This isn't accurate. I mean in generally you're pointing in the right direction. Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful, and in fact I think that it is maybe _you_ who don't know your computer as well as the person you were replying to, do -- after all they bring up relevant and actual details while you point at generalities like "Mail > Google".

Let me try to steer this in a constructive direction -- you're implying use of "GMail" with your "Mail > Google". That is fine -- it's certainly possible to set up a Google account with Mac OS X through the "Accounts" feature, implying SSO and/or reusable credentials API.

But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box. You do not need an "esoteric OS", and such an OS set up with something like described above for Mac OS X, or to demonstrate the simplicity of your argument, a Google Chrome binary blob (e.g. Ubuntu) makes the OS much less "esoteric" since it's now too a "Google vehicle". Point being that Mac OS is not a Google vehicle by default. Neither is Windows, for that matter. And this for a very simple reason -- normally both Apple and Microsoft are _competitors_ to Google, and they would very much prefer the data they would have been able to collect on the user, is sent upstream to Apple and Microsoft respectively, not to their competitor. But that is tangential, again -- the primary point is that by default Internet is not Google, not with e.g. Firefox on Windows.

Let me be perfectly clear -- there's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services. By using e.g. Firefox (which is indeed funded by Google) your data are _not_ sent to Google by default, and a Web extension like uMatrix also nips attempts by sites to send data to Google, in the bud. None of this is an esoteric OS.

I have nothing against warning us against Google monopoly, but I find your follow-up replies to be deflections and doubling down when the person is making it perfectly clear that their network does not contain data being sent to Google (in as far as they can trust their packet logs, I would say, but if you were to contest that, you'd need to try harder indeed).

Unfortunately you are 100% wrong and highly naive.

> But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box ... There's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services.

I have been perfectly clear about this:

> Not in source code not in network requests, zero.

You do realise that gstatic.com is a web service right that can be used for tracking.

The OP does not any Google requests, this includes gstatic, connectivitycheck.gstatic.com, Google owned IP addresses, DNS addresses and anything that can or could connect to or is affiliated with Google in anyway possible.

This includes Google baked into the source code that nobody asked for that can connect to Google for their own purposes. You have no clue what could change in an OS update with MacOS that you didn't ask for, and now with Apple is trying to work with Google to try and bake Google Gemini into their OS to power a voice assistant, an upcoming privacy nightmare nobody asked for. (0)

The fact that macOS is has Google integration baked into the OS with Mail, Calendar, Search, etc makes me not recommend it for anyone that cares about privacy.

> Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful.

Here is a concrete example:

You can use the base Linux kernel as an example, there are zero sources of Google in there which can be used as the basis of an "esoteric OS" so it is a good practical starting point to base a proper "ZeroGoogle" OS. Not any standard distro.

I even said busybox at one point, but you chose to ignore that.

Windows has its own different tracking which the OP also doesn't want so that is a complete moot point.

If you are serious about privacy and don't want any Google tracking, you would use an esoteric OS.

(0) https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/apple-is-in-talks-to-use-g...