Divesting from tech monopolies

 After listening to the Vox's Recode podcast series Land of the Giants, I reaffirmed my choices to delete my Facebook account and to never shop on Amazon again. I sent my daughter some kitchen stuff for her new apartment set-up and was able to shop online without succumbing to the behemoth. A few years ago I started to try to extricate myself from Google: I already use Firefox as my browser;  I have been very happy with the privacy-oriented Duck Duck Go as my search engine; I also switched most of my email to a free and ad-free zoho email account.  But I haven't given up on Google Maps yet (I didn't like Apple's map app), and I have yet to cut the cord on YouTube. I would like to get rid of gmail entirely, but I still have a twitter account linked to it that I use every day, and I'd need to back up the few things I have in Google Drive (at least I downloaded all the photos I had there). I think my primary Apple store account is also linked to that gmail, so I'd need to switch that as well. Ugh, so many ways the big G is entwined with our online lives.