad analytics that they've infiltrated taxi services. They're dipping their toes in biology, drone delivery, AIdriven drug discovery.

[00:02:57]Speaking of the elephant in the room, they've got AI research labs. What is it? Deep Mind, the one building their Gemini AI models that read your emails when you ask Gemini for help with them.

[00:03:07]And it connects every bit of data you've given them with all of their products that Gemini is connected to together.

[00:03:14]The profile or identity they have of you isn't just through their search engine.

[00:03:17]Their subsidiaries can know what you've searched for, what you've watched, where you drove, what genes you carry, what drugs you'll be prescribed, and what the inside of your neighborhood looks like from space. And it gets worse. With you dealling your life, you're stepping back from the apps and Google owns services.

[00:03:33]You are not stepping back from everything. If you're using Windows, you have Microsoft to worry about. I know you're probably using Arch Linux, though, because you watched PewDiePie's video on it. Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Do you use that? They bought it in 2016 for a lot of money. Did you hear about browser gate where they found out that LinkedIn probably have your real name and employer on it? Have been silently scanning users computers without consent, without it being in the privacy policy. Not that anyone reads that [ __ ] All of that linked directly to your identity and your real job. They own GitHub. I know you probably use that.

[00:04:07]It's where most of the world's software actually lives. They bought it in 2018.

[00:04:12]They own Activision, Blizzard, the makers of the best damn MMORPG to ever exist and will ever exist in the history of mankind, World of Warcraft. And even for you casual players, you've probably got Candy Crush on your phone. They own which they bought in late 2023.

[00:04:27]Bethesda, Skype, Minecraft, Bing. No, no, no. Not you, Sheamus. What the hell?

[00:04:32]Xbox, even if you don't use Windows at home, do you at work? Because Windows 11 sends a continuous stream of telemetry back to Mordor about how you use it.

[00:04:41]>> I didn't We made it to Microsoft. You think that's not going to get tied somehow to your real name? Get real. So when people talk about deleging, did you also de Microsoft? Then there's everyone else.

[00:04:54]Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. Does anyone use Threads? Can't forget about the old Zack. They run one of the largest behavior databases on the planet. Even people who don't have Facebook accounts have shadow profiles built from what their friends uploaded about them. the Facebook pixel tracker that lives on something like a third of the websites you visit. Amazon through their storefront, through Alexa. God, you better not have Alexa in your house.

[00:05:17]Through Ring doorbells, through Kindle's reading data, through Whole Foods, through their massive ad business, and through AWS, which silently hosts most of the internet that you use every day, all of that passing through Cloudflare because basically all websites default to using them. Apple is surprisingly taking some helpful steps to save your privacy by putting on anti-tracking features. or are they helpful? Whether or not that's a gimmick, which I personally think it is, just to get you to trust them and boost sales cuz Steve Jobs is evil incarnate because even Apple takes $20 billion a year from Google specifically to keep Google search as a default on iPhone and on well Macs too. If Apple really thought Google was a privacy disaster, they wouldn't be taking insane boatloads of money from them. Which leads into Have you considered also who Google does business with up till now in this video?

[00:06:07]What happens when your profile, your identity, your fingerprint, so not just your name and email, but every single bit of data that creates your unique profile. What happens when all of that gets sold? This is where we get data brokers. It gets messy. The big ones are Axiom, Live Ramp, and Epsilon, which make billions of dollars a year buying, aggregating, and reselling personal information. Axiom, by their own marketing, currently holds data on about 2.6 six billion individuals worldwide.

[00:06:38]They claim to profile each person using over 10,000 attributes, a little more than just your email address and your phone. The data broker industry overall has an estimated $270 billion in revenue in 2024. Data brokers get your information from credit card transactions, loyalty cards, app developers selling their user data. But how does a day-to-day broker actually know that a person buying groceries at this Walmart last Tuesday, the person whose Hyundai pulled into that parking lot and the person whose smart TV is currently playing 90day fiance are one person >> and getting women pregnant.

[00:07:16]>> What he say?

[00:07:17]>> Currently I have 71 CHILDREN.

[00:07:19]>> YOU WHAT?

[00:07:20]>> And I know there are nine on the way.

[00:07:22]>> Jesus Christ.

[00:07:23]>> They don't usually have your name on most of those data points or events.

[00:07:27]They have device IDs, IP addresses, and behavioral fragments. The way they tie them all together is the most important piece of this whole mess, and almost nobody really explains it. Spoiler, AI is making this worse and scarier. Now, I want to take a pause here, cuz you need to understand that everything else in this video stops feeling like a bunch of different separate issues and starts feeling like one machine that we're all stuck in. And it all ties back to what I referred to before as your profile, but let's call it your identity. Your browser when it loads any website automatically tells that website a long list of facts about your computer, your operating system, your time zone, the exact way your specific hardware renders graphics, how it plays audio, what browser extensions you have, what language settings you have. Researchers have shown that about 30 to 50 of these signals combined identify your specific device with somewhere between 90 and 99% accuracy. even between two devices in the same house. That combination is called a browser fingerprint. It works in incognito mode. It works when cookies are cleared. It works with a VPN and it was originally designed for fraud detection and got quietly repurposed for mass tracking when privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA started limiting cookies.

[00:08:42]Fingerprinting is effectively the industry's workaround for cookie regulation. Now, combine that with the other persistent identifiers most people have never heard of. Your phones have mobile advertising IDs. You can go into your settings and you can see what that is. You could even reset it if you wanted to. Not a whole lot of good that'll do. It's automatically shared with every single app that you install.

[00:09:01]Your smart TV has a connected TV ID.

[00:09:03]Your email address, even if it's hashed, so it doesn't look like a normal email anymore, is still treated like a unique ID because the matching tables to undo the hashing exist somewhere. And that also gets traded between companies and sold. your IP address, your loyalty card numbers, credit card transactions. This is all bought by brokers from third parties. And there are companies that turn this pile of fragments into a single human profile or as we've been referring to it, your identity. One of the biggest is called live ramp. They take in all of the identifiers I just listed and they stitch all that together into a single synonymous identifier they call a ramp ID. They publicly state more than 900 companies use this system, which includes Google, Meta, and Microsoft, to better target people with ads and build that identity profile. And that's what makes everything that I'm talking about actually dangerous. And without the ability to match that identity to anything, fingerprints and ad IDs are just noise. It doesn't work.

[00:09:59]But with it, they can be you. They can find you. And most people don't talk about it because it gets into the technical weeds and gets boring real quick. And not to beat a dead horse.

[00:10:08]>> Yeah. Let's talk about cars real quick again because this kind of fried my brain a little bit. I was oblivious just like most of you. In 2023, the Mozilla Foundation, people who make Firefox, published a consumer privacy report where they reviewed 25 major car brands, and every single one were reported to have been collecting data from sensors, microphones, cameras, the phone you connect over Bluetooth, the apps you install, the dealership, and the manufacturer's website, which of course gets sold into the machine. Funny, Nissan's privacy policy at the time, they might not have changed it, actually said they reserve the right to collect sexual activity and genetic information.

[00:10:46]It's a car company. If you drive a newer car, are you still feeling good about deleging your phone while your car outside is actively profiling you? It gets worse. Modern cars phone home in the same way that your cell phone behaves like a phone. They connect to a cellular network and can transfer information using radio waves, obviously, cuz they have a radio. They have their own built-in network. It gets worse. The government has your social security number, your address, your tax records, your voter registration, your passport, your driver's license. And increasingly now in more and more states, your driver's license photo is searchable in facial recognition databases that law enforcement can use.

[00:11:23]The DMV in lots of states sell your data to private companies. Your bank, by law, has to know its customer. They're not allowed to let you be anonymous. Credit bureaus track you involuntarily. Your phone, even with no apps installed, is constantly registering with the nearest cell towers. Your text messages and traffic that passes through those cell towers isn't always safe either. That's how the network knows where to send your calls. Has to know where your phone is.

[00:11:50]License plate readers scan your car as it drives past. And private companies combine all those scans into a searchable database of where every car in America has been. Smart TVs log what you watch using something called automatic content recognition. and they sell that data to advertisers. The Ring doorbell across the street films you walking by. The grocery store loyalty card you signed up for is selling your buying habits in real time. And then there's, of course, the most nonobvious one. Your friends and family upload photos of you or are tied to you and your unique identity. They save your number in their contacts, which syncs to Google or Apple cuz they have an Android or an iPhone. They tag you in photos that get scanned by facial recognition.

[00:12:31]They mention you in messages that also get analyzed. And honestly, the amount of breaches we have already had where billions upon billions of data has has been leaked. You might truly not quite understand or fathom. I don't even get it. Yes, definitely. How built out your identity is already. How many thousands of indicators it has to match to you and only you. And in 2024, a data broker called National Public Data was breached with roughly 2.9 billion records leaked publicly, which included social security numbers for most of the population of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. If you had any doubt that your social security number was leaked, that's just one of many. Go visit the dark web if you're bored. See if your name's in there. I'm sure you'll be pleasantly unsurprised. So, at this point in the video, I bet you're like, "There's just no point in doing anything." I feel the same way. There are some defenses you can build which brings us to the part about dehugling where some of the videos you've seen might have not have got it fully correct and might have undersold some of these protections and I don't want you to miss the point. The only real defense is opensource software running on hardware that you control. And here is problem that I'm trying to stress. It has to be 100% or nothing or else you might as well not even bother. Sure, you might get less targeted ads. Who's getting bothered when they get a World of Warcraft ad instead of a a makeup ad?

[00:13:55]I'd rather get the World of Warcraft ad, honestly. But if you actually care, open- source software on your own hardware, that's it. Closed source apps, on the other hand, where you don't have access to the source code that are sitting on someone else's cloud can do whatever they want with your data, and you have no way to verify what they're doing. Privacy policy says one thing.

[00:14:12]The actual code itself, which if you even had access to, says whatever the company wants, you have no control over it. Open- source software running on your own machine, has nowhere to send your data that you can't see because the code is open source. Duh.

[00:14:27]>> Are you stupid?

[00:14:28]>> Which means independent researchers, including automated AI tools, can audit it. So, you yourself could audit the code if you wanted to using AI or manually for anything erranous that's leaking your data. These are the steps you need to take if you want to want to go down this rabbit hole. Network level, you need a small device in your house routing everything, running software like Pi Hole, which can intercept every DNS domain request from all of your devices, not just your home lab. It can silently drop the domain request going to known tracking and ad domains, which it has a built-in list. You can also add whatever you want. any device like your smart TV trying to phone home automatically blocked. The mobile advertising ID stream your phone has and whatever app is trying to send out to also blocked. You can manually whitelist, blacklist or group entire domain lists to anywhere. Next is the browser level. Browsers like Mulvad browser or the tour browser are designed to specifically make every user look identical at the fingerprinting layer which is anonymity by standardization.

[00:15:28]Brave browser takes a different approach and randomizes your fingerprint per session. So nothing is persistent so your browser doesn't persist. Next at the data level selfhosting instead of Google drive or one drive run something like nextcloud on a small Raspberry Pi in your closet and that way your files never enter anyone else's cloud instead of LastPass or one password use Vault Warden instead of J GPT or Gemini. Run a local language model on your own GPU using something like Olama.

[00:16:01]Prompts never leave the machine. The data brokers can't buy what's never been uploaded into the cloud ether. Next is the device level. Open source only for everything. You have to. There's no room for error here. Use graffine OS for your phone and Linux only. The reason it works is the same reason the rest of this works. It's open source. It runs on your hardware and there's no background services that phone home. Now, once you have this stack, it defends against all the data hungry evil tech overlords. So, to answer the question, is privacy possible against any of these companies?

[00:16:34]Yes, but even a perfect open-source self-hosted stack has some hard limits.

[00:16:39]So, it only gets you almost there. It's not quite. Self-hosting cannot help you with your employer. The IRS still requires your social. You got to work somewhere. Self-hosting cannot help you with data brokers who already have decades of your records. You've already lived through multiple massive data breaches. Your social security numbers exposure is permanent. The dark web is not going to magically delete all of those remnants. Self-hosting cannot help you with your car. Cellular modem phones completely bypassing your home network.

[00:17:07]You can't block it without physically disconnecting the modem, which most people aren't going to do. You could certainly get a really old car.

[00:17:14]Self-hosting cannot help you with connecting the dots with your social circle. Your friends and family will keep uploading your number, your face, and your messages to their clouds. You did not consent. Neither did they, but they're probably not watching this video. Grandma going to do it anyways.

[00:17:29]Self-hosting cannot help you with the state, the IRS, the DMV, the credit bureaus, banking laws, license plate readers. These are all involuntary. We didn't ask for this. We just have to play our part in the system. So, do you see the big picture yet? You're probably not going to escape the government's ability to find you if that's what you've been after by watching this video. The machine has become too big.

[00:17:51]Now, the commercial ad tracking and everything else that goes into that to shape your identity. Online profile, on the other hand, you stand a good chance.

[00:17:59]That's a game you could win if you're strong enough. At the end of the day, you got to ask yourself, is it really worth it?

[00:18:06]>> How does it feel to treat me like a phone?