Keeping google out.

[Cree]

Im sure the majority of our community wants to keep the big surveillance behemoths out of our PinePhones. This brings me to a question, how safe is it to sync up with google anything at any time? For example, syncing contacts from google. As a android user until now, google has played a big part of my tech life but i wish for this to be no more. With thousands of contacts stored in google, this would be easiest way to transfer them to my pinephone. But therein lies the problem. Could syncing with google even momentarily for something so meager have downstream effects on the privacy of my Pinephone? What about accessing other google services on an as need basis, but not google itself? I understand much of the tracking from google is built into android and backdoors hidden within apps. But would accessing google meets over morph browser or using a gmail account in a mail client on the pinephone pose any threat?

[KC9UDX]

Why not sync them to another device and then transfer from there to the PinePhone? Then you don't even have to worry about it.

[bcnaz]

IF you sync through a Google cloud, does it make any difference how many times you bridge to other devices ?

[KC9UDX]

I'm not sure what you mean. I did this with the Apple cloud; I used an iPhone to send my contacts to a phone that would let me convert them to .vcf files. I lzx'd those and sent the archive to an Android phone. There's no Apple metadata in the contacts, and Apple doesn't know that I did this unless they are really, really dastardly and conniving (colluding with an app developer to steal the contract list in my Android phone).

[nico69400]

Why don't use the google caldav? No tracking or nothing send to google (just login/pwd)? 
I do that on my android phone to synchronize my apple iCloud contacts et planning.

[vanja]

'Hi,As a user of degoogled android for years now, I can offer you a solution I did. Synced google contacts to android phone, installed CalDav/ CardDav (now supported by NextCloud client itself I believe) and sycned all those contacts to my nextcloud instance running in digital ocean vps.after that i wiped that android phone out, and installed CyanogenMod OS (nowadays called LineageOS) and never used google services or google accounts since then.If you are "keeping google away" do it proper. if you still keep all your personal emails in their cloud, and keep logging in to check your emails from different devices and different locations...dunno...you are not doing a good job of keeping them away or at least forward all your gmail to some other address and then read that other address and never login to google btw all android apps that I need work just fine without google services. (like my netbank, whatsap, whatever). it\'s a android developers choice if he will make hard dependency on google services and crash and burn if its not found or not.and when I run  netmonitor/netstat app, i see exactly what application is connected where, and there is no mysterious open sockets, everything under control 

Im sure the majority of our community wants to keep the big surveillance behemoths out of our PinePhones. This brings me to a question, how safe is it to sync up with google anything at any time? For example, syncing contacts from google. As a android user until now, google has played a big part of my tech life but i wish for this to be no more. With thousands of contacts stored in google, this would be easiest way to transfer them to my pinephone. But therein lies the problem. Could syncing with google even momentarily for something so meager have downstream effects on the privacy of my Pinephone? What about accessing other google services on an as need basis, but not google itself? I understand much of the tracking from google is built into android and backdoors hidden within apps. But would accessing google meets over morph browser or using a gmail account in a mail client on the pinephone pose any threat?