Quit Big Tech

I discovered The Opt Out Project by Janet Vertesi in early 2025. I was on vacation with my family at the time, and we were away from our dismal midwestern winter for a week, staying somewhere nice and tropical. As we tend to do on vacation, daytime was for exploring and adventuring, and nighttime was for reading or other quiet activities.

I was so impacted by what I read on The Opt Out Project that I spent most of the evenings that week thinking about my relationship with big tech, online privacy, and the changes that I might want to implement for myself and for my family.

Reasonable Expectations

I will note up front that the "for my family" part has been the most difficult aspect of this, for a few reasons:

• Privacy isn't free, and many of the paid services can get quite expensive when moving beyond individual plans.
• I need to be able to manage gestures wildly all of this for my family, and (weirdly) those capabilities aren't neccessarily a given for many of the family plans available.
• I need to acklowledge that this being important to me doesn't mean it's important to others. This process requires tradeoffs, and every person evaluates the costs and benefits in their own way.

All that said, here are the objectives:

• De-google, to the greatest extent possible.
• Ditch amazon services and devices.
• Reduce usages of apple services, where possible. I fully expect that this will be an ongoing challenge.

Keep reading for details on the progress that I've made.

My hope is that the documentation of this journey may inspire similar thoughtfulness in likeminded individuals.

The Browser Question

Getting off of the Chrome browser was a quick and easy win. This is honestly the first step in this journey that I would recommend to anyone.

Anyone can do this, and it's not going to be hard.

After trying a few browsers, I settled on hardened Firefox as my daily driver. Privacy Guides has an excellent walkthrough of the privacy-related changes that any user of Firefox should consider.

The Email Situation

After a lot of research and effort, I got our email situation sorted out. This one was challenging, but doable.

I've been a gmail user since 2006. Mrs. Nullish and the kids were also gmail users, so there was a lot of migration that needed to happen.

Luckily, when I first set email up for the kids, I had the foresight to do it via google apps for business (with a legacy free plan that I've hung onto). The upshot is that they were using gmail, but were able to switch without changing their email addresses, since I had them set up using a custom domain name. There was some grumbling, but kids adapt quickly, and overall it was pretty painless for them.

After reviewing ALL of the options, I determined that the best way forward was a switch to Fastmail, for their affordable and easily managable family plan.

This is NOT a particularly privacy focused service compared to the other big names that get thrown around in this space.

However: in this instance, the main goal is to get away from google and attempt to dodge surveillance capitalism in some small way. Fastmail checks these boxes nicely, and provides one other significant benefit over many of the more privacy-focused services: Fastmail works great with custom domains, and allows for the creation of unlimited "masked" (randomly generated) email addresses, similar to duck.com or apple's "hide my email" feature.

I use this, perhaps excessively, and have come to subscribe to the philosophy of "each service gets its own unique email address."

It's worked great so far.

Personally, I supplement the above with Proton (paid, because I also use their VPN) and Tuta (the free plan is perfectly cromulent) for any instances where I'd prefer not to use Fastmail.

Ditching Drive and Photos

We stopped using google drive and google photos. Both were replaced with redundant local backups. The actual process of deleting photos from google is pretty difficult (by design, I'm sure), but I got through it slowly over a period of weeks.

My local backup process involves using an older PC as a small NAS, using rsync to replicate data across redundant hard drives, and occasionally backing up the most important files to solid state storage that lives in our fireproof safe with other important documents.

This process could definitely be improved, but is good enough for now.

Goodbye, Echo

We got rid of all of our amazon Echo/Alexa devices. They are now safely tucked away, unable to listen in on everything that happens in our household. Thinking about how we thoughtlessly used these for so many years makes me cringe, but I think that's a comment experience with these things.

We canceled our prime subscription, no longer use any of their services, and purchase from them only as a last resort. This definitely comes from a place of privilege, but I'll choose a more expensive (and maybe higher quality?) option from somewhere else vs ordering from them. I feel a bit of satisfaction every time I avoid buying something from amazon.

This isn't exactly "big tech", but around the time I got rid of our echo devices, I replaced our wifi smart plugs and bulbs with local only devices that don't need to call out to some server in China to activate. Local only FTW!

The Apple Problem

Remember how I mentioned that apple was going to be a challenge? Yeah...we are a big apple family, and I haven't made a lot of progress here.

I have been thinking for months that the next concrete step that I can take is to enable their Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature on all of our devices. The idea with ADP is that it increases the number of their services where E2E encryption is used, and switches to a setup where the keys are effectively zero knowledge from apple's perspective.

I challenge I am running into is that this configuration change is kind of all or nothing for our family. The research I've done suggests that some features we depend on are just going to stop working unless we all make this change, and I really can't be too heavy handed with this one. I'm still holding out hope to get this done eventually.

ADP aside, apple in general is really difficult. We don't have budget for replacing any devices right now, and trying to get my friends and family to use Signal vs iMessage, or trying to get Mrs. Nullish to NOT use apple photos are just not battles I can pick right now.

Does this sound like giving up? I hope not. I thik the way to handle this (like many things) is with consistent, steady pressure that's directed to where it can do the most good. Right now, that means NOT focusing on apple.