It feels pretty good.

It started with a mattress commercial—well, a string of commercials—one after another as if the only product that the whole world ever sold was a mattress.

I suppose I could say I brought it upon myself: I googled an idea for a mattress for heat dissipating, whether a heat sink or engineered for greater airflow. In my mind, I thought it could look like a web—like a aeron chair. I never found anything in my brief search and I thought that was that.

But, Google wasn't done with me yet. From that point on, anytime I'd watch a YouTube clip, there was a mattress ad(s). It didn't matter if it was Jim Gaffigan or the Robertson's Unashamed podcast, I was going to get a mattress ad. I've never had such ads before and it's like suddenly, they were catching up for all the years I've been online since that fall 1995's modem's first rattle.

I became exasperated that after watching (a very funny) Honest Trailer for Twister, I pulled up Netflix only to find recommendations for weather-related content.

That was it. That's just too much Big Brother for me. It's not that I haven't been unaware of Google's practices of reading private emails, tracking and selling data—it's rampant industry-wide, isn't it? I haven't been on Facebook in a really time long time, but I'm sure it's more of the same there.

Overall, I just would prefer subtlety, less used car salesman's plaid suit.

I knew it was time. I've made the following changes:

• Email: ProtonMail. A client-side encrypted email service. A free version is available but I opted with the first tier of service, especially with its custom domain option.
• Search engine: DuckDuckGo
• Browser: Brave. A privacy / ad-blocking browser based on the Chromium project.
• Webstore for Android: Aurora OSS. This became necessary as I reset my Android phone to factory defaults and avoided to sign in with Google, but since installing apps needs a Google account by default...well, this solution is pretty cool!

Sure, I no longer am a part of the whole Google ecosystem: Photos, Sheets ad nauseum, but, it feels pretty good. Say that I'm from a simpler time, but I just want my search engine to be a search engine; I want things to be hard. I no more want to be followed online anymore than I want to be tracked around a store by a salesman. In my day, I never liked fax / scanner / printer combos and I don't like modern amalgamations in kind.

While I get it, I'm out.