1. I am paying attention to data privacy for a while. I tried to reduce my usage of the GAFAM ¹⁾ products as much as I could for past years. It is pretty hard.
2. I am getting more and more exhausted by GAFAM spies: you talked/search for one topic on the internet and right after you got ads about it everywhere on GAFAM products.
3. How I can challenge people to quit²⁾ GAFAM products if I don't do it whereas I have the technical skills and I can afford it ?
4. I could give more examples, but it is time for action. No more bullshit, no more excuse.

In January 2023, I was watching one video about this topic “How to free yourself from GAFAM ? with Framasoft”³⁾.

Really interesting and during the video, one guy from Framasoft was talking about a story of tracking applications in the US:

For 160 US dollars you could buy data telling you if a women aborted,
when and where !

WTF?!?

Sad reminder: yes it is now illegal in some US states.

CC BY-SA 2.0 FR: Gee

Everyone has a threshold, they just reached mine. I decided to restart the big fight to quit GAFAM. Show that it is possible and reduce the power that GAFAM companies have on our life, our futur.

As I said, I already tried to quit GAFAM a long time ago. I wanted to highlight some projects that helped me or at least to say that I was happy to see that something else than GAFAM was existing.

I was convinced, and I still am, that the first quick win that I could achieve was to stop using an iPhone. That's why I tried Firefox OS. I love Firefox browser and their philosophy, that's why I was really excited by this phone OS but too many bugs. I was not able to just receive messages and manage calls.

This english company seems to provide a phone with an clean OS. I was wondering if it could fit my use case but sending the hardware to Canada looked complicated and really expensive and their software package/subscription did not provide me confidence. Maybe I am wrong but I did not go further.

Last but not least, Murena is the last one I discovered and it should be the one I would start my quit-gafam-quest. No subscription. You can buy their cloud solution only if you want but we can use your own Nextcloud instance. Looks good to me .

As I said, in my use case, I guess that the best first step for my quest will be to stop using my iPhone and the iCloud subscription that comes with.

I know there will be some challenges:

1. Get all my pictures back from iCloud. I know that exporting is clearly not user friendly like Google Drive (Degooglisation du GRAP part 1 in French).
2. Transfer data and applications I need onto my new smartphone. Especially the MFA⁴⁾ applications required by banks, employers…

To be continued…