Avoiding Big Tech control of information

 Jim Daws:

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Here are some suggestions for escaping Big Tech’s death-grip. A quick disclaimer: while improved privacy and security is an excellent side effect of these suggestions, nothing on the internet is completely secure or private. My main goal here is to provide alternatives that will starve the Big Tech beast.

Ditch Windows and Mac operating systems in favor of Linux. This may seem the most difficult and disruptive action required of your Big Tech jailbreak but it’s far less so than you may think and absolutely essential. By allowing Microsoft and Apple control of your computing ecosystem you allow them to track your activities and collect private information. Once the government has labeled dissent as “domestic terrorism,” you can bet that the lefties in Redmond and Cupertino will be there to help monitor your political beliefs. 

Linux is a free, stable, secure, open-source operating system not controlled by Big Tech. Its code is constantly monitored by thousands of privacy zealots on the watch for any backdoors or other vulnerabilities that would allow Big Tech or Big Brother to gain access. There are thousands of free, open-source applications that can meet the needs of a vast majority of users and a huge side benefit is there is no financial motivation to constantly make your hardware and software programs obsolete like Windows and especially Macintosh. You can even give new life to old computers that have been rendered worthless by Microsoft and Apple.

On the web browser front, if you're using Google Chrome or Apple Safari, you should know that your online activity is being tracked, recorded, and sold to thousands of data brokers. Most of that data is used for marketing, but the sites you visit are a good indicator of your political leanings and activities and the collection of that data is ripe for abuse. 

A good alternative is the Brave browser. It has tracking blocked by default and has a built-in, aggressive ad blocker. You can opt to see ads and, if you do, 70% of the revenue from those ads are paid directly to you. The earnings are very modest, but you could take those nickels, dimes, and quarters and contribute them to your favorite pro-American content creators. Leaving the ad blocker turned on, makes your pages load much faster and tax your computer’s memory less.

For the love of God, stop using Google search and Gmail. These two services provide the bulk of Google's ad and tracking revenue, which they then use to censor Google search results to block content their woke and H1B visa workforce find objectionable. Google search is the most powerful gatekeeper of information ever created and Google unapologetically uses algorithms to promote politicians and ideas they agree with and crush those they oppose.

Good alternatives are DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail. You will find search results of conservative and dissident content on DDG that you’d need to go many pages deep into Google to see -- if at all. The exception is pornography, which Google is saturated with, while DDG does a good job censoring from its images and videos -- starving yet another beast.

ProtonMail is an end-to-end encrypted email service and does not know nor sell your data -- anonymously or otherwise. They offer a free basic plan or a more robust option for $5 per month -- a small price I’m more than willing to pay to prevent Google from making money off my private communications.

If Jeff Zuckerberg’s and Jack Dorsey’s promotion and protection of leftist politicians and dogma during the 2020 election hasn’t convinced you to get off Facebook and Twitter, allow me to remind you that, among many outrages, Zuckerberg spent nearly a half-billion dollars subverting the 2020 election and both Zuckerberg and Dorsey censored stories of the Biden crime family’s blatant graft and corruption. Then, after the election, both banned the 45th President of the United States from their platforms for objecting.

More than any other tech service, users seem slavishly devoted to Facebook and Twitter and willing to sacrifice the nation and their freedoms to them. This effect is what empowered Zuckerbeg and Dorsey to offend about half their customers… er, products, without fear of reprisal. 

The fact that Big Tech has tried so hard to crush Gab and Parler should tell you that’s where you need to be. Both have been smeared with allowing hate speech on their platforms, when in fact both have a very tiny amount of actual hate speech compared to Facebook and Twitter. I would also suggest MeWe as a Facebook alternative for friends and family. 

In the interest of brevity, let me also suggest you quit Google’s YouTubeTV and Netflix, which produced and aired the child sexplotation movie, Cuties, and paid the Obamas $65m to produce a catalog of leftist propaganda. Use Sling or any of the myriad streaming services.

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I like DuckDuckGo and Brave.  While I like Parler it does not seem to load properly about 75 percent of the time.  I am not a big YouTube consumer.