Building a company without Google Workspace
2026-11-04 –, Jasmine Stage 4

At ack3 we went off-Google. The team previously relied heavily on Google Workspace and it was genuinely comfortable, so the goal was to keep as much of that comfort as possible while moving to something more privacy-oriented. This talk is our experience so far, what went well, what went badly, where it hurts most, and the problems nobody warns you about when you turn Google off in a company.


Most privacy talks are about one person's laptop. This one is about a company. When an organisation picks its tools, it makes a privacy decision for everyone downstream, employees, contractors, clients, none of whom were asked. For example, a security company has to take that seriously, because other people's security depends on its own, and privacy is part of it. But running everything yourself is too much overhead when you are moving fast to secure a client, so outsourcing is the convenient answer, which only moves the question to who you outsource to.

The talk is what that was actually like: what was painless, what we underestimated, and what is still unsolved. Things like external calendar invites, shared document editing, clients who only send Google Docs links, services that assume Google SSO, and more.

ack3.ai co-founder, security researcher, university lecturer, ETHSecurity badge holder, paneer enjoyer

Founder of ack3 (prev. Ackee Blockchain) - team securing $180B+ in TVL for Lido, Aave, and Safe. The auditors who created the open-source Wake framework. Ph.D. and Assistant Professor teaching blockchain security at CTU in Prague.