How to Resist Big Tech

The privacy violations by Big Tech and the government are manifold and overwhelming to internalize in one sitting. It can easily feel hopeless.

However, you can take action, and even a small action among many people is enough to halt their takeover. No matter who you are, you have multiple vectors to prevent institutional encroachment on your freedoms.

A. Know where you stand

Everyone needs to do this, no matter who you are.

To clarify the boundaries in your mind, you should know where you want to draw the line about privacy.

  • Broadly, you should look at a specific set of your personal data, then assume the worst possible thing that someone could do with it.

Some people think this isn’t a big deal, and you may be right. You can choose not to use a service or leave a country.

We can avoid using a service until it becomes a monopoly. Once everyone uses something for a specific, frequent need, there’s nowhere else to turn. It’s a slow creep into your rights, so it may be too late by the time you see the need to act.

This isn’t a concocted threat by conspiracy nuts, either. As of 2021, the US intelligence community now pervasively uses ad blockers, so these concerns have merit.

B. Discuss it openly

Everyone should do this, but that also depends on the friends you keep company with.

The discussion of censorship is a massive matter, and isn’t always as clear as most people think it is.

  • Stopping all illegal activity may sound reasonable, unless the law itself is acting against human rights.
  • Blocking all nude photos of children sounds sensible at first, until you consider that doctors sometimes need those photos to save lives.
  • Prohibiting all dark web or torrenting activity seems like it’ll stop crimes, but it’ll also stop civil disobedience against a tyrannical government.
  • Many beneficial services in society are crime-adjacent (i.e., they are the same actions as criminals).
  • No Vehicles In The Park demonstrates this example plainly.

Saying “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t need to stay private” is a bit like saying “I don’t do anything criminal, so I don’t have a problem with a cop following me everywhere I go”.

While you may see no problem with this issue now, at least one of two conditions give you peace:

  1. You hold presently fashionable opinions, which can often change in as little as 5–10 years.
  2. Your government hasn’t abused its power, which changes as different large group leaders gain political power and become corrupt.

Many good questions will also dismantle the “you have nothing to hide” argument:

  • Why do you have the right to know?
  • What level of trust do you believe you’ve earned?
  • What do you want to do with all this information?
  • How, specifically, will this make things better or help society?
  • How long will you store those messages, and will those messages prevent someone from getting a government job later in life?
  • Can anyone in law enforcement have access to this data?
  • Is this the most important thing to spend time and money on?
  • What is the process to remove data that may be libelous or cause undue harm to an individual or organization?
  • This action will generate mountains of information. Someone has to store, manage, analyze, and protect the data:
    • For a private organization, how can this affect corporate profits or expose them to legal liability?
    • For the government, will taxes need to increase to manage it?
  • Will a government use this stored data to defend people accused of a crime, or only for prosecution?
  • Is a government exclusively responsible for the complete chain of access to this data, or will it involve private organizations they must trust won’t use it elsewhere?

The word “surveillance” is a buzzword with negative connotations, so pay attention to any other words that permit surveillance without explicitly saying it:

  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Collaboration
  • Connected
  • Free
  • GPS-enabled
  • Integrated
  • Partner
  • Personalized
  • Safety
  • Smart

Whenever and as long as you have the freedom, publish the surveillance and censorship you do find (e.g., report it to the news, Atlas of Surveillance).

If you’re in the tech industry, connection is protection, and it’s worth reaching out to others who can help. In September of 2022, a network of sufficiently talented tech workers somewhat halted censorship in Iran.

C. Learn basic cybersecurity

While this applies in general, good data hygiene practices and general distrust protect you the most.

A large company or government is never entirely trustworthy as long as it’s also a participant in the marketplace it runs.

Very often, a company or government will advance a privacy-violating move under the claim of protecting something, which will be whatever people are afraid of.

  • We’ve seen this before in history, but it used to be from a government promising to protect civilians from a foreign threat.
  • Now, the justification has usually been about protecting children in some capacity.

Watch carefully for political candidates companies lean toward, irrespective of political platform.

  • Companies often pay for lobbying in that direction.
  • Other times, political candidates have invested in that company’s stock.

Watch for psychological tricks to imply you don’t have power or shouldn’t say anything.

  • If you see something, sharing it outside that siloed group can often create dramatic changes once other powerful people see injustice.

Learn what data a company does have from you, or delete it using services such as Own Your Data.

  • If you abandon a social network, manually delete the posts yourself, since the company often won’t delete the account information.

Practice degrees of separation between different entities, and avoid giving too much information.

  • Only use your email address with a password, and avoid authentication logins or stored passphrases with a Big Tech corporation.
  • Don’t use third-party payment processors. While PayPal, Stripe, and Square make life more convenient, they usually don’t add any security your bank doesn’t have.

D. Use alternatives

Not everyone should find alternatives, but you can often protect your rights with a little bit of research and a small learning curve.

You can definitely keep using the systems that exist, though it’s often more trouble than it’s worth:

No matter what, always opt out of data harvesting.

The simplest way to individually take action is to inform yourself and find trustworthy alternatives. Technology makes things cheaper and easier, and rebuilding most of the Big Tech’s services isn’t as hard as you may imagine.

There are three major reason people don’t adopt an alternative to a data-harvesting service:

  1. They aren’t aware that the service exists.
  2. They’re afraid of the habits they may have to change.
  3. The data-harvesting is the business model (i.e., ~$20/person in anonymized marketing data or ~$10-150/person for background checks), and most consumers don’t want to pay for a service directly.

In general:

  • Use a VPN whenever you can.
  • Learn to avoid or distrust anything by a massive tech company (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple).
  • Try to avoid anything from China, especially computer hardware and networking equipment manufactured there.
  • Don’t shop on Amazon, buy Amazon products, or work for Amazon.
  • Get “dumb” technology to serve your purposes:
    • Instead of getting a “smart” TV (which tracks your data), get a computer screen, since it’s basically the same thing with more tracking.
    • Avoid using Big Tech speaker/microphone combo interfaces (e.g., Alexa, Siri, Cortana) or anything else that can track your data (e.g., Oculus).

Messaging (to avoid offenders like Facebook and WhatsApp)

Web browser (to avoid Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge)

  • Use separate browsers or private mode when working with Big Tech.
  • Aim for browsers that are not on the Chromium engine when you can (e.g., Firefox’s Gecko engine).
  • Use browsers on the Chromium engine that respect your privacy (e.g., Brave).

Search engine (to avoid Google)

  • Brave and Qwant are excellent alternatives that don’t rely on Bing.

Social media (to avoid consuming on services like YouTube and Facebook)

  • Move from YouTube to another video service like PeerTube, Bitchute, Odysee, or Vimeo.
  • Move from corporation-owned social media sites like Facebook and Bluesky directly into the fediverse.
    • Essentially, anyone with a powerful-enough computer can run an instance that works the same as other social media, but each instance can pull social media feeds from the other instances (e.g., Mastodon, Lemmy).

OS/hardware (to avoid Apple, Microsoft, and Google products)

Beyond this, there are many alternatives available:

You could step away from all the tech, though it will depend heavily on your career specialization.

  • Consider moving to a smaller city or town, or go as far as homesteading.
  • Reduce your reliance on technology by getting a low-tech phone (e.g., Light Phone).

E. Use tech-savvy alternatives

If you do work in the tech sector, you have additional things you can do.

Whenever you do use alternatives, make sure to tell everyone else you know about it. Smaller and open-source projects simply don’t have the presence or advertising budget of their much larger competitors willing to pay for market exposure.

One of the most important things you can do is to advance free, open-source software and schematics, which allows others to re-release and develop separately if the original creator becomes too totalitarian:

You can also create tooling to advance awareness of tracking behaviors:

F. Stay anonymous

Anonymity is the best way to stay private, since large organizations have bigger problems unrelated to you, though that’s not necessarily true if you declare unfashionable things that work against their interests too harshly, too frequently, and too directly.

If you are shut down, separate your activities to avoid complete annihilation:

  • Make separate work and personal accounts, with each app you’re developing as a separate account.
  • Never, ever login as a personal account with a work-related account already on it, or vice versa.
  • Use separate profiles for work and pleasure (which is also a great productivity trick).
  • When in doubt, use virtual machines to open suspicious things, and open it over a VPN.
  • If you can afford it, have “burner computers” that are known-insecure or that you wipe frequently.
    • If you’re not doing anything computation-intensive (e.g., web browsing), computers in the developed world can be relatively cheap.

Be mindful of what government you’re working with and in. Some of them don’t have laws about privacy, while others operate in the interests of corporations over the individual.

Whenever possible, openly state to governments that you decline for their use of facial recognition technology or biometrics.

When Big Tech targets you, you can only reliably push back by publicly displaying what happened. Document everything that happened, and share recordings and screenshots of everything on social media. A company will often backpedal on an action, but prepare to use an alternative platform. Corporations only care about their public image, and typically won’t indemnify you for your suffering without a lawsuit.

G. Stay informed

The information for just about anything is readily available on the internet, so do your research if you’re unsure about what you’re hearing.

Before using any software, actually read the terms of service to see what you’re implicitly consenting to.

Use services like Mozilla’s Creep-o-Meter to see how safe you generally are from privacy violations.

Pay close attention to values presented by the topmost parent company of a business, and closely watch any acquisitions or mergers tied to the organizations you use.

  • Try to find worker-owned tech companies, such as with Tech Coops list.
  • Some relatively smaller groups, like Gab as of 2023, focus on fighting Big Tech.

There aren’t really any laws that require organizations to inform the public if a government organization (e.g., FBI, NSA, CIA) were to start monitoring their activities. There are laws, however, that are effective gag orders. For that reason, many of them place conspicuous “warrant canaries” in clear and public locations (such as a webpage). No update means a government clearly monitored the organization.

H. Learn advanced cybersecurity

Many elements are complex enough that it’s worth researching and discussing more in-depth:

  • What would you do if a company hosted your email who assists a totalitarian country?
  • What would you do if elected criminals are harvesting your information?

If you have the skill for it, learn to hack DRM, work outside the mainstream, and generally become more tech-savvy.

G. Take political action

You can do some things that will partially solve the problem:

  • Fight back with litigation (e.g., DoNotPay).
  • Publicly shame the organization on social media (and on a different social media if they are the social media company).

However, this is not a perfect method, and will often not fully indemnify you if they’ve abused your rights.

Joining class-action lawsuits (e.g., Facebook User Privacy Settlement) isn’t that useful. They’re dumb lawsuits where attorneys profit, regardless of who wins.

  • Class action lawsuits mean you can’t dispute an issue with them about that issue later.
  • If it’s small damages below a certain amount (~$5,000), take it to small claims:
    • You won’t need to pay for representation.
    • The cost of the damages is typically not worth the corporation flying their lawyer out to deal with it.

If you’re building something within the scope of Big Tech’s influence, they may send a cease and desist letter, and you can often fight it.

Even if you’re uninvolved, you always have limited political action:

  1. Follow and support the whistleblower groups that call out tech-related corruption, which include individuals connected to:
  2. Help advance political movements to cut down on surveillance and tracking:
  3. Add to the “tracker tracking”:
  4. Directly help groups that actually build and maintain open-source and federated tech things:
  5. Assist with groups that legally defend and propagate free use of intellectual properties:
  6. Direct attention toward groups that legally promote that public money should mean public code:
  7. Focus your resources and investments toward smaller organizations and groups labeled as part of the parallel economy:
  8. Don’t let yourself become distracted, deceived, or influenced by propaganda and distortion (e.g., follow No Agenda podcast). The battle is against anyone using user data without permission, for any private or public group.

More indirectly, contact your government officials to ensure laws steer a few possible places:

  1. Protect individuals from other organizations collecting or using personalized data. The European Union has created the GDPR, which in some ways makes debugging a challenge, but it’s a good start.
  2. Endorse aspects of web scraping (i.e., copying information off the internet). There are efforts to imply copyright law makes this illegal, but the internet is only free when anyone can copy it.
  3. Make the platforms required to give public, uninhibited access to their services (i.e., interoperability). This allows others to build on their work and spin off variations without requiring others to build everything from scratch, though it wouldn’t necessarily restrict Big Tech from misusing that information.
  4. Keep platforms separate from their users. The platform renders a valuable service, but they’re going too far if they’re moderating content. The USA’s Section 230 is powerful at regulating this, but the Good Samaritan Clause needs clarification.
  5. Hold the largest corporations accountable to things that aren’t corporations, such as elected officials or government bureaus. Otherwise, they will be free to act as all-encompassing monopolies while controlling most of the important information people need to live.
  6. Keep an eye on government censors as well. Any censorship that doesn’t violate a specific law (e.g., defamation, sexual exploitation) is essentially violating citizens’ civil rights.
  7. Work to advance legislation that promotes new startups. Oppose legislation that maintains large organizational power. Either angle will disrupt the systems presently in place.

Either way, do your part

If you’re willing to, you can contribute to helping archive the internet yourself:

You can spread awareness every December 16th by honoring International Day Against DRM.

As a service provider, the best way to honor privacy is to simply not keep user data whatsoever. This means your technical support may suffer, but is often worth non-negotiably honoring the users’ rights.

  • To prevent further incursions beyond your control, aim for “common areas” by using protocols instead of frameworks.

You can also work through legal channels to fight the issues yourself:

Either way, it may not be the hill you want to die on. If it’s not worth your time, stay as legally safe as possible:

If you are legally savvy, you can take it up with them directly:

If you really want to die on that hill without a legal battle, learn from your predecessors:

But, don’t fret

Even with all the above, there are limits to what you can do:

If you’re a nobody citizen (which most of us are), large entities won’t see you as worth the effort. Most people who fear “the conspiracy” feel a legitimately powerful group, but forget they’re still a group of people.

Empires collapse when the people at large grow restless enough. Staying connected with others in your community is your greatest defense against tyranny, and every empire eventually falls.

Above all, learn to release what you can’t control and find satisfaction with your life.

Image > Reality

The amount of legitimate power from FAANG’s sheer numbers isn’t as scary as it may appear:

  • Amazon had ~1,298,000 employees in 2020, but that includes all their warehousing/logistics.
  • Microsoft had ~181,000 employees in 2021.
  • Apple had ~147,000 employees in 2020.
  • Google had 135,301 employees in 2020.
  • Cisco had ~77,500 employees in 2020.
  • Facebook had 58,604 employees in 2020.
  • Netflix only had ~9,400 employees in 2020.
  • Dropbox only had 2,760 employees in 2020.

Most of Big Tech’s influence is through information, but they don’t necessarily have military power to kill and destroy if they don’t get their way, and a government can always shut them down at their desire in that region within 1–2 months.

Many recorded instances show Big Tech and governments’ actions stopped, so nothing is ever as bad as it seems.

It’s also worth noting tech trends move around a ton, and every few decades something tends to upend the value of how people want to use their technology:

  1. IBM once dominated the computer industry with their 360 system. They imagined people wanted the reliable IBM-brand computers more than anything. Microsoft signed a non-exclusive contract with them, and consumers cared more about MS-DOS (and later Windows) on a cheap computer more than whether it was an IBM computer. By the 1990s, IBM was just one of many competitors over hardware.
  2. Microsoft dominated the operating system world for a long time, with Mac and Linux picking up stragglers. However, Linux started taking over server environments by the early 2000s, and by the late 2000s Google had created a vastly superior search engine for what people wanted. As of 2022, Linux is still carving out parts of the desktop market as Windows 11 fails to improve itself.
  3. As of the early 2020s, people have grown tremendously concerned with Google’s lack of consideration for individual users’ privacy. It’s only a matter of a few years before a legitimately privacy-respecting operating system, search engine, and browser take over from the studious efforts of a clever software developer.