How I Work Effectively Without Big Tech (Mostly)
There are a lot of great alternatives that get overlooked simply because they aren't the default.
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The vast majority of people use the defaults in everything they do in life, especially when it comes to their electronics. They do this because it’s easy; it doesn’t require much thought beyond the initial choice for the thing they want, such as the type of phone or the type of automobile. When they buy a car they don’t usually consider installing a CB radio for emergency communications. When people order things online they are more likely to purchase items that are ranked higher in their search results simply because they appear first, even if there are perhaps better items further down the list. Likewise when people purchase a computer, whether a PC or a mobile phone, they don’t usually consider deviating from whatever comes on the device by default. If it’s an Android device they will probably just click “Yes” and “I agree” on any notifications that appear, leading them to use services like Google Drive, Google Chrome, Google GMail, Google Maps, etc. without too much thought going towards installing or using alternative services. If it’s an iPhone they’re probably sticking with iCloud, iMessage, Apple Maps, etc. If it’s a PC and it shipped with Windows, as most of them do, they’re probably never going to remove Windows and honestly, I’m shocked that Google Chrome is as popular as it is on the desktop, especially given Microsoft’s aggressive push for people to use their own “Edge” browser.
This leads the majority of people to end up siloed and trapped in curated ecosystems that are controlled by these mega corporations, where their personal information can be analyzed and used for various purposes, such as targeted advertising, training machine learning algorithms ( sometimes incorrectly referred to as “AI” ), etc. This not only violates user privacy, but infringes on individual freedom by trapping people who might not be very happy with the product they’re using, but are so invested in an ecosystem that they feel overwhelmed by the idea of switching and breaking the cohesion they have among a family of products and services that all come from a single corporation. Things like our phone number or our email address are now linked to our real world identity more than perhaps they have ever been. Your employer, medical providers, utility companies, social media accounts, etc. all require this information, so switching providers for something like email is almost like moving to a new home. You have to start making phone calls, visiting websites to edit your profiles, etc. for all of these different people who need to get in touch with you so you can make sure they have up to date information, like your new email address.
This however is exactly what these companies count on. Most of the time, especially when a corporation is involved, if something is free financially, it probably means you and your data are the product being sold to someone else. You are not a user, you are a “used”. These companies count on you not being willing to go thru all the hassle of finding new providers for email, cloud storage, instant messaging, etc., then updating that information with all the people who need it.
However, I’m here to tell you that it is possible to switch, and there are actually some very good alternatives being made by companies that respect your privacy and your freedom. I generally guide and curate the technological solutions for my family so that my wife and kids don’t have to be bothered with too many details about “how” things work, though my daughter has shown some interest in privacy and technology.
So here are some of the products that we use as a family to liberate ourselves technologically as much as reasonably possible, while retaining the ability to function day to day in a world that is increasingly dependent on technology.
EMail
I’ve paid for a family plan thru ProtonMail for as long as it has existed, and I paid for individual plans for all 4 of us, including my children, before the family plans existed. ProtonMail does have a free tier that is quite good. They’ve done a lot of good work creating an encrypted email service that rivals GMail in terms of usability and features, but being encrypted and a paid service means that not only does Proton not read your emails, but they “can’t” read your emails even if they wanted to. They even have a financial incentive not to violate this trust as user subscriptions make up almost all of their income, so breaching user trust would be a death sentence for a privacy company like Proton. Using Proton doesn’t magically mean every email you send is secure, particularly if you’re communicating with someone on an insecure service like Outlook or GMail, but it does mean that at the very least, the copy that exists within your account isn’t being snooped on by third parties.
Also, instead of rolling their own crypto scheme, ProtonMail uses standard PGP encryption so if you exchange public keys with someone, you can exchange PGP encrypted emails with people outside the Proton ecosystem, including on services like GMail so that even Google can’t read those messages.
Proton’s clients are all open source and they contribute heavily to open source libraries like OpenPGPjs.
Besides mobile apps, Proton also offers two flavors of desktop application. They offer a standard desktop email client that is essentially just a wrapper for the web interface. They also offer a “Bridge” application for those who want to use their own email clients, such as Evolution or Thunderbird. The “Bridge” client basically acts as a local relay between your client and ProtonMail in order to facilitate encrypting and decrypting your messages without having to manually manage your encryption keys within your email client.
Instant Messaging
Signal, Conversations and Element
Without a doubt the two most popular instant messaging apps/services in my area are Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. Both of these are proprietary software and neither of them are end-to-end encrypted by default. Messenger is also tied to and requires a Facebook account. Meta/Facebook is a surveillance company, so anything proprietary that they make is an automatic no-go in my book.
Signal on the other hand is open source and has literally set the standard for end-to-end encrypted instant messaging. It has been taken to court multiple times and proven they do not have access to your messages. When subpoenaed by the FBI the only information they have ever been able to produce is when someone registered with the service and the last time they signed in. Many other instant messengers such as Whatsapp and even the optional end-to-end encrypted chats in Facebook use forks of the Signal protocol. I’m of the belief that all instant messages should be end-to-end encrypted by default. It’s much easier to just encrypt everything and know you’re reasonably safe, then to have to remind people to go somewhere else before they start discussing certain topics.
Conversations is an open source XMPP client. XMPP is a decentralized instant messaging protocol that operates a lot like email. Anybody can host their own server, and anybody on any server can talk to anybody else on any other server, kinda like how folks on GMail and folks on ProtonMail can still exchange messages with one another. Conversations uses OMEMO, a fork of the Signal protocol, to provide its end-to-end encryption by default. The timeliness of its notifications and the reliability of its calling features have been superior to Signal for myself and my family, so we keep it as a backup messenger and use Signal as a default since it’s easier for non-technical people to get going with.
There are other good alternatives such as Element, which is a client for another decentralized, end-to-end encrypted protocol called Matrix and seems to be more popular with group chats than Signal or XMPP. My daughter uses Element pretty regularly to talk to her cousins and friends when they play games online together.
Navigation and Maps
Organic Maps and OSMand
These are two great, open source mobile applications and websites that are based on data pulled from the OpenStreetMap project. The applications add their own suite of features and additional data to make finding your way or finding information about places easier.
OSMand is much more technical, so if you like having tons of customization options this may be the best option for you. You can overlay weather forecasts and all sorts of things. If you drive a bus or a large truck they have navigation options for those and will even let you enter the dimensions of your vehicle to help you avoid narrow bridges, low overpasses, etc.
Organic Maps is a much simpler application, so it’s the one I have installed on my kids’ phones. It still pulls from OpenStreetMap and can show information about locations, plot directions and can even use voice navigation, but Organic Maps is to OSMand what a pocket knife is to a multi-tool. They can both do a basic, core task, but one of them has a lot of other tools available.
I have used both of these applications on a regular basis, and I occasionally edit OpenStreetMap data to help make sure data in applications like these is accurate. You can see my OpenStreetMap edit history here:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/gerowen/history
Web Browser
This is one area that may be subject to pretty regular change. I used Mozilla Firefox for years, but as a result of the things I discussed here, I am currently daily driving Brave. It’s open source and comes with built-in ad and tracker blocking. I’m not terribly fond of its crypto based “rewards” program, but it’s opt-in and you can even remove the buttons from the interface. Brave also benefits from being based on Chromium, and therefore having generally better website compatibility than Firefox.
I have also been tinkering around with Epiphany (Gnome Web), though I don’t think it’ll become my daily driver. It doesn’t support extensions, its built-in ad blocking isn’t as robust as Brave or Firefox with uBlock Origin and there’s no mobile version; and syncing bookmarks between desktop and mobile devices is a must have feature for me. That said, Epiphany is surprisingly good given its small development team and even renders some web pages more accurately than Firefox does.
Search Engine
Right now I’m using Brave search because I’m using Brave browser and it’s the default. Brave Search is interesting because they have their own independent index and so are much less dependent on others like Google or Bing to provide their results. Many alternative search engines like StartPage or DuckDuckGo are basically private-ish frontends to Google or Bing. Brave also has AI assisted summaries of search results, though these have been sort of hit or miss for me. Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re nonsense and even if they worked great every time, I’m not generally a fan of getting answers directly from an LLM instead of visiting the site the LLM got its information from.
DuckDuckGo is also generally more private than Google or Bing, and does have its own indexer, but is still largely dependent on results from Bing. This has been an issue in the past where Microsoft censoring certain content from their search engine also resulted in it being removed from DuckDuckGo.
Mobile Operating System
CalyxOS is an open source, privacy oriented operating system based on the Android Open Source Project ( AOSP ). As a result of being based on Android we are able to use the vast majority of Android apps without issue. It ships in a sort of de-Googled state without any of Google’s proprietary blobs, like their "Play Services”. This can cause issues with some applications, though in our experience that has been exceedingly rare and most apps just work as expected using the open source replacement “microG” that you have the option of installing. On the rare occasion an app doesn’t work it hasn’t yet been any task that was critical or that couldn’t be accomplished in a web browser.
While you can purchase a device with CalyxOS pre-installed, what we have done is purchase unlocked Google Pixel phones online and then flash them ourselves.
CalyxOS comes with apps like Signal pre-installed and hooked into the phone dialer so that clicking on a contact who has Signal will prompt whether you want to make a Signal call or an insecure cell call over your carrier.
Even my young children use CalyxOS on a daily basis without issue.
If you’d like to use something like CalyxOS, but don’t feel like you’re up to flashing it yourself, consider purchasing a pre-flashed phone directly from them to help support them financially.
Desktop Operating System
Debian is a GNU/Linux based desktop operating system. We use it on every PC in the house, including our home server. It’s versatile, open source, stable and secure. It also has a more aggressive stance on “free” ( as in freedom, not price ) software. While they do allow you to enable and install non-free software if you wish, those repositories are not enabled by default except where necessary to improve hardware compatibility. My children have used it since they were able to hold a mouse in their hand and have no issues navigating or using it to get work done. My daughter has used it to create art, science projects, etc. I use it to do video editing and all of us use it to chat and play video games.
Debian however, out of the box, is not really aimed at new Linux users. I go out of my way to curate Debian in a way to make it user friendly and usable by my wife and kids, but if you’re free-software-curious and have never used a Linux distribution, you may not want to start with something like Debian or Arch. Instead I would probably recommend something like Linux Mint.
Cloud Storage
We have two solutions for cloud storage. The primary and most used one is a Nextcloud instance I host and manage myself on our home server that runs Debian GNU/Linux. They have desktop clients for all major desktop operating systems to support syncing files between your devices easily, and they have mobile apps to let you browse and view your files, automatically upload photos you take, etc.
Nextcloud also supports syncing your contacts, calendar, etc., which we make use of. We have a shared “Family Calendar” that we all have access to and use to help keep track of appointments as a family group.
Nextcloud can be extended thru the use of “apps”. One of these that comes recommended is “Talk”, a text, voice and video communication app that can be used to comment on files or talk directly to other users. During the pandemic around 2020 my son actually used our family Nextcloud server to have a video meeting with one of his teachers because Microsoft Teams, which they were using primarily at the school, wasn’t working properly that day.
Secondarily we use Proton Drive. Like its email service, Proton Drive is end-to-end encrypted so that only the intended users actually have access to files stored there. Not even Proton can access your files. I mainly use Proton Drive as an additional off-site backup of critical data, like my Nextcloud data. We get expanded storage in Proton due to our paid family plan, so at least once a year on “World Backup Day”, I make backup archives of important data for each person and upload it manually to their respective Proton Drive account. Proton doesn’t yet have first party desktop Linux clients for Proton Drive, but they do have mobile apps, desktop clients for other platforms and there are third party desktop Linux clients that support Proton Drive.
Office Software
I don’t do that much with regards to document management in my personal life, but on the occasion that I do I use LibreOffice. LibreOffice is a free, open source office suite that allows you to create written documents, slideshows, spreadsheets and databases. It also includes a program called “Draw” that is useful for creating flyers and banners, editing PDF documents, etc.
I do also occasionally use Nextcloud Office ( Collabora Office ). This is a browser based document solution ( based on LibreOffice ) that can be integrated with Nextcloud to provide in-browser document creation and editing, much like Google Docs or Office 365. This is especially useful when sharing documents from my Nextcloud with people who may be on a phone or other device that may not have an office suite installed, because my Nextcloud server does the work of rendering the document within the browser window for them.
Music and Entertainment
Physical media such CDs or websites that offer DRM-free downloads
When it comes to music and other forms of entertainment I believe in owning your content. If you pay a subscription fee to a service like Spotify or Netflix you don’t own a right to anything you’re watching or listening to. A service provider can revoke your access to their content at any time for any or no reason whatsoever. There’s an entire page on a site called “What’s on Netflix” specifically centered around tracking what types of content will soon no longer be available on the platform for one reason or another.
So when I want to buy a piece of music or a movie, I buy it either in physical form and then rip it myself to a non-patent encumbered format, or if I buy it digitally, I only buy it from places that give me a DRM-free copy of the content so I am free to copy and use that media in whatever way suits me best. This has the added benefit that I do not have my time wasted by ads interspersed throughout the content.
I store my music in a folder on my Nextcloud which makes it automatically accessible from my laptop, desktop or mobile phone all without having to do any additional work.
What About That “Mostly” Part?
I said “mostly” at the beginning because while almost all of the software I use is free/libre, some of it does still depend on big tech.
For example, even though I’m using CalyxOS, an alternative de-Googled Android based operating system, on my phone, it’s still based on the open source releases of Android, Google’s mobile operating system. So while it is open source, it does depend on Google.
Web browsers are another area where Google has a lot of influence. Whether you’re using a Chromium based browser or not. Google is the primary developer of Chromium, the basis upon which many other browsers including Brave are built. Even Firefox, while not Chromium based, gets the vast majority of its funding from Google in the form of payment for making Google the default search engine. So Firefox, and therefore all of its derivatives, are largely dependent on Google’s cash to help fund its development. There are very few open source web browsers that aren’t dependent on Google either technologically or financially.
What’s the Point?
I make every effort to use free ( as in freedom ) software as much as possible, and minimize my use of proprietary software, for two reasons.
Freedom. Even if you’re not a programmer, you should have a right to use any program, especially if you pay for it, in whatever way you see fit. You should have the right to modify that program, or have it modified for you, to suit your own needs. Proprietary software removes this freedom so that you don’t “own” your computer, you’re only renting its ability to do work from some mega corporation that uses their software to trap you within an ecosystem that facilitates the collection and sale of attention and personal information to surveillance companies, ad companies and data brokers.
Privacy. Proprietary software hides its inner workings. You should have the freedom to inspect any program you use, or if you’re not a programmer, have it inspected on your behalf. Without access to the source code you have no idea what a program “actually” does. A graphical user interface can say anything the programmer tells it to say, but that doesn’t mean changing settings in that interface “actually” does anything. The only way to be 100% certain that a program is behaving as it should and not doing dishonest or malicious things in the background is for that program’s source code to be publicly available.
Proprietary software developers do not respect their users; they think people don’t deserve to know how their software works or have the right to exercise autonomy over the software on their devices. This is why I insist that the software I use, especially at critical junctures like operating systems or messaging applications, be wholly open source. This isn’t always achieve-able, but I strive for it wherever I can. Even if I personally don’t intend on reading the source code, it’s the principle of the matter. I don’t plan on fully disassembling the engine in every car I buy, but I won’t buy one that puts arbitrary road blocks in the way if I ever need to have that done. The same is true of the software I use.
I realize that completely ditching somebody like Google, Apple or Microsoft isn’t easy for someone who is already heavily invested in one of these ecosystems, so while I would love to see everybody using free software that respects your privacy, I understand making the transition may be difficult for some. If that applies to you, instead of switching everything all at once, perhaps try one thing at a time. Perhaps start with email. Create an account with somebody like ProtonMail or Tuta who creates open source software and respects your privacy. Then over the next month or two slowly transition your various services from your old GMail, Yahoo or Outlook to your new email service. Perhaps set up automatic forwarding with your old accounts to forward emails to your new provider so that you don’t miss anything from people who are still using your old address. Proton has a migration assistant called “Easy Switch” to help automate this process for you.
Once you’ve switched email providers, then pick something else from the list, perhaps switch messaging platforms. Just work thru it a little at a time. Privacy and software freedom is an ever evolving journey with no end, so you don’t have to do everything all at once. Do one thing today and you’ll be better off than you were yesterday.
It’s also important to recognize that these big companies make it difficult to switch on purpose. It’s not an accident it’s difficult to log into one Apple device if you don’t already have another Apple device to verify with. It’s not an accident that Microsoft Windows regularly reverts settings you may have changed, such as switching your default browser back to Edge, or that the Windows setup process tries to up-sell you on more Microsoft products and subscriptions multiple times before you ever see your desktop for the first time. It’s not an accident that Facebook makes you wait 30 days to delete your account, and logging back in at any point during that 30 days, for any reason, cancels the deletion request. It was an intentional choice that Apple stuck with their own inferior, proprietary lightning connector for their chargers until they were legally forced to switch to a more open standard. Making the switch away from these big tech providers is difficult on purpose, so the reality is that you will most likely encounter some amount of resistance, inconvenience or other difficulty not only because you’re picking up stakes and moving somewhere else, but because big tech companies make leaving difficult on purpose. If you value your privacy, freedom and respect, I would highly recommend evaluating the things you use and depend on daily, and as you can, migrate from proprietary services and products to free/libre ones wherever possible. Many of these alternatives are surprisingly good but get overshadowed by the fact that they aren’t the default option on Windows, Android or iOS.
I just wanted to take a few minutes, in light of the other articles I’ve written about privacy, security and such, to talk about some of the things I actually use personally on a daily basis. Feel free to use different products and services than I do, there are plenty of good options. I mainly just wanted to bring awareness to a few good products for those who are curious. If there’s a topic or product I didn’t discuss here that you would like my input on, feel free to leave a comment, DM me here, contact me thru Mastodon or message me thru Signal or Conversations.
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