Moving My Digital Footprint out of the United States - Part 1

I’ve never really been too keen on many of the US tech giants. I deleted my facebook back in 2019 (and shamefully re-created it again last year, to participate in a few groups), and I X’d Twitter back when it changed name.

Having the US president militarily threaten your kingdom certainly doesn’t make me more enthusiastic about sending my money our my data to the US, so I’m beginning a much more full migration of my digital footprint away from the United States. I’m documenting my journey here to hopefully inspire others on how to do the same¹.

When starting this process I needed to reflect on a few things:

• I use a lot of US services, and often for good reasons. Whether it’s because they have a generous free tier, they’re the best you can get, or just because I’m used to them. Migrating over won’t be something I can accomplish in one day, so I’m dedicating a few hours to the process every Sunday. I hope to dedicate a blog post to each phase.
• This is probably going to cost money for me. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a lot of money, but I am willing to put my money where my mouth is and help strengthen the non-US tech scene.
• I might never be able to get away from all US technology. My personal computer still runs Windows (might switch that though), my Smartphone still runs Android, and my credit card is still a Visa. I’ll need to be pragmatic and focus my energy where I can make reasonable choices.

Low Hanging Fruit

I’ve switched my search engine to Ecosia. If you’re already using Chrome, I can recommend switching over to the Ecosia browser. Ecosia is a German-based company that donates all its profit to help combat climate change.
I’ll fully admit I don’t think the search results are as good as Google², particularly for local queries, but you can always prefix your search queries with !g and it’ll redirect to google for the tricky queries.

First Phase

The first phase for me is switching over services that I actively pay for. The services I pay the most for are cloud file storage. I actually pay for both Google and Dropbox³.
I’ve moved them both over to Proton, a privacy focused company from Switzerland. Proton also seems to offer almost a full replacement for all the Google services I actually use.

The process for migrating took a little while but actually wasn’t too complex:

• I signed up for Proton and installed the Proton Drive appliction on my desktop computer
• I exported all of my Google data via Google Takeout, and downloaded the files.
  • For my photos I followed this workflow to get them into proton drive
  • For the rest of the Drive files, I just dropped them into a directory that Proton drive syncs with the cloud.
• For Dropbox I already had the desktop app installed, so synchronizing over was a simple matter of copying the files into a directory that proton drive syncs to.

This process wasn’t particularly difficult, but syncing many hundreds of GBs did mean I had to leave my computer running for a fair amount of time.

After synchronizing, I deleted most of my old / big files from both Dropbox and GDrive, and cancelled my subscriptions.

I was paying around 15£ per month for Dropbox (I was on a subscription much too big for what I needed), and around 4£ per month for Google One.
I’ve managed to move all my files to a 15£ a month subscription to proton, that covers both me and my partner.

After moving these services, the only US tech service I still actively pay for is 6$ I spend on DigitalOcean every month to host a small website.
In the next couple of months, I hope to move that service to Scaleway which I’ve used before and quite like.

Next Phase

I expect the next phase for me to be switching over my email. I’ve started setting up proton so that I can use hi@gustavwengel.dk as my primary email address.
I didn’t get around to migrating over accounts or forwarding emails today, though - hopefully that’s for next time.