One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2022 is to reduce my Google footprint – to try to de-Google my life as best I can – and hopefully inspire you to do the same. In today’s show, I’ll talk about replacing Google’s many communications apps (Meet, Hangouts, Chat, Talk), Google Authenticator (the Kleenex of 2FA apps), Google Maps and Waze, and YouTube.

In security and privacy news: ISPs in the UK are complaining about Apple’s Private Relay feature; the Federal Trade Commission has a new weapon to fight algorithmic data mining; if someone tricks you into sending them money via Zelle, your bank probably won’t give it back; Russia has issued a state-sponsored “trusted root CA” that could undermine privacy in Russia for a decade; the EFF weighs in on attempts to cut off Russia (and its citizens) from the internet; DuckDuckGo took a controversial step to down-rate Russian mis/disinformation in its search results; Google is mining info from receipts and invoices in your email; and Google is also mining data from your dialer and messaging apps on Android.