We just celebrated our child’s birthday, and without our consent, Google decided it knows what’s best for her.
Google has started emailing 12-year-old children to tell them that they can remove parental control features when they turn 13, without informing their parents. It’s the latest (and perhaps most frightening) action in a long-building pattern.
For decades, Google has been invading our privacy rights, and grooming all of us to be their unwitting data servants. Taking control, improving your online life, and getting some of your privacy back is more straightforward than you might think.
A brief history of Google’s rise to dominance
I was blown away when I first used Google Search in 1999. In the early days of the web, I had used many search engines, including Yahoo!, Webcrawler and AltaVista. Within a few minutes of using Google, it was clear that a vastly superior web search experience had been realized. It wasn’t long before word of mouth caused Google to become a verb, with the vast majority of people holding a positive view of the company.
It quickly became the dominant search engine. Around the turn of the millennium, depending on whose mythos you believe, the founders adopted the phrase “Don’t be evil” as the company motto.
Google developed amazing products around the mission of organizing the world’s information. From Image Search, Google News and Gmail, to Google Earth and Chrome, the company culture led to products with the Midas touch. All the products had an innovative ~cool~ factor to them that made rivals like Microsoft and Oracle seethe with jealousy.
The “Don’t be evil” motto was officially dropped in 2015, around the time the company restructured to form Alphabet Inc. Since then a few things have happened:
- Cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have faded into the background
- Annual revenue hit $100B
- Current CEO Sundar Pichai was hired
Pichai, brought on in 2019, eliminated Google’s famous “TGIF town halls” where employees could keep management in check with honest feedback. The company’s exceptionalism has faded alongside its moral image.
Example: Remember when people used to say they were convinced their phones were listening to them, because they’d seen ads for a product after saying something around their phone? It turns out they were not crazy, as Google just settled a $68 million class-action lawsuit where it admits it secretly recorded private conversations without consent since 2016, and used the data for targeted ads.
Before that, the company quietly backed away from commitments to never develop artificial intelligence for military applications or unlawful surveillance. Its advertising and data collection policies build intrusive profiles about you, your family, and your friends. They’ve engaged in anti-competitive behavior, just like Microsoft. The algorithms on Google-owned YouTube rate as some of the most addictive in an industry with a very high bar, and silo users by reinforcing pre-existing beliefs for maximum engagement, with misinformation and disinformation being the beneficiaries.
Google is now replacing headlines in news articles with “A.I.” generated disinformation made not to inform, but to maximize engagement, as the market push for greater ad revenue never stops. This is yet another insult to journalism. The many penalties they’ve received from governments aren’t even a slap on the wrist compared to the revenues they generate.
The last straw: Grooming minors for profit
Our child has had a school-provided Chromebook since third grade, which requires a Google account and many Google services for her to complete her school assignments. She has to use her school-district issued Google username and password to log in to the computer, must watch lessons on YouTube (with advertising), write papers in Google Docs, and store information in Google Spreadsheets. States across the country have spent over $30 billion replacing textbooks with laptops. Studies have now shown the result: the first generation of students less cognitively capable than their parents.
Now Google has decided 13-year-old children can remove their own parental controls.
Last month, Digital Childhood Institute President Melissa McKay posted an alarm: Google had started emailing 12-year-olds approaching age 13, to inform them they can remove parental controls on their birthday.
They’re not emailing the parents. They’re emailing pre-teens. While other companies like Roblox have started doing the same, Google is much more integrated into many people’s lives, and a mandatory part of most of our children’s education.
McKay called it out: “Grooming for engagement. Grooming for data. Grooming minors for profit.” This is an actual direct attack on parental rights, unlike some imagined attacks used as wedge political issues. It is an attempt to create lifelong data producers and content consuming addicts for their bottom line, mental health of entire generations be damned.
I reached out to McKay for comment.
“Google has shown, again and again, that it prioritizes profit over the safety of children,” she told me, “It should not take a viral social media post to force a trillion-dollar company to end a predatory business practice that harmed countless children and families.”
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and Director of the Emotion Regulation Lab at The City University of New York, is also troubled by emotional attachment to “A.I.”. Asked for comment, she said, “I’m hugely concerned that Google is bypassing parental supervision, and that their technologies have been aggressively integrated into our children’s education. But it’s the tip of the iceberg when we think about how human-mimicking A.I. is baked into their systems. Chatbots powerfully activate our natural drive for human bonding. Attachment hacking is the killer app for engagement. The industry knows this, and it’s becoming clear that emotional over-reliance on A.I. isn’t a bug, it’s an engineered feature.”
How to unGoogle? It’s not as hard as you might think
Google infiltrates many parts of our lives. Even as a life-long technologist, I haven’t been able to completely extricate myself from the complex tangle of Google products. Sometimes the folks I’m collaborating with use Google Docs (like for this very story).
But with a few steps, we can minimize how much Google there is in our lives.
Start with the web browser
As of January 2026, Chrome owned an astonishing share of the web browser market: 71%, trailed by Apple’s Safari (15%) and Microsoft’s Edge (4.7%), according to StatCounter Global Stats.
This is an over-simplification, but there are two main parts to every web browser. There’s the part that “paints” the page you see in the main part of the browser window, called a rendering engine, and there’s the part that adds all the menus and features. There are three main rendering engines: Chromium (Blink), WebKit, and Gecko. Chromium is used by Google’s Chrome, Brave, Helium, Vivaldi, and Edge. WebKit is used by Safari. Gecko is used by Firefox.
This means you can have a very similar (and better!) experience to Google Chrome in another browser, without your web surfing data being taken by Google. I’ve made a chart below of seven browsers, rated in three categories.
The first category, Security & Privacy, rates the browser for how well it protects you with its default settings. Helium and Firefox come out on top. Brave gets dinged for defaulting to having crypto and “A.I.” on by default. Vivaldi is good, but requires configuration to be more locked down. Safari is decent. Avoid Chrome and Edge at all costs.
The second category, Features & Experience, describes how the browser feels, performs and whether it has modern features. Brave does well here, but gets dinged for defaulting to including a crypto wallet, sketchy rewards program, and “A.I.” on by default. If it wasn’t for those questionable practices, Brave would be the best browser experience I’ve had. Helium ranks best here. Note that it does not support WildVine (the DRM package required for watching NetFlix, HBO Max and other streamers through the browser) or browser sync. That may seem a negative, but these are actually a big positive when it comes to security considerations. Vivaldi is great if you love to tinker with settings, but has so many options, it makes the interface feel sluggish. Firefox and Chrome are both solid choices for features, but Brave and Helium ship with built-in ad blockers, malware protection, and fingerprint blocking. For speed, Helium, Brave and Chrome come out on top, with Vivaldi a bit behind, and the rest much slower. Helium and Brave also have some key features missing from Chrome and Edge, like vertical tabs, tab groups, split-view and fantastic reader views.
The final category, Morals & Ethics, looks at the companies behind the browser. I had used Brave for several years. Having a built-in crypto wallet and rewards program feels gross, and then they defaulted to having “A.I.” included too. I don’t want any of that in my web browser. It was easy enough to disable the Brave features I didn’t want, and I lived with it. Over the years I have learned more about the company and its founder. I can no longer support or recommend them.
So what browser is best to move to, to get off of Chrome? I’ve tried Vivaldi and Firefox over the years, but the browsing experience has not been great. There are a few key features I like missing, and their speed is just slower. They feel clunky to me.
Which makes Helium the clear winner, and the browser I use for the vast majority of my needs.
I rarely watch streaming services through my browser, as I use the dedicated apps on my phone or streaming device, but in the rare cases I’m watching Netflix on my computer, I use Firefox. It took me under five minutes to migrate from my old browser to Helium, and I haven’t looked back. It successfully migrated all of my extensions, bookmarks and browsing history.
The great news? There’s very little friction by changing your browser. After a few hours, you’ll be asking yourself why you waited so long for a better experience. Give Helium a try: download it, run it, make it your default, and import from your existing browser. It’ll ask a few more questions to get you set up, and you’ll soon find yourself exploring a web free of much of the enshittification that has crept in slowly over the years. You may want a few extensions, in addition to uBlock Origin: Just Read and a password manager are ones I need.
Changing your search engine
I tried and failed to leave Google Search several times in the 2010s before it finally became permanent..
Changing your search engine is not quite as simple as the browser. It will cause a bit more friction, and may leave you feeling like something important is missing — until you get used to it.
At start, there was an unwritten bargain between Google and content creators, such as journalists and bloggers and recipe writers and list makers and forum moderators. Google would benefit from indexing the world’s web pages, profiting from the contextual advertising displayed alongside search results. In return, Google would provide the vast majority of traffic to content creators.
Google has broken that contract. The company now tries to keep you on its site as much as possible. It shows “A.I.” overviews (which are often wrong), intentionally bad search results, and other tactics to be able to show you more ads, rather than get you to your destination.
During Helium’s initial setup, you can pick your search engine, which you can modify later in settings. I have been happily using DuckDuckGo for many years.
DuckDuckGo was founded just outside Philadelphia, PA, in 2008 with a focus on privacy features, and continues to be a strong choice. During the various sports seasons, I can type “phillies”, “eagles”, “flyers”, or “76ers” and get current scores and standings, just like in Google.
On the very rare occasion that DuckDuckGo’s search results aren’t enough, Helium’s “bang” features allow me to use any other search engine from my location bar. A “bang” is simply a shortcut using an exclamation point which diverts to another search; for example, !w winter olympics searches Wikipedia for “winter olympics”, !startpage winter olympics searches StartPage, !g winter olympics searches Google, !chatgpt winter olympics queries ChatGPT, and there are thousands of more destinations. Firefox and Brave offer a similar feature with a much smaller set of search destinations (less than 10).
If DuckDuckGo isn’t your cup of tea, check out the aforementioned StartPage. If you’re not quite ready to leave Google search results, but want to stop them from tracking everything you do on the web, this is a good option.
StartPage is a privacy-first search engine that proxies Google results. That’s right: It gives you the same results that Google does, without all the widgets, “A.I.” summaries, and noise surrounding the results. It even looks like Google used to, circa 2010, with a clean results page.
StartPage is in an interesting position, since it was founded as a Dutch company that has a unique deal with Google to return search results. “Startpage stands between users and Google,” factually.co reports. “It strips identifying metadata from queries and forwards anonymized requests to Google, then returns results without building profiles.”
Caveat: Some users have noted that a purchase by advertising company System1 has muddied the StartPage privacy waters.
If you want to add StartPage as your Default Search in Helium, you can do so in settings:
- Name: Startpage
- Shortcut: !startpage2
- URL with %s in place of query: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=%s
- Suggestions URL with %s in place of query: https://www.startpage.com/osuggestions?q=%s
You may find changing search providers does not cause nearly as much friction as it did a decade ago. Quite the opposite: you may find the change to be a breath of fresh air. The privacy benefits are huge, to you on the micro level, and society on the macro level.
Switching email providers
Changing email providers can feel intimidating, but it is something you can (and should!) take your time doing. The first step is to find a new email provider; I’m a big fan of the Proton ecosystem, and they have a robust free tier for email, calendar, VPN, drive and password manager.
There are other options, such as FastMail, Mail.com, iCloud Mail from Apple, and many more. I’ve found the Proton ecosystem to have the most generous free tier for a privacy-first provider, and I liked it so much, I’ve become a lifetime paid member. You can also create email addresses with several of these providers, and try them out: email back and forth from one to the other. See what features you like. Try out the mobile apps.
Once you’ve decided which service works best for you, you can slowly but surely start switching all your accounts that use your Gmail address over to your new email address. When I first switched from Gmail to ProtonMail, I kept both active for about two months while I switched everything over. Once I was sure I’d finished, I deleted everything from my Gmail and closed out the account. It was a process, but it was well worth it. I don’t feel like Google is peeking over my shoulder any longer, or gossiping everything they glean about me to data brokers.
Practicality beats purity, and together we have power
It is ironic (and some might say hypocritical!) that I am writing this article with collaborators on Google Docs. Because of Google’s ubiquity, I still have an account for collaboration purposes with people still in Google’s ecosystem. There are times, as the Zen of Python teaches, that “practicality beats purity.” With that stated, I’ve improved my security and privacy exponentially since leaving Google’s services as my primary ecosystem.
And now that I’ve seen how Google is grooming my teenage daughter to be a beholden data servant for her entire life, I know it is imperative I also teach her good data hygiene.
It is easy to dismiss the effects of big tech on our lives, when we look at the micro level. We can justify targeted ads as useful, or presume we have nothing to hide. It is crucial to consider the macro level instead: the huge influence and power Google has over the world, being the biggest arbiter of information, is greater than any company in our species’ history. The ability for Google to influence governments, policies, and elections has never had a parallel.
The company has already misused its mammoth cache of user information for surveillance, and study after study shows algorithms are inherently biased. Google is already grooming our children during the education process, they have expanded into many of our homes with spying devices, while growing their influence in fields like healthcare and politics. It is because of this that each one of us can contribute as a check to balance their rising power.
Changing your browser, search engine, or email provider might not seem like a big deal, but when enough of us start to do it, we can help put a check on that power, while improving our own lives and online experience.
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