DISENGAGE PART 2: Opting Out—and Finding New Options—to Reclaim Your Life from Spammers, Scammers, Intrusive Marketers and Big Tech

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When I was looking into this, I discovered virtual PO boxes. These are real addresses, but you don’t have a physical box. The virtual PO box service collects your mail and sends you photos via email or in their app. The company will trash mail pieces for free, or charge a small fee to hold your mail for pick-up, email a scanned PDF of the contents, or shred it. The company I tried, iPostal1, offers discounted bundles of scans/shreds.

My advice is to not go this route until you’ve:

Gone through the businesses and websites on your spreadsheet and requested they stop sending you marketing mail. (Chapter 5: Control Your Online Accounts has more info.)

Removed yourself from data broker lists where possible. (See Chapter 6: Bash The Brokers.)

Signed up for the Direct Marketing Association’s Do Not Mail list. (See Chapter 6.)

Signed up for paperless billing, statements, etc. where possible.

This way, you’re not getting a ton of mail to your virtual PO box that you may have to pay to have scanned or shredded.

Once you have a PO box, whether virtual or physical, switch over to this address for all businesses that don’t need to know your home address.

To be transparent, I didn’t love the experience. I frequently received ads at my PO address such as credit card offers, which I then had to pay to have shredded. (Remember, Do Not Mail lists do not apply to companies you currently do business with.) It was also more of a pain than it was worth for me to have a delivery address that was different from my billing address, as I now needed to enter two addresses any time I used my credit card online.

In the end I cancelled by PO box and went back to using my home address, but this idea may work better for you.

HIDE YOUR HOME ADDRESS BY…ADDING DISINFORMATION TO THE SYSTEM

If you, like me, decide not to use a PO box, try this instead: Create an alias mailing address and use it with your real name, and create an alias name to use with your real address. We discussed this In Chapter 6: Bash the Brokers.

HIDE YOUR HOME ADDRESS BY…CHECKING OUT PUBLIC RECORDS

Your home address may be visible online in the form of public records and, unfortunately, you often can’t delete your address from these sources. For instance, many states keep open records on home sales. As another example, if you registered a business using your home address, your state may not allow you to change or delete the business records they make available to the public online.

Worse, people-search sites get a lot of their info from public records, making it even more difficult for you to wrest control of your home address from these companies.

If you have a court order because you’ve been stalked or are otherwise in danger, send it with your request for deletion from public records. Then follow up, follow up, follow up.

If you don’t have a court order and simply want the records changed for future safety and privacy considerations, you may be out of luck. The only thing you can do is try: Reach out to the website, government office, or whatever it is and politely ask how to have your personal data removed.

Many voter sites do offer a way to opt out of having your home address visible. However, the site may still announce, “See how Maya’s neighbors on Gardenia Grove Drive voted!” Real helpful.

There is a bright side: Now that you know all this, you’ll take pains to conceal your home address in future dealings. In his book Extreme Privacy, Michael Bazzell even recommends buying a home in the name of a trust instead of using your own name. This may not be useful information now, but it’s something to consider if you’re ever in the market for a new home.

HIDE YOUR HOME ADDRESS BY…BEING MASTER OF YOUR DOMAIN

If you own a domain name (such as www.example.com), anyone can do a WhoIs search to find out who owns the domain plus their address, phone number, and email address.

Every domain host I’ve used has offered privacy protection, either free or paid. When you turn this setting on, the WhoIs lookup for your domain will show the contact information for your domain host instead of your personal details.

You do need to provide your domain host with a working email address (even if it’s a masked email) to abide by the law and so the host can contact you about your payments.

TRY IT NOW

Turn on privacy for your domain!

CHAPTER 12: REMOVE YOUR HOME PHOTOS FROM THE WEB

Did you know it’s incredibly easy for people to see images of the inside of your home online? Sites like Realtor.com, Redfin, and Zillow display interior photos from the listing when you bought your house. This means strangers can see the layout of your home’s interior.

While real estate sites let randos see inside your home, Google Street View and Apple Maps Street View let them view the outside. These photos may include personal possessions like your car, bike, toys in the yard, and identifying flags such as a Pride flag, state flag, or college football banner. (They do blur out license plates.)

Here’s how to keep people from peeking into your home.

STEP 1: CLAIM YOUR HOME TO DELETE INTERIOR IMAGES

Real estate listing sites will let you “claim” your home, at which point you can remove the listing photos.

BEWARE

Anyone who knows just a few simple details about you can pass the verification to claim your home…so if you haven’t done it, do it now.

Here’s how to claim your home on the most popular real estate websites. You will need to create an account, or log in if you already have an account.

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR HOUSE ON ZILLOW

Go to the How Much is My House Worth ? page.
Type in your address.
Click Claim this home in the pop-up box.
Follow the instructions to complete claiming the home.

Zillow requires you to confirm via email before they’ll allow you to remove your images.

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR HOUSE ON REDFIN

Go to the Claim Your Home page.
Enter your address.
Follow the instructions to complete claiming the home.

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR HOUSE ON REALTOR.COM

Go to the My Home page.
Enter your address.
Follow the instructions to claim the home.

The fact that it’s so easy to claim ownership of a house is another good reason to get your home address removed from the web wherever possible.

STEP 2: BLUR YOUR HOME IMAGES IN STREET VIEW APPS

If you don’t like the idea of online strangers being able to glean details about your personal life from exterior photos of your home, ask Google Street View and Apple Maps Street View to blur your home’s image. This is irreversible, so make sure you really want to do it...for yourself and for anyone who lives there in the future!

BEWARE

There is some debate about whether you should blur your home on maps apps. Some say it makes you stand out more, and some point out there are other ways to see your home online anyway...so why bother?

Despite all this, you may want to blur your home as a middle finger to surveillance capitalists.

HOW TO ASK GOOGLE TO BLUR THE IMAGE OF YOUR HOME

Open Google Maps.
Find and open the 360 photo that shows your home.
In the bottom right, click Report a problem.
Complete the form.
Click Submit.

If you enter your email address, Google may contact you for additional information.

HOW TO ASK APPLE MAPS TO BLUR THE IMAGE OF YOUR HOME

Email mapsimagecollection@apple.com with your request. Be sure to include the full address of the home, the coordinates (which you can find by searching for your address in Apple Maps), and any other information that will help them locate the image.

TRY THIS NOW

Blurring your home images takes only a few minutes!

CHAPTER 13: BANISH SMART PRODUCTS FROM YOUR SPACES

We’re being sold the “dream” of totally hands-off homes.

What this means for you is you’re able to check in on your dog, turn on your lights, or lock the doors no matter where you are.

What this means for the businesses that provide these products is that they have access to very personal details about you and your life. This information isn’t protected by default, so businesses can be privy to your comings and goings (from your smart doorbell), the layout of your home (from your robotic vacuum), and even when you’re sick (from your oral thermometer).

Imagine what they can infer about you from the combination of data they snatch from your home. It would be easy to know you’re on vacation just from the patterns of your door lock, lights, and alarm. Digital creepers can see when you’re depressed from the books you’re reading on your Kindle, the movies you’re watching, your decline in treadmill use, and the fact that you haven’t left your house in a week.

Some smart products are even actively sharing your data with outsiders. The Atlantic reports:

Some security-camera companies share information with police departments. [D]epending on your settings, your smart speaker may use your voice data—including coughs, snores, baby gurgles, and barks—to sell you more products. Not only that, some gadgets may be able to siphon data from your personal wi-fi network and send it back to the company.

Worse, many of these products provide little security; while researching this chapter, I came across a Redditor whose home assistant accidentally paired with his neighbor’s Bluetooth toothbrush.

“I now know when my neighbor is brushing his teeth, which gives me a good idea when he gets up and when he goes to sleep,” the poster wrote. “Probably [I could deduce] when he is not at home (e.g. vacations) and I can also see how much pressure he is applying and which program he is using.”

In the intro to this guide I talked about how difficult it is to remember a time when you could go about your day without the feeling of being constantly surveilled. Knowing that these intrusive technologies are tracking you even in your home, you can understand why, if it’s feasible for you, smashing the smart home is such important work.

FIRST, SURVEIL THE SURVEILLORS

Take a look around your home and make a list of all the smart products—items that are potentially storing, sharing, and exploiting your data. Consider your:

TV
Car
Light switches/lightbulbs
Refrigerator
Alarm
Locks
Heating/AC systems
Remotes
Printer
Oven
Microwave
Doorbell
Security camera
Speakers
Coffee maker
Thermostat
Toothbrush
Vacuum
Tablet
E-reader
Fitness tracker
Digital camera
Digital personal assistant
Exercise bike, treadmill, etc.
Smoke/CO detector
Dishwasher
Oral thermometer
Gaming console
Washer
Wi-fi-enabled headphones
Dryer

TRY THIS NOW

Make a quick list!

Once you have your list, for each applicable product:

STEP 1: ASK YOURSELF WHETHER THE PRODUCT REALLY IMPROVES YOUR LIFE

In other words: Do you really need or want to have this in your home? Maybe you have a disability or mobility needs, so it’s useful to be able to turn on and off lights, set your alarm, and lock the doors through an app. Or the smart treadmill helps you stay motivated to exercise by tracking your progress, and you don’t want to give that up.

You may discover, though, you have a lot of products that don’t add enough to your life to give up your data for them. For example, I didn’t get much benefit from a smart thermometer connecting to an app on my phone, so why continue to use it? It was easy enough to replace it with an old-school one.

STEP 2: UPDATE THE PRIVACY SETTINGS FOR EACH PRODUCT YOU KEEP

Change the privacy settings in any apps associated with your smart products to the highest protection level. You may also need to check the settings on your smartphone to ensure the products aren’t accessing features they don’t need—like your camera, microphone, location data, or contacts list.

TRY THIS NOW

Update the privacy in just a few devices/apps!

STEP 3: DELETE CONVERSATIONS

Ever talk to Siri or Alexa, or any other device or app? Get rid of your conversation history.

According to PCMag, there have been reports of Amazon employees actively listening to Alexa voice recordings. Google speakers have also been compromised, exposing users’ private conversations.

The easiest solution for many people is to just not use personal digital assistants. But these products are lifesavers for some of us.

EXTRA CREDIT

If you’re pretty skilled with tech, consider a privacy-forward, open-source assistant like Home Assistant, which is “perfect to run on Raspberry Pi or a local server,” though you can also run it on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. The company website offers thorough documentation and getting-started guides, but the learning curve looks steep.

Here’s how to delete your conversation history on Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. It makes sense to do this periodically to decrease the chances of your home chatter being compromised by the companies providing these apps (or by criminals).

How to delete your Alexa voice history

In the Alexa app, open More.
Tap Settings.
Select Alexa Privacy.
Select Review Voice History.
Set the date to All history and tap Delete all of my recordings.

How to delete your Google Assistant history

Go to your Assistant activity page.
Sign in to your Google Account.
Tap More.
Select Delete activity by.
Select All time.
Tap Delete.
To confirm, tap Delete.

It may take a day before the activity is deleted from your other devices.

How to delete your Siri history on iOS

Open Settings.
Go to Siri (or Apple Intelligence and Siri).
Tap Siri & Dictation History.
Tap the Delete Siri & Dictation History button.
Confirm by tapping Delete Siri & Dictation History.

How to delete your Siri history on MacOS

Open Settings.
Go to Siri (or Apple Intelligence and Siri).
Click the Delete Siri & Dictation History button.
Confirm by clicking Delete.

For instructions for other Apple devices, read this article.

TRY THIS NOW

Delete voice history in just one app or device!

STEP 4: TELL THEM TO STOP EAVESDROPPING

Starting with iOS 13.2, you have the power to choose whether you want contractors to listen to your Siri interactions in order to improve the service.

To opt out of Siri recordings review on MacOS

Open System Settings.
Go to Privacy & Security.
Go to Analytics & Improvements.
Turn off Improve Siri & Dictation.

To opt out of Siri recordings review on iOS

Open Settings.
Tap Privacy & Security.
Tap Analytics & Improvements at the bottom of the screen.
Turn off Improve ‌Siri‌ & Dictation.

You may need to delete recordings separately from Apple CarPlay, your smartwatch, etc. These steps will keep Apple employees from listening in on your conversations with Siri.

TRY THIS NOW

Opt out of Siri recordings review in just one device!

STEP 5: KEEP YOUR PRINTER PRIVATE

Home printers are one of the most egregious invaders of our privacy. They aren’t necessarily “smart,” but many of them send your data back to the manufacturer (aka “phoning home”).

Cory Doctorow writes about the printer HP charges you a monthly fee to use (after you buy it!): “When you click through the signup agreement, you grant HP permission to surveil every document you print—and your home wifi network more generally—and to sell that data to anyone and everyone.”

And according to Epson’s privacy policy, the company collects “data about the type of device or browser you use, your device’s operating software, printing patterns, ink usage, warranty status, your internet service provider, your device’s regional and language settings, and device identifiers such as model number, age, and IP address.”

Some of this is for benign purposes, like being able to warn you if your ink is low. But Epson makes clear in their privacy policy that the data they collect from you may also be processed for advertising and marketing purposes.

Ready to get these corporations out of your private spaces? Two ways to keep your printer from phoning home are:

Find a printer that lets you decline tracking as you’re setting up the software. It’s hard to know if that will be the case until you start actually installing it, but you may be able to ask others about their experience before buying a printer.

Use a USB-only printer (which connects directly to your computer) instead of a wireless one—meaning it’s not attached to your internet network at all.

Neither of these are ideal. What would be truly ideal is for corporations to let you control the product you paid for, and for them to not use products you own as data harvesting devices. But they’re a start.

EXTRA CREDIT

Install a free, open source printer driver, such as Gutenprint for MacOS or OpenPrinting for Linux; there don’t seem to be many for Windows except perhaps CUPS, which looks fairly complicated for a single user with a single printer. You’ll need to find a driver that works with your printer; the three here support many different brands and models.

STEP 6: PUT YOUR SMART PRODUCTS ON A GUEST WI-FI NETWORK

A guest network is a secondary network isolated from the home wi-fi your laptop and mobile devices are on.

Putting your smart home products on a guest network helps keep businesses and people from accessing your home network through these products.

If you have a newer router, you may already have an app for managing your wi-fi network; in the settings, simply add a new network, choose a name for it, and create a password.

No app? Log into your wi-fi using any device, then open the network settings to find your router’s IP address. For Android, it’s under the wi-fi settings. For Mac, click on the wi-fi symbol and then select Open Network Preferences.

Enter your router’s IP address into your browser; once you get to the page, enter your credentials to log in. From there, you may have to click around to find the right page or tab to create a guest network.

If you can’t find your router’s IP address or have other difficulties, check the sticker on the bottom of your router for information that can help.

Once you have a guest network ready, the next step is to get your smart home products set up on the new network; refer to the user manuals for instructions. It was fairly easy to get my robotic vacuum and printer moved over to the new network, so I hope the process is fast for you as well.

STEP 7: TELL YOUR CAR TO STAY IN ITS LANE

Printers are bad, but cars are worse. Anyone who tracks your car knows when you’re out of your house, what establishments you frequent, and where you are whenever you’re on the road.

To find out what data your car is collecting and sharing, enter your vehicle’s VIN at the Vehicle Privacy Report website. Tighten up your privacy choices or ask the manufacturer to delete your data based on the information you find.

When I discovered that my car may track and share location data, I tried calling the number listed in the manufacturer’s privacy statement and was on hold for ages…and then disconnected. I ended up sending a letter via post, and received a response via mail over two months later.

TRY THIS NOW

Find your car's VIN. It's on a sticker inside your vehicle!

STEP 8: RINSE AND REPEAT FOR ALL YOUR SMART PRODUCTS

There are too many smart products and too many ways to adjust them to fit into this guide. Check each device’s privacy policy to know which invasive features to turn off, and set each device to the strictest privacy settings in their respective apps.

PART 4: DISENGAGE BY...RECLAIMING YOUR CONTENT

We often say “we are the product” of companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Google, and other sites—but that’s not quite correct. The product is the stock, and we are the unpaid workforce.

As Douglas Rushkoff writes in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:

We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work. The beneficiaries are the shareholders.

A platform becomes more powerful the more people join it. Your free content draws new people into the fray, the platform locks them in (“all my friends and content are there!”), and it becomes that much stronger…all so its shareholders can rake in more dollars at your expense.

In this section, you’ll withdraw your content from Big Tech, and learn how to make it work for you instead.

CHAPTER 17: PROTECT YOUR POSTS

One type of content you’re donating to for-profit businesses is forum posts. Not only do your posts help attract more users and more engagement for the platform, but the business gets to harvest your data as well.

Do you really want data brokers, and the marketing firms they sell to, knowing that you belong to a personal finance forum, a community for people with diabetes, or a Twilight fan fiction writers group? Going further, would you want them to know what you post on these sites? Just imagine your health insurance provider being privy to your posts on the diabetes forum.

I’m not saying anyone should feel ashamed about the forums they belong to or what they post there. What I’m saying is that anything you share online can be scraped by businesses to enrich your profile…and possibly to be used against you.

Here’s how to minimize the amount of unpaid labor—and data—you provide to these businesses.

OPTION 1: ERASE USELESS POSTS

I discovered that in many cases, there was no point at all in my posts remaining online. For example, say I asked a question in 2015, it was answered, and the post has had zero views in the last five years, meaning no one is getting any value from it. Why not delete it?

BEWARE

When you delete a Reddit post, it can still be accessed by anyone with the direct link. People can use platforms like Reveddit to uncover all your “deleted” content.

Even if you delete your entire Reddit account, your posts stay live but with the username deleted.

I have successfully used the Redact tool, which, instead of deleting posts, comments, DMs, and chats, replaces them with a random series of words. They offer a free plan plus paid plans that let you delete more posts and from more sites.

OPTION 2: DELETE FORUM ACCOUNTS ALTOGETHER

If you want to disengage even more, delete some of your forum accounts altogether. This is another instance where it makes sense to balance your need for community with your need for privacy.

Maybe you’re okay with the world seeing the information you’ve shared on one forum, but not the juicy details you’ve spilled on another. Or you’re fine with sites that let you sign up with minimal personal information. Or a particular discussion group is simply so important to you, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Note that, as with Reddit, deleting forum accounts may or may not also erase your posts. Check out the forum’s policies, and if they specify that posts are not removed when you delete your account, go through first and delete your posts one by one. If you want to be super careful, obfuscate your posts before closing your account.

This method isn’t foolproof—there are ways people can find deleted posts if they want to, such as by using the Wayback Machine.

Again, we can never achieve 100% privacy and anonymity—even if it’s what we want to do. My philosophy is to do as much as I can, and to be more careful in the future based on what I learned going through the process.

TRY THIS NOW

Is there a forum account y9ou no longer use or care about? Delete it!

OPTION 3: POST YOUR CONTENT ON YOUR OWN WEBSITE

If you really like to share, why not post your wisdom, advice, thoughts, and ideas on a platform you control? More on this in Chapter 16: Say Sayonara to Social Media.

CHAPTER 15: RETRACT YOUR REVIEWS

Another type of content we create for free—and that megacorps profit from—is reviews.

I’ll never forget this scene from an episode of South Park:

Barkley: Sir, it's midnight. Go home, get some sleep.

Sgt. Yates: There's no time to sleep when the city's counting on me.

Barkley: More Yelp reviews, sir?

Sgt. Yates: I had a bad experience at Red Lobster and if the people don't know about it, they could too. Folks deserve to know where to eat, Mitch.

Barkley: But does anyone even thank you for it?

Sgt. Yates: I don't need them to. I know they need me, and that's enough.

Barkley: God bless you, sir.

Sgt. Yates: I know.

We feel like we’re doing a good deed when we post a review warning people away from a restaurant whose servers just don’t care, or pointing them to a stellar gym. But what did we do before there were so many outlets for us to share our yeas and nays? Somehow we all survived.

When you spend time writing a review of the local skate park, you’re working for the review site. Your Google reviews give Google data. Information from Yelp is used to train data analysts. Amazon reviews keep people on, well, Amazon—and unscrupulous sellers game the system with fake reviews anyway, so why bother?

Also, recall that one side benefit to disengaging is being able to see the world through our own eyes, without automatically framing all of our experiences for online consumption. Habitual reviewing trains us to see every experience as just more fodder for strangers’ eyes (and data scrapers’ databases).

When I decided to disengage as much as I could, I deleted all my reviews. (Thank goodness there were only four.)

Now, whenever someone asks me for a review, I ignore it; if they persist, I tell them I don’t write reviews as a policy.

If this resonates with you, I urge you to delete all your reviews from these sites:

Facebook and other social media

Yelp

Tripadvisor and other travel sites

Amazon

Goodreads (owned by Amazon)

Home services review sites like Angi and Thumbtack

The Better Business Bureau

General review sites like Trustpilot

Software review sites such as Capterra

Employer review sites like Glassdoor

In most cases, you can remove a review by logging into the service and navigating to your profile or settings. Here are a few exceptions:

Remove Google reviews from the Google Maps site.

Yelp will ask you for the reason you’re requesting removal. Selecting “I changed my opinion of this business after a new interaction” might be the best route. (It’s the only one that doesn’t make you or the business look like a jerk.)
The Better Business Bureau does not seem to provide an easy way to remove complaints or reviews. Your best bet is to find your local BBB office at BBB.org and call them to find out.

Really, really want to write up a glowing review or slam a business that did you wrong? In Chapter 16: Say Sayonara To Social Media, you’ll learn about a method for posting content to your own site and syndicating it on social media.

I inadvertently did this when, instead of complaining on a review site when a business ripped me off to the tune of $10,000, I wrote a 5,000-word report about my experience, posted it on my business website, and then shared the link on social media.

A minor celebrity retweeted the link, and my story racked up over 20,000 hits in one day. It also garnered media coverage and spawned 65 pages of comments.

Can you imagine a review on Trustpilot getting that much response? Sharing my content on my website ended up being a much better way to warn people than a handful of snippy reviews on other sites.

TRY THIS NOW

Remove your reviews from just one site!

CHAPTER 16: SAY SAYONARA TO SOCIAL MEDIA

What a minefield: We know how bad social media is for our mental health. We know that these platforms mine, use, and sell our data ruthlessly. We know their algorithms serve us negative, frightening, or rage-bait stories—and sometimes just plain lies—because that’s what gets engagement.

Since I wrote the first version of this book, things have gotten much worse. Let’s take a look at just a few examples.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH TWITTER?

Twitter, now X, has become the mouthpiece of an angry billionaire who is currently taking over the U.S. government—slashing departments and aid while raking in money on government contracts.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH TIKTOK?

In late 2024, TikTok’s main feed showed “a high volume of…not attractive subjects”—so the company changed its algorithm to boost users it considered better-looking. The company also quantified the amount of time it takes for someone to get addicted—260 minutes, or about 35 videos—and it wasn’t so they could stop it.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH META/FACEBOOK/INSTAGRAM?

This is just a tiny bit of the news that came out in early 2025 about this company:

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are getting rid of their moderation teams.

Meta torrented terabytes worth of pirated books to train its AI.

In early 2025, Meta suffered a backlash when it introduced AI profiles to Facebook and Instagram; these fake profiles were sloppy, untruthful, and occasionally racist.

So why do we have such a hard time quitting social media?

For some of us, Facebook is the only way we can stay in touch with far-flung friends and families. We need LinkedIn for our jobs. We feel there are no good alternatives for selling our art (Instagram!), moving our books (TikTok!), or generally promoting our businesses (YouTube!).

Reddit gives us a community to belong to when there are none near us IRL. And without Nextdoor, how can we passive-aggressively shame our loud neighbors, find out why there’s a white van in our driveway, or ask whether that snake is a copperhead?

There is another powerful reason we have trouble letting go of social media, and it was articulated perfectly by Nicholas Carr, the author of Superbloom, in The Art of Manliness podcast in January 2025. (Lightly edited.)

In the physical world if you're quiet in a social setting...you're still there, you're still present.

Online, if you go quiet, you disappear. That's another reason we're encouraged to constantly post things, express ourselves, put up pictures. There are studies that show that if you compare people conversing online versus people conversing in person, people online tend to divulge four times as much information about themselves in a given period of time.

That’s a tough one to solve. After all, who wants to feel as if they’ve disappeared? Tackling this issue could fill a whole book on its own, but hopefully the advice below will help you shake the feeling that if you’re not online, you’re not anywhere.

See the ideas below to determine whether it’s possible for you to disengage from social media, where to go instead, how to run a business without it, and how to use social media while giving up as little data as possible.

GET REAL ON THE PROS AND CONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

If you’re interested in spending less time online, protecting your personal data, and giving the bird to Big Tech, take a good, hard look at whether social media is serving you. Some platforms may be indispensable to you, while others are a waste of your precious attention and life energy. Here are some questions to ask yourself these questions:

TRY THIS NOW

For real, ask yourself these questions right now!

QUESTION 1: HOW MUCH DOES SOCIAL MEDIA HELP ME WITH MY CAREER?

Think about the millions of people screaming to be heard on social media. Your posts are swept into oblivion within seconds by the sheer number of new posts. Are you really getting enough return on your investment of time and energy?

(If you do decide you need to be on social media for your career or business, check out “Option 2: You Want to Stay on Social Media” later in this chapter for tips.)

QUESTION 2: ARE THERE OTHER WAYS TO ACCOMPLISH THE TASKS I USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR?

Whether you’re using a social platform to communicate with friends, market your business, or just to be entertained, think about what other platforms and places are available for meeting these needs.

For example, instead of selling items on Facebook Marketplace, can you save it all up until you have enough for a yard sale? If you have a side gig as a dog walker, would it make sense to ditch Instagram and instead post signs and ask local veterinarians to mention you to clients?

EXTRA CREDIT

If you’re doubtful that your career can survive without social media, run a time-limited experiment to see whether any offline marketing techniques will work for you; you may even find one you enjoy, which means you’ll do more of it. If we managed to do these activities before social media existed, there must be some ways to do them now without relying on those platforms.

QUESTION 3: WHAT AM I MISSING BY SEEING EVERYTHING THROUGH A CAMERA LENS?

As Nicholas Carr said above, sometimes we feel social media is as crucial as oxygen because we’ve been trained to think that everything we do and think has to be visible to others, lest we not fully exist. It’s not hard to guess who trained this into us, and how they benefit.

Until a couple of years ago, I had an Instagram account to post my photography. I wasn’t selling it…I just wanted validation from other people. When I realized how absurd this was and deleted my account, I was also freed from the small, insistent voice in my head saying, “Ooh, I should post this!,” “I wish I had gotten that on film,” “I need to check for likes and comments!” and “I should probably interact with other people’s posts so it doesn’t look like I’m only here to post my own photos…which I am.”

Are you missing out on your life because you’re constantly thinking about how to frame everything you do, think, or see for social media?

It’s a nice feeling to experience something exceptional and not automatically think, “I should put this on Facebook.” Experiencing something in real life and not through the lens of a camera gives you a sense of quiet confidence, knowing you can do and experience amazing things and not need to prove it to the world.

QUESTION 4: DOES ANYONE REALLY CARE IF I'M ON SOCIAL MEDIA?

As I mentioned, I opened an Instagram account just to post my photography. I was more interested in gaining other people’s approval of my photos than in giving approval myself. I’m not unique; chances are, many other people are using social media in the same way.

When I quit Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in 2015, I had thousands of friends and followers. In the weeks following my departure, which I didn’t announce, only two people noticed I was gone.

I know we all want to imagine that people will weep in their beds if we leave social media. But the harsh fact is, for most of us it’s not true.

QUESTION 5: DO I NEED THE INFORMATION I GET FROM SOCIAL MEDIA?

I have never seen anything on Nextdoor that has changed what I think or do. The same goes for Facebook memes, TikTok videos, and Instagram photos. In fact, after I take them in, I wish I could get those seconds of my life back.

Ask yourself when was the last time you actually heard or saw something useful or actionable on social media—and, more importantly, whether you used or took action on it.

QUESTION 6: ARE MY CONNECTIONS CLOSE ENOUGH FRIENDS FOR ME TO DEAL WITH THE HASSLE?

If I have to find out from Facebook that you got married, graduated college, won the lottery, or had a baby...we’re probably not very close friends. Close friends call, or at least text, with big news.

Sure, there are people who are more than acquaintances but not quite good friends, but I don’t need to invest hours of my time—and my mental health—scrolling through my feed to make sure I don’t miss their latest news. (I wouldn’t expect them to do it for me, either.)

If you feel guilty quitting these platforms because you need them to stay connected with friends, consider whether they are close enough friends for you to want to deal with the data mining, invasions of privacy, misinformation, and blows to the self-esteem that are an integral part of social media.

Again, when I quit social media in 2015, it was crickets. No one sent messages asking, “Where have you been? We miss your pet photos, humblebrags, homemade memes, and random musings on life!”

Maybe you’re more popular than I am, but I suspect most people on social media are doing exactly what we’re doing—worrying about themselves.

QUESTION 7: HOW TO SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES BENEFIT. BY MAKING ME FEEL LIKE I'VE DISAPPEARED IF I'M NOT ON THEIR SITES?

This goes back to the quote from Nicholas Carr. Why is it important to social media platforms that you’re on there as much as possible, as opposed to popping in once a week to check your feeds? What do they get out of it, and is their gain your loss?

Let’s say your answers to the above questions have convinced you to leave social media. Here’s how to do it. (Later in this chapter, we’ll talk about what to do if you decide to remain on social platforms.)

OPTION 1: YOU DECIDE TO CLOSE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS

Take a deep breath! I’ll walk you through the whole process. Remember, you can always quit one at a time—or some and not others—if that feels better for you.

STEP 1 TO QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA: LET YOUR FRIENDS KNOW

No One likes those “I’m leaving Facebook forever, goodbye!” posts…especially when the person sheepishly reappears three weeks later.

Instead of dramatically announcing your departure, inform the people you actually want to stay in touch with that you’re leaving the platform and suggest alternate ways to continue communication—such as via text, phone, email, or a better social platform (which we’ll discuss later).

If you belong to a group that uses a specific social platform to make plans, share news, and so on, suggest moving the whole group somewhere else.

EXTRA CREDIT

Signal is a good replacement for iMessage, Facebook Message, Skype, and other chat groups. The app includes messaging, group chats, group voice and video calls, and even messages that disappear once the recipient reads them. Everything Signal offers is end-to-end encrypted—and it’s free and open source.

STEP 2 TO QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA: DOWNLOAD YOUR DATA

Before you click “Close My Account,” be sure to download any photos, posts, and other information you want to keep.

Keep in mind that the data you will receive may vary; for example, LinkedIn let me download my recommendations and some other data, but I ended up copying and pasting all my posts into a document by hand.

You’ll need to be logged in on your desktop browser to start a download request. Some sites let you download your data right away, while others will email you a download link. Unless otherwise indicated, It can take up to 30 days to receive the email; if you close your account before then, you won’t receive your data.

How to download your data from Twitter/X

Select More in the main navigation menu.
Select Settings and privacy.
Choose Your account.
Select Download an archive of your data.
Confirm your password, then select Request archive.

It looks like posts are not included with the data you download; if you want them, you’ll have to copy-paste or find another method. I attempted to download my data from a test account and never received the emailed verification code.

TRY THIS NOW

Pick an account and do this!

How to download your data from Facebook

Click the down arrow under your profile picture.
Go to Settings & Privacy.
Select Settings.
Scroll down to Your information and click Download your information.
Click Continue to visit the Accounts Center.
Click Download or transfer information in the pop-up.
Choose which information to download. Click Next.
Choose how much information to download and click Next.
You’ll be asked whether you want to download the data to a device or transfer it elsewhere. Make the selection and click Next.
Click Submit request.

How to download your data from Instagram

Click on your profile picture.
Select Settings.
Scroll down to the Security section.
Click on Download Data.
Choose the type of data you want to download.
Select the export format; HZD will give you a ZIP file with your data.
Confirm the download.

How to download your data from TikTok

Click the three dots next to your profile picture.
Click Settings and scroll down to the Account section.
Choose the type of data you want to download.
Select the export format.
Click the Download button.

How to download your data from Pinterest

Click the down arrow on the top right corner of your screen.
Select Settings.
Select Privacy and data.
Under Request your data, click Start request.

It may take up to 48 hours to receive a download link. Do not close your account before your data download request is complete.

How to download your data from Reddit

Visit https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request.
Log in to the Reddit account you’d like to request data from.
Select the reason for your request and a date range or All Time.
Click Submit.

How to download your data from Threads

Click the two-line menu in the bottom left.
Select Settings.
Click Account.
Click Download your information.
Enter the email address where you'd like to receive a link to your data, then click Request Download.
Enter your Instagram account password and click Next in the top right, then click Done.
You'll receive an email titled Your Threads Data with a link to your data. Click Download data and follow the instructions to finish downloading your information.

How to download your data from Discord

Go to User Settings.
Select Privacy and Safety.
Click the Request all of my Data button.

It may take up to 30 days to receive a download link. Do not close your account before your data download request is complete. If you’re wondering, this is the data you will receive.

If you’re on a social site not listed here, look up “How to download data from [site].”

STEP 3 TO QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA: DELETE YOUR CONTENT

If you want to be extra careful, once you have your backup in hand, delete all your content before closing your accounts. We know that deleted posts from Reddit are still searchable...and who knows what other sites will do with your content once you close your account?

TRY THIS NOW

Delete (or start deleting) your content on one site!

If you were a prolific social media user, deleting all your posts manually can take for-ever. Here are some ways to make it happen.

For Twitter/X, try TweetDeleter. This service starts at $2.99 per month.

The free version of Redact works for Reddit, and, to a limited extent, for a couple other platforms. The premium version (at $14.99/month) lets you delete more content, and also works with Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Imgur, Tumblr, Bluesky, and many more—even some dating and productivity sites. Check here for the full list .

Another idea is to delete a handful of posts each day when you need a break from other work. It may take longer that way, but is not as much as a burden.

STEP 4 TO QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA: CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNTS

Here’s how to close accounts on the most popular social media sites.

In some cases, your account will not be closed right away; for example, Facebook takes 90 days to delete all your data, Pinterest takes 14 days, and Twitter/X takes 30 days. If you log in again during the process, your account will be restored.

Afraid to let go? Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, and probably others, let you temporarily deactivate your account.

When you start to follow the steps in the links below to delete an account, the platforms will usually first ask if you’d like to deactivate it temporarily instead, and then walk you through the process.

For the instructions below, you’ll need to be logged into the site on your desktop browser.

TRY THIS NOW

Ready? Close one account!

How to close your Twitter/X account

Click on the More icon.
Select Settings and privacy.
From the Your account tab, click Deactivate your account.
Click Deactivate.
Enter your password.
Click the Deactivate account button.

How to close your Facebook account

Go to your Accounts Center and click on Personal Details.
Select Account ownership and control.
Select Deactivation or deletion.
If you have both Facebook and Instagram accounts, you’ll be asked to choose one.
Here’s where you have the option to temporarily deactivate your account. Otherwise, select Delete account and click Continue.
Keep hitting Continue through all the pleas for you to stay until you get to the actual deactivation option.
Enter your password.
Hit Delete account.

If you don’t log in again for 30 days, Facebook will permanently delete your account. If you want to check that your account has been deleted, ask a friend on the platform to see if they can find your profile. I once discovered my account was still not deleted a year after I went through the process!

How to close your Instagram account

Do the same as for Facebook above, but select Instagram instead of Facebook. Deleting the Instagram account associated with Threads will also delete your Threads account if you have one.

How to close your Threads account

Click the two-bar menu in the bottom left.
Click Settings.
Click Account at the top.
Select Deactivate or delete profile.
Click Delete profile.
Follow the prompts, then click Delete Threads profile.

How to close your Pinterest account

Click the chevron-down icon at the top-right corner.
Select Settings.
Select Account management from the left-side navigation.
Click Delete account.
Click Continue.
Select the reason you’re leaving, then click Send email to receive an email to delete your account.
Check your email to confirm.

How to close your Discord account\

Go to User Settings.
Select My Account.
Select Account Removal.
Click Delete Account.
If you're a server owner, you'll need to either delete the server or transfer ownership.
Enter your password and your six digit 2FA code.
Click Delete Account.

How to close your Reddit account

Go to Account Settings.
Scroll down to the Advanced section and click Delete Account.
Enter the required details and check the box that says I understand that deleted accounts aren't recoverable.
Click Delete.
If your account was created with your Google account or Apple ID, scroll down to the Account authorization section of your account settings and click Disconnect next to the Google account or Apple ID you signed up with. If you don’t have a password yet, you’ll be asked to create one.

How to close your LinkedIn account

Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
Select Settings & Privacy.
Go to the Account preferences section.
Under the Account management section, click Change next to Close account.
Check the reason for closing your account and click Next.
Enter your account password and click Close account.

If you don’t log in again within 14 days, your account will be permanently deleted.

If you belong to any platforms not listed here, search for “how to delete [site] account” to find instructions.

Once your account is closed, you may find that Google will still show your posts in search results. This will stop happening over time as Google updates its data, but if you don’t want to wait, revisit Chapter 7: Surf in Secret for details on how to remove outdated results in Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

OPTION 2: YOU WANT TO STAY ON SOCIAL MEDIA

For those who can’t say goodbye forever to social media, the ideas below will help you reap the benefits, while minimizing the amount of data, content, and attention these companies can extract from you. I’ll list these from the simplest to the most complicated.

SET A LIMIT

Like to relax on social media, but worry about getting trapped in the infinite scroll? Ask someone you trust to change the password to your account and only give it to you if you really need it (as defined in advance by you). This works for any type of website you want to use only occasionally, but have trouble dragging your attention away from.

If that’s too hardcore for you, try a site-blocking app like AppBlock (Android/iOS), Freedom (Android/iOS), or SelfControl (MacOS). These let you add distracting sites to a blocklist, and many apps let you set time limits for different sites as well.

DITCH THE APPS

The social apps go everywhere you go...and some of them track you the whole time. If you simply have to use social media while on the go, log in via the website using the browser on your phone.

CHOOSE YOUR PLATFORM WISELY

If social media is necessary for your job or business, consider which sites are best for your purposes. Usually, those are the ones you like enough to really work at.

For instance, I realized the majority of my clients came through LinkedIn. So rather than spreading myself thin trying to reach audiences through all social sites at once, I doubled down on LinkedIn. It worked so well that even after I deleted my LinkedIn account, I continued getting reach-outs from prospects who had seen me there!

MOVE TO THE FEDIVERSE

A big problem with the dominant social media platforms is that they “trap” you there. If you leave, you lose your content and your connections.

But for almost every one of these platforms, there’s an analogous social media site that won’t trap you—in what’s called the fediverse.

What the fediverse? According to The Verge, it’s “an interconnected social platform ecosystem [...] which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.”

In other words, imagine if you could post on TikTok from your Facebook account. And if you decided to leave Twitter/X, you could transfer all your connections and posts to Instagram.

Here are some platforms to check out. They all have good features...and a surprising amount of traffic.

Instead of Twitter/X...try Mastodon or BlueSky. (This platform is not yet fully interoperable because it uses a different type of fediverse protocol. But as of now it is interoperable with Mastodon.)

Instead of Reddit...try Lemmy.

Instead of Instagram...try Pixelfed.

Instead of YouTube...try PeerTube.

Instead of Facebook...try Friendica, Hubzilla, or Diaspora.

Instead of Goodreads (owned by Amazon)...try BookWyrm or The StoryGraph.

Instead of Discord...try Mattermost or Signal. (You can install a start using Signal in seconds. Mattermost is more of a DIY set-up better for tech-savvy people. )

Instead of TikTok, sign up for a beta of Loops.

TRY THIS NOW

Test out a federated social media site that looks appealing to you!

If you move to one or more of these federated social platforms and get your friends and family to move there as well, the site will grow. Over time it will be so much like the old social media—minus most of the bad parts—that you won’t miss the old ones at all.

Not sure which site to try? The Fediverse Observer can help you narrow down the best sites and servers for your needs.

BEWARE

Threads is sometimes mistaken as a friendlier version of X/Twitter, but it’s owned by Meta—the same company that owns Facebook and Instagram. You need to have an Instagram account to sign up for it. With all these federated social media sites listed above, I see no reason to join Threads.

FAKE THEM OUT

Some social platforms let you choose an anonymous username. Even if they don’t, you’re likely to get away with using at least a semi-fake name. When I took a course that used a Facebook Group, I created an account using my first and middle names, and didn’t post a photo or any personal information.

While you’re at it, change up the info in your account: Use a masked email, PO box, burner phone number, etc.

REFUSE TO SHARE

Want to (or have to) have a public profile? Be careful about what and how much you share. Even if you’re required to be on the platform, say for work, you aren’t required to get personal. When you do post or comment, keep the personal details light.

Also, be stingy with personal information in your public profile. Strangers (and the social media behemoths themselves) don’t need to know your gender, whether you’re married, your birth date, or your location.

CHECK THE PRIVACY SETTINGS

I’m not sure how much good this does, since Big Tech is not known for keeping its privacy promises, but be sure to check the privacy settings in each platform (both on your browser and in their apps) to turn off advertising tracking, location tracking, and so on

Do this on a regular basis; I can’t tell you how many times I returned to my privacy settings, on both social media and other sites, and discovered they’d magically changed back.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation put together a very, very detailed set of instructions for tightening up your privacy settings on Facebook and Instagram—which is great because many of these settings are hidden in obscure places. When I went through the process for a friend I was shocked to see exactly what Facebook was tracking and the details they were sending to third parties.

OPT OUT OF AI DATA COLLECTION

Do you want the social platforms to let AI bots scrape your data? Yeah, me neither. Make your preference known—typically in the platforms’ Privacy & Security settings—or let Redact’s premium (paid) service opt you out of 30+ platform’s AI-powered data collection services.

EXTRA CREDIT

If you use ChatGPT, the chatbot may have access to very private information. And there’s always the threat that it will be leaked: In 2023, a tech issue exposed users’ conversation histories.

Here’s how to delete your data from ChatGPT:

Click the Profile icon in the top-right corner of the screen.
Select Settings.
Scroll down to the Account section and click Clear History.
Confirm by clicking Clear History in the pop-up window.

And you’re done!

MAKE YOUR WEBSITE YOUR HOME BASE WITH POSSE

In some careers, building an audience online is crucial; for example, artists, writers, and podcasters need to share their content to survive.

However, the social media platforms you depend on can kick you off, erase all your posts, or go out of business instantly and with no warning, taking your content and your audience with them. We saw, when Elon Musk bought Twitter—and later when TikTok went dark for a day—how quickly even an established social media platform can be destabilized.

Instead, why not share your thoughts, creations, and content on a platform you own?

One method to do this is called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. With this strategy, you get to participate in social media while reclaiming some power from these exploitative digital platforms. No matter what happens to these platforms, your content, engagement, and followers will be safe because they will also live on your own site.

POSSE can be as simple as publishing posts on your own site and manually copy-pasting them into the various social platforms with a link back to your site. Or it can be as involved as setting up special tools to automatically syndicate your content to the platforms and “reverse syndicate” the comments and likes back to you.

The first step is to set up a website under your own domain. Don’t know what website host to use? Wordpress lets you build a federated blog.

Once you have your website ready, take a look at these helpful resources to learn how to get set up for POSSE:

POSSE (IndieWeb). This entry includes information on why you should go with the POSSE approach and has instructions on how to set it up. Warning: The instructions are fairly technical.

The poster’s guide to the internet of the future (The Verge). A thorough article for lay people.

Great article on #POSSE by @davidpierce.xyz (Tantek.com). This is a response to the Verge article above. At the end of the post, author Tantek Çelik lists many, many tools and resources to dive into as you set up your own POSSE website—like Brid.gy, a free tool that connects your site to various social media platforms.

Çelik’s front page is a good example a POSSE site.

POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - Hacker News (Y Combinator) This thread tackles some of the disadvantages of POSSE; for example, if you use this method to post on social media without having to be there yourself, you won’t see your friends’ posts. Some commenters offer solutions for various issues.

TRY THIS NOW

Be inspired by Çelik's POSSE site above!

Moving to a POSSE approach may seem complicated, but it’s no more difficult than learning the ever-changing ins and outs of each social media platform—from video orientation to post length to tagging. Once you get through the learning curve, the experience should become much more streamlined and intuitive.

EXTRA CREDIT

The OPSEC Guide, published in February 2025, gets serious about social media protection—plus anonymous browsing, biometric-behavioral threats, and much more.

PART 5: DISENGAGE BY...RECLAIMING YOUR ATTENTION

Big Tech vies for our attention because they can turn it into profit. Pop-ups, audio and video ads, and every single thing on your smartphone are trying to distract you from living your life to get you to bow to their whims.

Consider this: Meta and Google are not nice companies that give away lots of free services; they are literally categorized as ad-tech companies. Their main business is selling your attention to advertisers.

According to Ezra Klein in a January 2025 podcast episode, “Attention is the world‘s most valuable resource.” When we store this resource for ourselves and dole it out wisely, not only do we shrink the attention thieves’ power…we live richer lives by focusing on what really matters to us.

CHAPTER 17: SLOW YOUR SURFING

Perhaps the best way to keep the internet from commandeering our attention is to use it as little as possible. To that end, before you hop online to look up a random fact, first consider: Do you really need this piece of information?

Looking back, I can’t believe how many times I used to find myself reaching for my phone to look up the height of an actor in the movie I was watching, what year an historic event happened, or whether the crazy news a friend read on Instagram is really true.

Whenever someone in my family had some inane question (“are sharks fish?”), we would joke, “Oh, if only we had a device with all the world’s knowledge on it!”

Pulling out our phones or hopping onto our laptops to look up unnecessary information is so incredibly easy, we often don’t realize the information is completely useless to us. Resisting this urge is a huge step toward disengaging.

CHAPTER 18: ANNIHILATE ADS

Online ads pop up, flash, and play audio and video to distract us from the goal we’re trying to accomplish online. Free yourself of ads…and free up your attention for better things.

ANNIHILATE ADS BY…OPTING OUT OF ONLINE ADVERTISING NETWORKS

Online advertising networks are national trade groups that devise self-regulatory solutions to consumer issues online. In other words, they’re groups of marketers and advertisers that give you cursory control over your data so they can avoid actual regulation.

Part of this weak effort is to let you opt out of a lot of their preference-based advertising. The process is clunky and they will warn you—over and over again—that if you opt out, the ads you see online will not be customized to you. (How out of touch can you get? I don’t know a single person who complains that online ad companies know too little about them.)

Here’s how to deny yourself the privilege of ads targeted to your behavior.

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE DIGITAL ADVERTISING ALLIANCE

Enter your email or phone number to control how advertisers collect data associated with that address or number. This won’t affect ads you get via phone or email; the DAA’s advertiser members only use this information only to identify you in order to exclude you from personalized ads online.

The site also lets you do a browser check to find out which of their member advertisers are customizing ads on your browser, and to opt out of any or all of them. I ran the check in the spring of 2023 and opted out of every one of all 118 advertisers. When I did it again in the fall of 2023, I discovered that a bunch of those advertisers were still serving personalized ads to my browser. So it’s probably worth it to go through this process a couple of times per year.

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE NETWORK ADVERTISING INITIATIVE

Enter your email to opt out of member companies’ browser-based advertising and matched advertising. There are also instructions for opting out of interest-based ads on various mobile devices and internet-connected TVs. (FYI, I discovered that if you try to opt out while using a VPN, you’ll get an error message.)

TRY THIS NOW

Opt out of these two ad networks!

ANNIHILATE ADS IDEA BY…BLOCKING THEM OUTRIGHT

Opting out of these networks doesn’t stop ads—it only stops member companies from tracking you in order to get rid of ads online altogether, you’ll need to install an ad-blocking browser extension. These are a few popular ones.

TRY THIS NOW

Install an ad-blocker now...or after you've installed a new browser!

Adblock Plus (for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, and Android)

AdBlock (for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, iOS, and Android)

uBlock Origin (for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera)

Ad-blockers also prevent third parties from installing cookies on your device, so you reclaim your attention and your data all at once…for free!

BEWARE

Some of your favorite online content may be funded by advertising. You could always turn off your ad-blocker to allow ads from creators you want to support. (Some sites will show a pop-up asking you to support them by disabling your ad-blocker while on their site.)

CHAPTER 19: SAY SEE YA TO YOUR SMARTPHONE

Just 15 years ago, we managed to navigate the world without having to look at our phones 144 times per day—like we do now, according to PCMag. That’s nine times per hour, or about once every seven minutes! Today we’re completely reliant on our phones, pouring our life energy and attention into the very features and apps that suck up and share our data.

But…how can we find our way to a new friend’s house without the GPS on our phone? How else can we get boarding passes, find a new restaurant, deposit checks, listen to audiobooks, join video chats, play music, tell the time, know whether to bring an umbrella, identify a bird, check our heart rate, or find out the name of the song playing at the local café?

Don’t despair: Just as it was possible before, it’s possible now. Not super easy, thanks to the way our phones have wormed their way into a position of such significance in our lives, but not as difficult as you might think.

OPTION 1: TRADE YOUR SMARTPHONE FOR A DUMB PHONE

I tried all the tricks of taking email off my phone and disabling the browser, but I’d instead find myself checking the weather an unreasonable number of times, looking at photos (again), and checking my bank account over and over.

So when my smartphone died, instead of buying a new one, I opted for the LightPhone II—a small, privacy-oriented phone with a backlit black-and-white display that came with the bare minimum: phone, time, and text. You could use the online dashboard to add a few extras like a podcast player, music player, or map.

Incredibly, within just a couple weeks, I no longer felt the urge to check my phone. I could sit in the car, wait in line, or chill on my porch…without needing a gadget!

The bad news is, the main functions—texting and calling—were clunky, slow, and difficult. Part of my screen was unresponsive, and the phone would also turn itself off at random times. Despite the company’s excellent customer service, I couldn’t get it to work well enough that I felt safe being out and about with this phone as my only form of communication. The company was kind enough to offer me a refund even though it was after the return window.

That said, many, many people love their LightPhone, so perhaps I just got a bad one. If you like the idea, it’s worth trying out, especially knowing that the company does have a return policy. The latest version, the LightPhone III, comes with a camera, fingerprint sensor, flashlight, and other features.

OPTION 2: COMPROMISE WITH A SEMI-SMART PHONE

While using the LightPhone II, I did have to endure some inconveniences. For example, I borrowed my partner’s phone to deposit checks, used my laptop to make Venmo payments, and went to the wall thermostat to see the temperature outside. When a business required customers to scan a QR code for service, I marched up to the front desk and asked for an alternative.

Not willing or able to sacrifice Uber, the weather, or other apps? Some LightPhone users also keep an old smartphone and swap in the SIM card when they need to use it.

If you want a distraction-free phone but the inconveniences of a true dumb phone are a deal-breaker for you, try one of these semi-smart phones or privacy-forward smart phones.

WisePhone II looks like an actual smartphone and includes music, calculator, maps, phone, messages, camera, flashlight, photos, clock, notes, a calendar, and more—but no social media apps, browser, or app store. The company bills itself as a conservative and religious business, if that matters to you either way. Their privacy policy states they will not sell, rent, or provide your information to any third parties for marketing purposes.

The Ghost Phone looks similar to WisePhone II and has many of the same features. In addition, it has its own small app store, and many other apps can be sideloaded to the phone—but browsers and social media apps will be blocked. The Ghost Phone Pro runs on an Android-based operating system, and while it purports to reduce distraction, I couldn’t find any claims to privacy.

The Fairphone with 5/e/OS is “a fully ‘deGoogled’ version of Android—built on open-source tech.” It comespreloaded with apps like email, calendar, chat, web browsing, and weather. The operating system also works with all Android apps while keeping your data private.

Not all phones are compatible with all carriers; for example, my LightPhone didn’t work with Visible, my carrier at the time. Check the phone’s website to see if you can stick with your current carrier.

For more brands to consider, search for “distraction-free phone.” (Not on Google, though! More on search engines later.) Or, if you’re not looking for a lot of features, look for an old-school flip phone like the Nokia 2780 Flip.

OPTION 3: INSTALL A PRIVACY-FIRST OPERATING SYSTEM

For those more concerned about privacy than distraction, here’s another possibility: Buy a used Pixel phone and install GrapheneOS, a free, privacy-oriented operating system for Android phones. GrapheneOS is an open-source non-profit that also develops secure and private apps and services—so you can keep your data out of Big Tech’s hands without missing out on, say, a camera or a browser.

I finally did this, and I’m so glad I did. When my kid’s iPhone finally died, I gave them mine and ordered a refurbished Pixel 7a for $200 from Gazelle. After downloading my contacts to my laptop and uploading my photos to Proton Drive, I went to the Graphene site and followed their instructions. There were a few user-error glitches at the start, but then the process was fast and smooth.

The Graphene operating system is clean and easy to use, and comes with basic apps. For other apps, download from Google Play. GrapheneOS has a special “compatibility layer” that lets you use Google Play apps without forfeiting your privacy.

BEWARE

Whatever kind of phone you have, consider getting a cover for your front-facing camera. (And pick up one for your laptop, while you’re at it.) These gadgets cost only a few bucks, and they not only thwart hackers gaining access to your camera through malware, phishing attacks, and other bad-guy tactics—they also save you from potentially embarrassing situations when you forget your camera is turned on before or after a video call.

CHAPTER 20: GHOST CORPORATE NEWS

Remember earlier when I said Big Tech—and the billionaires that own these companies—are shaping the way we see the world? That’s because some of them actually own the news.

In September 2024, Pew Research Center Reported, “Overall, just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media, up slightly compared with the last few years.”

I don’t know how many people turn to which social sites, but at the very least this means millions of people are taking in news on sites controlled by Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk. Then we have the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The rest of the media industry is just as concentrated. According to Wikipedia:

In 1984, fifty independent media companies owned the majority of media interests within the United States. By 2011, 90% of the United States's media was controlled by six media conglomerates: GE/Comcast (NBC, Universal), News Corp (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post), Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar), Viacom (MTV, BET, Paramount Pictures), Time Warner (CNN, HBO, Warner Bros.), and CBS (Showtime, NFL.com).

A lot of these are the major news networks millions of us turn to every day. They control what we know and what we see, while selling our eyeballs to advertisers.

Why not take some of the power from corporate-owned, ad-supported media—not to mention privacy-invading social media—and give it to reader-supported independent media instead? You can read many of them for free, or support them for extra perks like unlimited articles. Some subscriptions cost under a dollar per month.

Trustworthy Media offers a list of independent media outlets; it’s not at all comprehensive but is a good start. If you’re concerned about an outlet’s political bias, check it at AllSides. You’ll find that the majority of independent media leans left, but center and right-leaning outlets do exist.

I personally have cancelled my New York Times subscription and now support Lever News, The Guardian, and Ground.News with paid subscriptions. If you already have a paid subscription to a mainstream news outlet, you’ll drain a little power from our corporate overlords—and possibly save your sanity—by moving your money over to an independent one.

PART 6: DISENGAGE BY...QUITTING THE BIG 4

Hopefully, the actions you’ve taken to disengage so far have honed your wits for the biggest challenge of all: quitting Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—the biggest of Big Tech. (It’s actually a Big 5, but we covered Meta/Facebook earlier.)

These are the companies that use their market power to lock us into their products, kill off competitors, assault us with ads, mistreat creators, and extract our data for corporate profit.

These are the corporations whose massive privacy violations have turned us from living, breathing humans into dollar signs and data points.

And they’re the businesses with the dollars to buy our country right out from under us. Recall that CEOs from three of these four companies bent the knee at the President’s inauguration. It’s not clear if Microsoft’s CEO was there, but the company did donate $1 million to the inaugural fund.

In this section of the book, I’ll offer a quick critique of each of these surveillance capitalist companies—and some solid alternatives.

CHAPTER 21: SAY GOODBYE TO GOOGLE

Google’s free products are hard to beat! Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Photos, Google News, the Chrome browser, and the list goes on.

However, Google is also one of the world’s most ruthless harvesters of your personal data—which it doesn’t adequately protect, seeing as how it’s exposed the personal info of hundreds of thousands of people.

The product Google is best known for, Search, isn’t all that great: As the biggest server of online ads, the company prioritizes paid search results over what you actually want to find. Scammers manipulate Google’s algorithms to create junk sites that rank high in the search engine, ripping off both visitors and advertisers.

Then there’s the monopoly issue. In September 2023, the U.S. launched an antitrust lawsuit against Google. “The Justice Department's case hinges on claims that Google illegally orchestrated its business dealings, so that it's the first search engine people see when they turn on their phones and web browsers,” reports NPR. “The government says Google's goal was to stomp out competition.”

In February 2025, Google removed from its “AI Principles” its promise not to use AI for weapons or surveillance.

All this and (much) more is why it makes sense to explore the big world outside of Google products. This can be a difficult endeavor at the beginning, but once you move to new platforms, they’ll become as much a part of your everyday life as Google once was. After some up-front effort, you don’t need to think about it ever again. (And I know because I’ve done it myself.)

EXTRA CREDIT

For more alternatives to Google and all Big Tech offerings, visit ethical.net, a not-for-profit project building a collaborative, online directory of ethical companies of all kinds.

If you’d like to kick Google to the curb, Nord VPN provides a list of Google alternatives, many of which are free or cheap.

I researched and tested some of NordVPN’s suggested replacements as I went about getting rid of Google products in my own life. Here’s what I ended up using and how well these replacements worked. Like Google products, many of these alternatives are free but offer more space, features, and so on for a fee.

EMAIL: GMAIL —> PROTON MAIL

I chose Proton, a privacy-first email provider that also offers a calendar, password manager, VPN, masked emails, and more. Get an email address for free, or upgrade for more addresses, the ability to use your own domain, and other features.

TRY THIS NOW

I’ve been very happy with Proton except I find their email search to be slow and annoying. However, that’s the upshot of extra privacy. Google provides the fast searches they do because they have access to your content, giving them a perpetual searchable index of your data.

Changing over was a long-term process. Here’s how I handled it:

Deleted all Gmail accounts except for my main one, as I had different addresses for different purposes.

Set up the main Gmail account to forward to the new Proton account.

Set up this automated response on Gmail:

Subject Line: This email address is no longer being monitored

Body: Hi! This email address is no longer being monitored. If you know me and didn't get my new address, please text me. Otherwise, you can contact me through my website, [URL]. Thanks!

On Proton, created two email addresses: one for friends and family, and a second one for businesses and organizations I trust.

Emailed my friends and family to give them my new (main) email address.

Changed over all important accounts to use the second email address. (Less important accounts, such my local supermarket, get masked emails; see Chapter 8: Escape Email Tracking for more on masked email addresses.)

Changed the email address on my website, my downloadable content, etc. to a masked address.

For the first few weeks, I occasionally caught forwarded emails from people and businesses I neglected to alert to the change, and I switched them over to one of the new addresses. At some point, I started getting nothing but spam at my main Gmail address.

Once I moved all my files out of Google Drive (more on that below), I took a deep breath and deleted my main Google account. It felt so good!

Discover other free or cheap private email providers in Chapter 7: Surf in Secret.

SEARCH: GOOGLE SEARCH —> KAGI, DUCKDUCKGO, OR SIMPLESEARCH

Rather than using Google Search, I use Kagi Search. You get 100 free searches with their trial, and believe me when I say you’ll want to upgrade. I now pay about $12.50 per month for unlimited searches for both my partner and myself, and it’s worth every cent.

Since Kagi is not ad-supported, you don’t see ads. Your searches and other data are private. You can raise or lower websites rankings—for example, if you want to see more results from WebMD or fewer from WikiHow. Kagi also lets you create “lenses” for more personalized results. And the search results are just better: no AI spam, no junk.

Here’s how to change your default search engine to Kagi.

TRY THIS NOW

If Kagi’s price is too steep, check out the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo, which I used for several months before switching to Kagi. It’s free, but because it doesn’t track or collect your info, search results are not personalized or hyper-targeted. I consider this a good thing, as I don’t want to be confined to a little bubble when it comes to what information I see. It took a few weeks to get used to DuckDuckGo, but after that I didn’t even give it a second thought.

To change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo in your computer’s browser, simply click on the magnifying glass in the search bar, click on Change Search Settings in the dropdown menu, and choose DuckDuckGo under the Default Search Engine section. Follow these instructions for iOS; these are the steps for Android.

Don’t want to pay for Kagi, and/or can’t do without the ease and personalization of Google Search? Simple Search is an extension for Firefox and Chrome that highlights the actual search results provided by Google or Bing, cutting out all the paid search ads, info boxes, etc.

Using Simple Search doesn’t mean these search engines can’t track you, collect your data, or serve up personalized ads—it just means you don’t see those ads, which throws a tiny bit of sand into Google’s money-making gears.

CALENDAR: GOOGLE CALENDAR —> PROTON CALENDAR

A Proton account includes Proton Calendar, which works pretty much the same as Google Calendar. The disadvantage is that while you can share and view events between the two platforms, you can’t edit events created in the other platform.

PHOTOS: GOOGLE PHOTOS —> ENTE OR PROTON DRIVE

I first replaced Google Photos with an app called Ente. This paid platform lets you organize and store photos both in the app and online. The developers are big on privacy, and I found it to be worth the money.

But then I discovered that the Proton Drive app automatically backs up and encrypts your photos. The back-up is a bit slow, but it’s fine—especially considering I was already paying for a subscription.

NEWS: GOOGLE NEWS → GROUND.NEWS

Ground.News “process[es] nearly 60,000 news articles from over 50,000 different news sources. Articles from different outlets covering the same event are merged into a single summary, making it possible to get multiple perspectives in one place.”

I think of it as the non-Google Google News, with the extra perk that the service marks each story with Bias and Factuality ratings.

The site is free, but a paid subscription gets you more features. Subscriptions start at $9.99 per year. Yes, per year!

TRY THIS NOW

Check out Ground.News. It's very cool!

BROWSER: GOOGLE CHROME → FIREFOX OR A PRIVACY BROWSER

I chose Mozilla’s Firefox browser in place of Google Chrome, and have been very happy with it. Mozilla is a non-profit that states, “Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.”

The only catch is, you need to “harden” Firefox by setting the privacy restrictions and using a tracking blocker like Ublock Origin.

As I write this, there has been some noise about Firefox’s new privacy policy; it does look like people are not reading it fully or are misinterpreting it, but if this makes you worried, you can avoid it.

In this case, there are privacy-first browsers you might like to try. Some to think about include Mullvad, Epic Privacy Browser, Orion browser, and Librewolf.

TRY THIS NOW

Install one of these browsers and test it out!

Whichever you choose, install it before changing it to your default browser.

HOW TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT BROWSER ON iOS

Go to Settings.
Select Apps.
Tap Default Apps at the top of the list of your apps.
Tap a feature to change your default setting to a different app.
After choosing a new default app, you might have to follow additional onscreen steps.

HOW TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT BROWSER ON MACOS

From the Apple menu in the corner of your screen, choose System Settings.
Click Desktop & Dock in the sidebar.
Scroll down on the right and choose a web browser from the Default web browser menu.

HOW TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT BROWSER ON ANDROID

Open the Settings menu.
Select Apps or Applications.
Tap the three-dot menu icon in the top-right corner and choose Default apps.
Tap Browser app or Browser.
Select the browser you want to set as the default.
If prompted, select Set as default or a similar option to confirm.

HOW TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT BROWSER ON WINDOWS 11

Press the Windows key or click the Search Bar and type Default Apps.
Click Default Apps.
In the search bar under Set Defaults for Applications, type your the new browser name and click on it.
Click Set Default.

You did it! Now, when you click on a link in, say, a text, it will open in the correct browser. Be sure to set the new browser as default on your desktop computer, phone, and other devices.

BEWARE

Brave bills itself as a private browser, but according to AndroidPolice:

Brave Browser is undeniably a commercial product first, and a privacy-centric web browser second. While the browser does have quite a few improvements to privacy compared to stock Chrome, it's designed to promote the use of a cryptocurrency (BAT) that Brave itself owns, and it has a referral program that pays browser users by how many people they can get to download Brave. Now the browser has been caught injecting its own affiliate codes into web addresses for popular cryptocurrency trading websites.

I read in other places that the affiliate code snafu was an honest mistake. However, if you lean left, know that the CEO has questionable ethics, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was a major backer of Brave.

So considering there are so many other privacy browsers, if these facts worry you, I’d just choose another one.

MAPS: GOOGLE MAPS → KAGI MAPS, OSMAND, HERE WEGO, OR PAPER MAPS

I use Kagi maps, which is available for subscribers. According to their website, “Unlike other competing Map services that track your location to serve you ads, Kagi does not track or store your search history or location data.”

TRY THIS NOW

Test out a new map app!

Looking for free maps? Try OsmAnd, which NordVPN calls “one of the leading privacy-oriented Google Maps alternatives” or HERE WeGo, which “falls under GDPR rules and regulations, so you can be sure that your data is in good hands.” I tested out HERE WeGo and it worked just as well as Google or Apple maps.

And for the ultimate in privacy, don’t forget that paper maps still exist. We keep a road atlas in each car for emergencies.

WARNING

The popular Waze app was acquired by Google over a decade ago.

VIDEO: YOUTUBE → NEBULA, PEERTUBE, OR YOUTUBE (!!)

Some of the same creators who post on YouTube also post on Nebula, “a place for experimentation and exploration, with exclusive originals, bonus content, and no ads in sight.” Half of your subscription fees ($6 per month or $60 per year) go to the creators.

If you prefer to watch for free, PeerTube is a federated social platform on a mission to provide an alternative to Big Tech. According to the website, “With PeerTube, no more opaque algorithms or obscure moderation policies! PeerTube platforms you visit are built, managed and moderated by their owners. PeerTube allows platforms to be connected to each other, creating a big network of platforms that are both autonomous and interconnected.”

I searched for “music,” “gardening,” and “video games” to see what I could find. As of this writing, PeerTube is hosting 900 music channels, 10 gardening channels, and 4,200 video game channels. It’s nothing compared to YouTube, but if more people like us use it, it will keep growing.

TRY THIS NOW

Test out a new video platform!

Can’t find what you need on Nebula or PeerTube? Here’s some good news: You don’t need to be logged into Google/YouTube in order to watch videos. You’ll lose out on some features—such as subscribing, liking, and commenting on videos—but it’s a small price to pay if you prefer to be slightly more anonymous.

(I say “slightly more” because I doubt you’re invisible to Google just because you’re not logged in. But again, every little resistance helps!)

LAPTOP: GOOGLE CHROMEBOOK —> LENOVO OR DELL

If you want to steer clear of both Google and Apple, many cybersecurity experts are recommending Lenovo and Dell laptops as secure alternatives.

EXTRA CREDIT

Whatever laptop you opt for, consider switching your operating system to Linux: a free, open source operating system that gives you more control over your privacy. There are many tutorials online for switching over your current laptop, and dedicated Linux machines are also available. Michael Bazzell goes into detail on the options in his book Extreme Privacy.

CLOUD DOCUMENT EDITOR: GOOGLE DOCS —> ZOHO OFFICE, PROTON DOCS, OR CRYPTPAD

Zoho Office is one of Google Docs’ biggest competitors, because it includes a whole suite of tools like editing, chat, and an offline app. The platform also lets you upload different types of documents and even edit PDFs. On top of all that, it has a clear and reasonable privacy policy.

Zoho Office’s Writer, Notebook, Sheet, and Show products duplicate Google’s popular office products and are free for individuals; access all of these through Zoho’s Workspace, which offers 5GB of storage per user with up to five users, and a 25MB attachment limit.

I’m also thrilled that Proton now offers a cloud-based document editor as part of Proton Drive. It doesn’t have all the features of Google Docs (yet), but it keeps adding new ones. I now use Proton Docs for word processing documents and Zoho for spreadsheets.

Finally, I discovered and tested out CryptPad, “the end-to-end encrypted and open-source collaboration suite.” CryptPad lets users create and collaborate on text documents, worksheets, forms, and more.

EXTRA CREDIT

I found CryptPad through PRISM Break, which has lists of suggested alternatives to global data surveillance programs. The website states, “Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical! We all have a right to privacy, which you can exercise today by encrypting your communications and ending your reliance on proprietary services.”

On this site you’ll find safer apps for email, file sharing, financial tools, productivity tools, social media, and much, much more—for both mobile devices and computers.

CLOUD STORAGE: GOOGLE DRIVE —> PROTON DRIVE

I originally chose Box.com as my new cloud storage solution because it allows users to collaborate on and share documents; however, when I attempted to switch over to Box, I was continually frustrated at how slow and inconvenient it was.

First, there was no easy way to automatically transfer the contents of your Google Drive. I tried various methods, and finally resigned myself to downloading all my folders from Google Drive and then uploading them into Box Drive.

Second, I discovered if you try to upload folders that contain subfolders, many of the subfolders’ contents don’t transfer over. So my next task was to upload the individual subfolders one by one. This entire process took several days, on and off.

Third, the editing and sharing of files is very clunky. In order to share a file, the recipient needs to have a Box account—which makes sense, but who wants to go to that much effort just to collaborate with little old me? And in order to open and work on files in Box, you have to use third-party apps like Microsoft Word, which defeats the purpose of choosing a privacy-oriented drive.

Finally, I had the terrifying experience of losing thousands of files when I tried to reorganize my drive.

Thank goodness I hadn’t deleted the files from Google Drive yet, so I gave up, canceled my Box subscription, and went crawling back to Google.

Later, I moved to Proton Drive for storage. I like it, with the exception of their search: They only allow you to search by title and not by content. However, this is because, unlike Google, Proton doesn’t have access to your documents. That’s part of what makes it private!

HOW TO STOP PAYING GOOGLE FOR STORAGE

Until I had the chance to move to Proton Drive, I cleared out my Drive files from many, many gigs to under 15 GB. This not only let me stop paying for Drive—thereby withdrawing my dollars from Google—but also helped me minimize the amount of my content Google had access to.

If you’d like to reduce your Google storage to “free” levels, here are some tricks I used. (Also, if you ever decide to move to another cloud storage service, you won’t be paying for storage you don’t need.)