One of the big problems nowadays, especially with tech companies is that the “social contract” is completely gone.
Instead of things being a “give and take”, it’s just “take, take, take”.
Between everything harvesting our personal data and charging us a monthly subscription to do that, it feels like I only exist for others to extract everything they can from me.
So, I’ve been working a lot on being less dependent on these companies that are only interested in maximizing profits and minimizing what they deliver.
Tools and programs I use to avoid being endlessly harvested
First off, my browser is the Brave browser. It has a lot of built-in blockers to prevent tracking. I also added the uBlock Origin plugin. That’s probably overkill, but I’ve been using it for so long, it’s a default plugin for me at this point. If you watch a lot of YouTube, and want to avoid embedded sponsor segments, you can also install the SponsorBlock plugin.
In the past, there was an unspoken agreement that our “payment” for free content was that we’d watch some ads. But nowadays, we’re not just watching ads, we’re having every instant of our online life stored on servers somewhere, to feed us the exact content to hijack our dopamine and keep us doom-scrolling or binge-watching for hours, so they can feed us even more hyper-focused ads.
If everyone else has broken their end of the agreement, I don’t feel any need to keep up my end of it.
I also built my own UnRAID NAS, to store my music, videos, documents, images, etc. locally. Besides being a place to store all my files, it can also run some services that help me maintain my privacy and independence.
I realize computer hardware is not cheap right now. If you want to build your own NAS for (somewhat) cheap, I suggest looking for a used computer (a NAS doesn’t need a huge amount of power or RAM) with several drive bays. For the hard disks, I personally buy refurbished Seagate Exos hard drives on eBay. Look for a professional seller with high ratings and a warranty.
These are the (mostly free) apps I have running on it:
AdGuard Home: An app to block ads and trackers. I configured my home router to route all traffic through this app, so it works automatically for every desktop computer, laptop computer, and wireless device (like my phone).
Thunderbird email client: I canceled my annual subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and started using Thunderbird as my email client. Since canceling my subscription also meant losing Word, Excel, etc., I also installed LibreOffice to replace them. Thunderbird and LibreOffice aren’t as polished as as Microsoft Office, but they’re good enough for me.
Jellyfin media manager: This stores all my video content. I ripped all my DVDs to files with WinXDVD. I was able to un-DRM most of my iTunes purchases with DRmare M4V Converter (a paid product), using tinyMediaManager to help with labeling movies and TV series episodes.
Navidrome music library: A replacement for iTunes, for my music.
audiobookshelf eBook/audiobook manager: A replacement for Audible and Kindle (assuming you have un-DRMed version of your Kindle books).
Paperless-ngx document manager: Upload and tags your documents here so you can search for them later.
Open WebUI local LLM AI manager: Even though I use a paid AI service for programming assistance, I’m lucky enough that I had a computer powerful enough to run local LLMs for my personal questions/prompts. Open WebUI lets me access these local models without sending my questions off to Sam Altman.
I did some other things for more privacy and network security, but I’ll go over those in a future post.
What tech services do I still pay for?
Programming LLM: As much as I don’t want to send my prompts/questions to a third-party service, my local LLM is nowhere near as good for programming as the paid services. I was using Cursor, until it got bought by SpaceX. After Grok/X shut down my account, 10 days after I paid for a year, I refuse to use Cursor now. It’s too bad, as it was a good product.
There’s also no way I’ll have anything to do with Sam Altman. So, that kind of leaves Claude. As much as I don’t like/trust Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei (who regularly declares AI will eliminate all programming jobs, any day now), it’s the least-offensive vendor for me. And it does a good job, which should help me build my own products and/or services.
One video streaming service at a time: While I probably should spend less time watching movies and TV series, there are a few good ones that come out. I use the free Plex site to track movies and TV series I might want to watch (including upcoming ones). That shows me what services they are available on.
Every so often, when there are enough things in my watchlist that are available on one of the services, I’ll subscribe for one month, watch everything I wanted to, then cancel it. Actually, I generally cancel the monthly renewal the day after I sign up, so I don’t forget.
How are you reducing being harvested?
I hope this will help some of you readers improve your privacy and reduce your dependency on all those monthly subscriptions and data harvesting sites/services. But, I know this isn’t everything that can be done.
If you have more ideas to help us use our technology FOR us, and not AGAINST us, please share them in a comment below.