Time to take privacy seriously.

Free speech does not exist, and big tech is in the state's pocket. Do you trust them with your life?

On Technology

Since the creation of the internet we have been living in the information revolution, following on from the industrial one. It’s an age that feels like we stumbled into, that one day there were no computers and the next they were on the news, then in every office, then every home, then every trouser pocket.

We realised one day that they audibly listen to us without us knowing, said to ourselves “well that’s concerning” and carried on as normal. Now it’s accepted and expected. We feel like this change hasn’t been that big, but the big one is just around the corner, AI. The truth is that AI has been brewing for decades and the creation and proliferation of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are the latest stages, just as we went from the office computer to the pocket computer stage. Technology now rules the world, our relationships with our people, and us ourselves. It’s not a part of life that is just now becoming inevitable, it’s been that way since I at least was born. I don’t need to remind you that it’s the very reason and method you’re listening to me.

I do not hate technology, nor am I scared of it. Technological fearmongering has been around for the longest time, most especially for economic and personal safety reasons.

The lightbulb put candlemakers out of business, but there’s no labour market glut still left behind from this. People adapted. The wires connected to people’s homes did not zap passers-by underneath to death. Changes such as these bring changes in many other ways. Some are negative whilst some are positive, and most are neutral. There is a very specific reason why for this, and it’s incredibly important. It is because technology, fundamentally, is synonymous with the word “tool”. A human who uses a sharp stone to dig instead of using his own hands has employed technology to make a process more efficient. There is no fundamental difference at all between this and a large language model being commanded by a man to compile information and generate a summary far quicker than could be typed out with his own hands.

The eye of Sauron

So what is my problem? Well, remember that I said we are in the information age, and I did not say the “technological age”. For as long as mankind has made and used tools we have existed in a technological age, but the information age is something much more specific. The retention of information is knowledge, and knowledge is, indeed, power.

Whoever has access to the information which our pocket computers collect and transmit knows your name, date of birth, personal identification numbers, bank details, where you physically are right this second and the places you visit most often, if those places are business addresses and so are likely to be where you work or are residential addresses and likely belong to friends and family - so even if you got rid of your phone now then somebody with this data would know what day and time they’d be likely to find you as they have years and years of this telemetry at their disposal.

They know your sleeping patterns, they know if there are other devices which spend time in close proximity to you at night, so they know if you have a spouse that keeps their phone on their other bedside table; they know if they were to enter under the cover of darkness whether or not you would be alone. They have just about every photo you’ve ever taken so know exactly what you & your frequent company look like and where you spend your time together. They know your calendar so again know the time and place to find you on a given day.

These “people” who are not people but the information giants Meta, who owns Facebook, Alphabet Inc., who own Google & YouTube, Apple, and Microsoft. At least one of those, but likely most of them, have your entire life’s information to rights. They know every single thing about you, and with this knowledge they would have total power over you should they choose to use it. You simply trust that they won’t.

And to be fair, you’re probably right.

I’ve had somewhat of a scrape with Meta as in 2020 I had a political Instagram account which was somewhat successful and got banned around the time of the election that year. I evaded the ban and made a new account, and not long after it also was banned, but now, along with my personal Facebook account – that I never expressed a political opinion on - and which was the only place I had stored some of my most valuable memories. Just about all of the photos from the early days of meeting my wife, photos of family birthday parties, weddings, funerals, the lot – gone. Earlier this year I made a new personal Facebook account and that too has now been banned on the week of me writing this, with no reason given, but I assume they still have my name and face on file and employ an algorithm to track me & other rowdy dissidents down and hit us like whack-a-moles should we try to pop up again.

All things considered, that’s not too bad considering what they could do to me if they wanted to.

But there is an organisation who would very much like to obtain this data, not just of mine but probably every person watching this video. It’s election year again, and the levers of power within the Global American Empire are never more twitchy. Not long after the last one they imprisoned, debanked, and relentlessly pursued the destruction of the livelihoods of many people who simply attended the Capitol protests.

The depressing lack of freedom of conscience and the two-tier society of Britain are being pronounced loudly to the world as Kier Starmer opens 24-hour fast-track courts to prosecute working-class White people, be they ones who gestured in the face of a police officer, or just announced their displeasure on Facebook at the mass murder of girls in a dance class. No such 24-hour court or fast-track process existed for the migrant’s son who committed this gut-wrenching crime in the first place.

Nowhere is safe

And now I bring this back round to America, because it really aggravates me how so many over there think they are safe because a dormant piece of paper says so.

Your government did exactly the same 4 years ago. 700 people were arrested on or shortly after January 6th 2021. Alex Jones was sentenced to a fine of 1.5 billion dollars for expressing a view. Whether that view is correct or not, it demonstrates with blinding clarity that political speech and attendance is successfully criminalised in the land of the free, the home of the brave. You may think it’s not because you nor anybody you know has been arrested, but I can say the same, and you’ll surely acknowledge Britain’s dire political situation. I need you to realise that we’re not even just “10 years ahead of you”, we’re in the exact same position right now. So what can we do to manage our risk?

The first thing you can do is precisely not what I am doing. If you don’t want to draw the eye of Sauron, don’t talk about this stuff. In fact I’d advise you don’t do that anyway for several reasons, namely that it takes enormous effort to spend the time it takes to talk about political issues and not be dragged down into dark depths of despair.

If that’s not you, then don’t risk it to begin with. And, making videos like I do will not change the situation. Democracy is a sham and it is not true that if you convince 51% of a population of your viewpoint then you’ll win. Power remains in the hands of very few people, despite their propaganda which tells you the contrary. It’s a highly exclusive club and you’re not getting in, and if you convince a person of something one day, this club can use their incredibly large toolkit of influence and conditioning to make them forget all about it the next, or at least stop them from caring enough to change their habits or overall view. You have to accept this if you want to retain your sanity.

90% of people listen to their phone and the TV and will not listen to you. Accept it and work around it.

Finding the hope

And you work around this through real-world connections. If you want to make society better, don’t stand on a soapbox shouting until you’re red in the face. The propaganda will always reach more ears than your counter-propaganda.

Join local communities such as clubs and a church. Spend time with your family and friends, and help them in every single way you can. This way you will make yourself and them better people, and that is your lot in life. If you cannot make the country as a whole healthier and stronger, then narrow your scope. If one person in every single was family doing all that they could to help and improve them, then every family in the country would be better, and as such, the country as a whole would be better. We are tiny pieces in a large machine, and so we can’t effect the machine as a whole, but we can effect the parts we’re connected to. Draw that out across every tiny piece and the whole machine will work correctly.

Economic incentives

Now, these things will manage your risk of the regime commanding big tech to hand over your data, but that data is still theirs, and in essence, your whole life is too. Companies owning your electronic data and telemetry is not something I completely oppose in principle either. I remember again around 2020 one of my lecturers discussing Universal Basic Income as Andrew Yang was drawing attention to his campaign with this idea. This lecturer said that the way he envisions it being possible would not be through taxation and redistribution, but free market competition. How?

By “tech” companies, who should right be called data companies, paying users for their data. Sure Google make the Pixel phones and Microsoft make Office and the Surface devices, but these are grains of sand on their revenue beach. Their monumental wealth comes from the data that you produce. Every data point that I mentioned earlier is used by them to adverise or build slash optimise services and train AI models on, or sold to other companies for similar purposes.

I just ran the numbers for the combined revenue in 2023 of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta, and it comes to just over $1 trillion; 1.037 to be exact. The vast majority of it coming from value generated by users such as you and I using their services. Consider that there are 8.2bn people in the world and you can imagine how valuable each person and their data is to these companies.

Have we seen a single penny from it? You can argue that our data is the way in which we pay for their services, as after all, search engines and social media are free; and to that I say, bollocks! They all charge you a pretty penny for a plethora of services; Microsoft Office, Google Drive, and if I even look at the price of an Adobe Creative Cloud license I feel like I need to start paying a mortgage. That’s the thing too, you don’t ever own this software, you pay a license for them to just let you use it at their behest. How very kind.

You pay Google to store your data in Cloud which they then use to advertise, sell on, train AI, and make an absolute fortune from. They should be paying you! Again you can argue “Well, it’s the free market, if you don’t like it then don’t use it!” Well that’s exactly what I intend to do. Let me tell you how, because, if we all did this and pressured these companies with revenue loss, who knows what could happen?

Alt-tech adoption

When it comes to the privacy and security of your data what matters most is who owns it, and if you trust them.

If you trust Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple with your life, then quite frankly you’re fucking mad. The good news is that you don’t need big tech to make use of tech. There are fully functional alternatives to every single thing that you use your phone and computer for everything you already do. I work in the corporate IT industry and I can tell you that everybody used to laugh at system admins who refused to be at least 80% reliant on cloud storage and server hosting – most of which goes through Microsoft’s Sharepoint and Azure services.

Then in July this year, Crowdstike fucked up an update on their kernel-level security software in Microsoft devices and bricked 8.5 million enterprise machines, many of them remote and inaccessible, causing an estimated $5bn in direct losses just within the US Fortune 500 in one day. Nobody’s laughing at those old-school sysadmins now – and you can be like them.

Private cloud

Do you have or know a family member who has an old laptop or crappy Dell PC collecting dust? I know I do. There’s a good chance that each of those have a 500 or so gigabyte hard drive in them.

Did you know you can wipe that drive, turn the machine into an Ubuntu home server completely for free, and store your data on there as a private cloud which only your devices can access, all while doing your elderly relative a favour by taking the computer off their hands? And it’s highly likely you can put another hard drive in there to expand the storage or run in a RAID format to essentially backup everything on the first drive should it break.

If that bug bites you hard enough you can then looking into hosting your own email exchange and domain, a media centre to stream your own completely legally acquired and IP-compliant shows and films, VPN, and much more. Yes this stuff isn’t easy to do if you have no experience, but I’ll continue on to very briefly highlight alt-tech services and you will have to accept that if you want greater personal control over your data, or greater trust in the third-parties you give it to, you will have to sacrifice convenience and become more digitally proficient. Again, if you don’t care enough about your life being so much in big tech’s – and therefore the state’s – hands to make this sacrifice, then I think you’re fucking mad.

Personal computing

Now we have to talk about Linux. Yes I know it’s technically GNU/Linux. Think of it as a free and open-source (FOSS) alternative to MacOS and Windows. The nature of software being FOSS means that everybody with enough knowledge of the programming language used can observe all the workings of the software to either check it for efficiency improvements, audit it to make sure it has good privacy measures, and in a similar way to crypto the crypto blockchain’s zero-trust system, the software’s community can check that there’s nothing dodgy going on. It is, in a word, decentralised. Now there are many Linux “distributions” such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch, which are owned and released by companies/foundations, but they don’t make a lot of money because they do not farm your data and almost entirely on donations or by selling support packages to businesses that use them. FOSS, like the blockchain, is as much a philosophy as it is a technology.

If you have a personal laptop or desktop computer, I urge you right now to start researching Linux. It’s full of insane rabbit holes and yes it’s not as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows, but these are the compromises you have to make to not be fucking mad. I’ve settled on using Nobara on my PC, which is a one-man-modified version of the much larger Fedora distribution designed to be easier out-of-the-box for gaming and content creation, and it certainly is. I’ve had to sacrifice very little in terms of practicality compared to Windows. You can also download Nobara with the Gnome or KDE Plasma “desktop environments”, which are essentially the graphical interface. They’re unique in their own right, but really, Gnome is similar in layout and use to MacOS, and KDE is similar to Windows 10, but both can be customised extensively. If you would rather a minimal but incredibly stable & lightweight distribution, then Linux Mint is always the way.

If you’re a beginner, I don’t think you need to look at anything more than these two. You can then use Brave for web browsing, OnlyOffice (dodgy name I know, but it’s great) to fully replace MS Office, GIMP for basic photo editing, Davince Resolve for a free industry-level video editor, Audacity for audio editing, OBS for streaming and more. I’ve written this script using OnlyOffice on my 2020 Lenovo Thinkpad E495 on Nobara Gnome which I bought for £100, then will record the audio on Audacity and edit in Davinci Resolve on my 2020-built gaming PC on Nobara KDE. Start-to-finish alt-tech.

Mobile computing

Now what about your phone? Sadly, this is more restricted in methods to adopt FOSS software top-to-bottom than a PC, because the answer begins primarily with GrapheneOS. This operating system is designed to entirely remove an Android phone’s dependency on Google services. Ironically, the only phones that this can be ‘officially’ installed on are the Google Pixel devices. I massively regret buying a £700 Samsung S23 on a 3-year finance plan last year because I’ll continue to use it until it’s paid off, but could instead have bought a used Pixel 6a for just £120 in good condition and adopted this OS. Now I don’t care if you’ve always loved iPhones for any reason under the sun, if you’re still reading this but won’t make the switch to a Pixel with GrapheneOS then, guess what, you’re fucking mad.

GrapheneOS lets you “sandbox” Google services meaning you can remove permissions that it wouldn’t otherwise let you turn off, and even turn all of their services entirely on or off depending on when you want to use them. Replace your Google/Apple Maps with the ‘Magic Earth’ app, which is FOSS and built on OpenStreetMaps, and you’re now well on your way to running your life fully on alt-tech. But there’s one more thing to cover everything off, and you can take a breath because it’s a super convenient one: Public cloud, and there’s none better than Proton.

Public cloud

I absolutely adore Proton, because they are in practice what we would hope Google is. Proton offer mail, calendar, password manager and a truly fantastic VPN for free. They do have paid plans for greater features and storage, but, how do they manage this business model? The answer is that, like Google, they do harvest your data, but this data is actually encrypted, private, and as anonymised as it can be. Once again, the value of our data being given away is not neccesarily a bad thing, especially when you get a lot back out of it and you trust the people you’re giving it to. They are also very wisely based in Switzerland. The Swiss know the value of physical gold, but also the new digital gold called data.

The world’s wealthiest and most powerful have stored their wealth in Switzerland for centuries because their government knows they have far more to gain long-term by being neutral and upholding a good reputation and level of trust in securing these assets than seizing or taxing them, and so their data laws are second to none. So if the state wants your data from Meta, they’ll recieve it on a silver platter. But if they want your data from Proton, they are not obliged to provide it, and if they did, their reputation would sink. If the data was acquired through espionage instead, it’s highly unlikely it would be decrypted and actionable before anybody knew about it. So for goodness sake, if you’re not going to self-host your own private cloud entirely, get off Google, Microsoft, and Apple’s clouds and emails and onto Proton’s right this second.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this roundabout journey examining the nature of technology and how to take it back under your own control. I’m yet to setup my own home server but will do so as soon as is feasible, and I will continue learning Linux in my own way, feeling all the fun of getting something new to work and the extreme frustration when it doesn’t. All part of the charm. Don’t forget that the practical steps I’ve described are extremely surface-level, so enjoy the learning process and remember why you’re doing it. It’s for the sake of taking control of your life.