If you’re like me, you feel a need to need to kick the tech giants out of your life. But how? Well, nobody said it would be easy, but I’m actually doing it!
Stop using Google Chrome. Google is contemptuous of your privacy and of free speech. I recommend Brave.
Stop using Google Search. And it tracks you after you search. I recommend DuckDuckGo, with results just as good as Google’s 90+% of the time, in my experience.
Stop using Gmail. Look. Gmail is way overrated. And there are many, many other options out there which do not read your mail and extract marketable data.
Stop using Google Contacts and iCloud. Start managing your own contacts and data. There are lots of great tools to do this; it’s not that hard.
Shields up on all the tech giants’ websites and devices. Dive in to the innards of your settings (or options)—not just a few, all of them, because they like to hide things—and set your privacy settings to max.
Maybe quit social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others have becoming increasingly censorious and contemptuous of your privacy. Make them less relevant by spending more time elsewhere, if you can’t just quit for good.
Use a password manager. Stop letting your browser track your passwords.
And then, if you want to get serious:
Start learning Linux… Microsoft’s problems with privacy and security are famous. Apple has its own too. Well, there are these things called “virtual machines” which make it easy (and free) to install and play with your very own Linux installation. Try it!
…then switch to Linux. If you know how to use Linux, why not make the switch to something more permanent? You can always dual-boot.
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