About

I hope to show the users of this site that there are many alternatives to big tech. There is a plethora of wonderful and talented software developers out there that make great apps for you to use. These don’t require your home address, drivers licence and stool sample simply to have an account. You can come and go as you please. You can be free.

More importantly your data can be kept locally, ie on device or in your own home without a company running algorithms over it to recognise faces from your photos and work out which adverts to send you. By using alternatives to big tech you can prevent much of your personal data being shared. For example you can prevent your phone from sending data to Apple or Google every few minutes. This data can tell them, amongst other things, what music your are listening too, what apps you have downloaded and where you are.

Just think of the future, the one our kids will live in. The trend at the moment is toward more and more surveillance. We are already living in a digital panopticon where all card transactions are shared with multiple third parties, your location is tracked via your phone and your social media accounts are mostly public. Some people even use devices from Google, Amazon or Apple in their houses that are actually listening to you, harvesting data from your own home. These can be useful but it is like have someone else in your house watching you. Since these devices look like a little innocuous hockey puck no one cares. If this trend continues it will be very easy for central authorities and big companies to control where you shop, where you travel and what you can spend your money on. Not only will you have a credit score, but you will have a social credit score of sorts. There are tools that you can use to bypass companies that force you to have an account in your real name. You don’t have to stop using products you enjoy, but you can at least have the option to not use them. This takes some skill and effort, but the ability to have a private conversation when you want to is worth it.

This site started in late 2021, with a number of events making me more privacy aware:

The first was the financial crisis of 2008 where the world seemed on the brink of financial collapse. This was due in part to the way sub-prime mortgages were packaged and resold over and over. It seemed that after that crisis was resolved by vast government spending, almost no one was held accountable and not much has changed. Apart from a handful of banks that went under most of the organisations that caused a multi trillion dollar loss to economies all over the world continue to do business. It is like it never happened. Watch this movie if you want a reminder of this event: "The Big Short."

Secondly, having grown up in several countries, two of which had regime changes, I have seen the history books we studied at school changed to a new version. It highlighted to me that most of the time we are told a story and we just go along with it because that is the easy path. It is difficult to know what source to trust. By being more agile on the internet, more aware of privacy and the source of truth you can better protect yourself from stories that may not be true.

Thirdly, in the last ten years Facebook has grown to have about 2.5 billion active users. That is one third of the planet, and arguably the demographic that has the most resources. It is difficult to set up an account with Facebook using a pseudonym so most people willingly give their real world information, including home address. Facebook has already been hacked, even though it has some of the best engineers on the planet. As with the banks, I just don't want to trust data linked to my single government identity with these corporations operated for profit. They have the power, ability and skill to alter your news feed to support a chosen narrative, i.e. your perception of reality is manipulated by a single company. I also do not want this company knowing where I live or what I do for sport, school or business. That said I realise they are incredibly useful in terms of community building, events co-ordination and keeping friendships going. So there is a significant trade off if you decide to ditch surveillance apps like Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/GoogleHangouts etc.

However the trend here is important, in the early 90's the internet was more free. Now it is controlled by a small group of large companies that give you all these admittedly brilliant tools for free...for free?

So how did these companies become so wealthy? Because they sell your data to advertisers. This means you are the product.

In some sense you/we are digital serfs. The products are as I said very good and in many cases make your life better and more enjoyable. But in other ways you now need permission to post something, you need to be approved by Microsoft/Facebook/Google to host a website or publish certain content. I am all for freedom, peace and people working together. So use what tools you want to. But I think competition is important too, having a single point of failure is not resilient and so using open source software that anyone has access too is really important. The ability to continue to produce content and not be cancelled is free speech. This is important.

Being private online and protecting your data is more difficult every day, this is because your data is worth money. That is the incentive for the companies to be good at harvesting your identity and habits. The better they are at invasive tech the more money they make. Data is like the new oil. You can’t realistically beat these companies, they hire very talented engineers. But you can bypass them. You can ignore them and use other tools. You can vote with your feet. There are enough people out there that make software to make this possible, the community is small but passionate and I hope still growing.

That is what this site is about. Learning new tools that give you options, choice and digital agility. They can prevent you becoming reliant on one company, one social platform one internet provider etc. I hope it will give you the opportunity and skill to be private when you want to be, and public when you need to be.