DeGoogle Yourself

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don't trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren't getting more data from me.

I've had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It's not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I'd been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there's a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I've got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I've had is my phone keeps complaining that I'm not signed in with a google account, and there's a few email addresses I hadn't updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it's been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

Deleted my google account about 10 years ago. No "experiences" to speak of, you just have to go in knowing that you'll lose online access to everything Google: mail, calendar, youtube, etc. But that's what Google Takeout is for.

As for your last question: No, I don't. Lack of trust is why is wiped my Google account in the first place.

Yep back in 2016. Never needed it since

I have been preparing to delete my Google account very soon. I did a final takout request and I'm waiting for that email (it has been 4 days since the request), but there is a lot of stuff since it is a very old account and I was deep in the Google ecosystem. Over the last six months, I have deleted my Microsoft, Reddit, and Facebook accounts and I don't regret it. Google has always been the big one and it has taken a lot of work to rearrange my life to cut it out.

I have deleted a lot of google accounts. No, I don't trust them to delete everything. That's why I take care of what I put in that account. I also delete everything myself - even though I know, I can't be sure that google deleted it too...

A few times I filled up the account with hard encrypted big files of nonsense... just to confuse the enemy. :-)

Do you trust them to really delete everything?

Are you kidding?

They never delete.

Harddisks are cheap.

In case of accounts, you should edit all the fields and fill them with wrong (but consistent) data while you still have the password, and then use the acc for a few days more.

Yup.

I'm about to do the same with Facebook. Wondering if going through a European country like France via a VPN would add any benefit and allow all my info to really be wiped out and not remembered.

They'd never delete it. They will just mark it as inactive so you won't see it, but their ai bots will.