De-Googling My Life

I have an Android mobile phone, and I used to use the built-in Calendar and Contacts apps. They were very convenient. I would also sync my Google calendar to my Remind calendar on my computer. So why would I want to De-Google my life?

Over time, I became a bit concerned about the amount of data Google was storing on my behalf. My contact list and my calendar are pretty sensitive data. While the political situation in the United States was relatively OK, I didn't worry too much about it. But now that the US administration seems hell-bent on picking fights with Canada or even performing an Anschluß on us, I'm not so sure I want my data to live in the United States, any more than I'd want it to live in Russia or China. So the time had come to reclaim my data from Google.

The thing that finally pushed me to throw the switch was a tablet I inherited from my sister. It had an old version of Android that was no longer being upgraded by the manufacturer. I wiped the OS and installed LineageOS instead. I didn't install Google Apps, so even if I wanted to, I could not use Google to sync my contacts and calendar to the tablet.

Self-Hosting FTW

I already self-host most of my services, including email, a VPN, backup, phone system, etc. so self-hosting calendar and contact syncing held no terrors for me.

The Server

The server to host my data on is a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM and two 6TB USB-3 drives in RAID-1. I needed software for doing the syncing, so after a bit of research, I decided on Radicale, an open-source CalDAV/CardDAV server. Radicale is packaged with Debian, so installing it was a simple matter of:

    apt-get install radicale

Configuring Radicale was a piece of cake; I think it took me about 10 minutes. I created a new calendar and a new contacts collection. I logged on to Google and exported my calendar and imported it into Radicale. I did the same for my contacts. The entire process took no longer than 30 minutes, and that's including reading up on how to do it.

The Clients

On the phone and the tablet, I disabled the existing calendar apps and installed OneCalendar. This app lets you specify your own CalDAV server for syncing. I added a test appointment on the phone, and sure enough... it soon appeared on the tablet. I deleted it on the tablet, and it disappeared from the phone. Woohoo!

For syncing contacts, I kept the existing Contacts apps, but installed the DAVx⁵ app. You have to pay for this if you get it from the Google Play store, but it is free on F-Droid. DAVx⁵ lets you set up a CalDAV/CardDAV account and then use that to allow the native Contacts applications to access that account. This was a little more fiddly than OneCalendar, but I eventually had contacts syncing on the two devices too.

My Desktop

For syncing my calendar to my desktop Remind setup, a small modification of the script I had been using with Google let me use it with my own Radicale server. That piece took about 5 minutes to accomplish.

However, the calendar syncing is one-way... I set up syncing from Radicale to Remind, but not the other way around. (Though see Convenience Calendars below for an exception.)

Sometimes I want to add something to my shared calendar from my desktop, so I installed KOrganizer which lets me do exactly that. I also installed KAddressBook in case I ever want to modify my Contacts list from my desktop. Both of these apps talk to the Radicale server.

My e-mail client, Claws-Mail, unfortunately does not support CardDAV for contact lists. Instead, I installed Vdirsyncer to periodically sync my contacts into a VCF file that Claws-Mail can use. It's not a perfect solution, but it's workable.

Convenience Calendars

One of the convenient aspects of using Google is the availability of many built-in calendars such as civic holidays, religious holidays, etc. But I have all that in Remind already... how can I integrate those?

I created three new calendars in Radicale: Civic Holidays, Jewish Holidays and Birthdays. I then used Jochen Sprickerhof's excellent Python tools to upload my already-existing Remind files into Radicale. I set up a cron job to do this once a day, so all of my devices automatically have the latest set of civic holidays, Jewish holidays and birthdays.

More De-Googling

I switched away from using Google as a search engine; instead I use Startpage.

I never used Google for my email, having always hosted it myself. If this is not an option for you, why not try the privacy-respecting ProtonMail?

Freedom

Once I was sure everything was working, I deleted all of my contact and calendar data from Google. I don't know for sure that Google has actually deleted all traces of it, but at least Google won't know about any contacts or calendar items I add in the future. My data is safely under my control, in Canada.

List of Software Used


Copyright © 2025 Dianne Skoll