Ditching Big Tech, One Step at a Time

How I Started Taking My Digital Life Back from Big Tech — Not a guide. Just what actually happened.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. Every time I started, it turned into a tutorial. A list of tools. A how-to guide. That’s not what I want to write. I already wrote that. This is different.

This is about why I did it, what it was actually like, and what I learned along the way. Including the parts where I was lazy, made compromises, and still haven’t finished.

I knew for a long time. I just didn’t do enough.

I was deep in Google for years. Gmail, Drive, Docs, Photos, Calendar, Keep. Everything. On top of that, the full Apple ecosystem too. One account for this, one account for that, everything syncing to everything. It was seamless and honestly, it was great.

I wasn’t blind to what was happening. I knew Google was reading my emails, building a profile on me, tracking my behavior across platforms, selling that data to brokers. I knew this, and I genuinely wanted to change it. The problem was that the alternatives weren’t good enough. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice productivity and convenience for something half-baked. Finding tools that could actually replace what I had, without making my day-to-day life dificult, was harder than it sounds.

That’s the real trap. Not ignorance. The lack of worthy alternatives.

That said, I wasn’t just sitting on my hands either. I did what I could within the constraints I had. Separate email addresses for different purposes. Privacy hardened browsers. Signal or Element over WhatsApp whenever people were willing. Being deliberate about permissions and what I shared where. Small things, but conscious ones. It just wasn’t enough on its own.

What finally pushed me

There wasn’t one big moment. It was a few things stacking up.

Skiff was one of them. A few years ago I was genuinely excited about Skiff as a Google alternative. Email, drive, documents. It felt promising. Then Notion bought it and killed the whole product. Just like that. Users got a migration window and that was it. The founders got their exit. Users got nothing.

That stung. But it also taught me something: building your digital life on someone else’s product is always a bet. Sometimes you lose.

The other thing was AI. When every major tech company started aggressively integrating AI into everything, not really to improve the product but to capture more data and more context, The direction was getting worse. The extraction was accelerating, surveillance got autoamted. It felt like the right moment to stop waiting and actually move.

Also, I had been “planning to do this” for a few years by that point. At some point the delay becomes its own decision. So, I was tired of it.

What I did

First thing: I bought a new domain that I could use as a foundation for many things; as an umbrella domain, or simply as a personal domain. This sounds small but it’s the most important step. If your email is @gmail.com, it belongs to Google. If it’s @yourdomain.com, it belongs to you. You can point it at any provider, switch whenever you want, and your address never changes. That’s the whole idea.

Then I set up Proton Mail under that domain. Proton is still a third party. I’m still trusting someone else with my email. But the difference matters. End-to-end encrypted, Swiss-based, no advertising business model. It’s not the same as Google. It was a tradeoff, but a good one.

The actual migration was just tedious. I used Proton’s import tool, then went through every service I use and updated my email address one by one. Banks, subscriptions, everything. Sent a note to my contacts. Set up forwarding on the old Gmail. It took weeks.

For passwords, I kept using KeePass locally for the sensitive stuff. Proton Pass for everything else. The alias feature is absolutely useful. Every new service I sign up for gets a unique throwaway address. When I get spam, I can know who exactly sold my data.

I deleted Chrome and switched to Firefox fully. The Multi-Account Containers extension isolates your browsing by context. Work tabs in one container, personal in another, social media in another. They can’t track each other. It sounds complicated but once you used to it, becomes easy.

I set up a Raspberry Pi at home running Pi-hole, which blocks ads and trackers at the network level for every device in the house without touching any of them individually. I also put Ollama and Open WebUI on it for running local AI models. SearXNG for local search. The whole thing sits in a corner and just works.

I connect back to my home network from anywhere through a WireGuard tunnel on a cheap Hetzner VPS in Finland, which falls under EU privacy jurisdiction, so I can use all of this remotely too.

If you want the full breakdown of tools, steps, and how to sequence the migration, I wrote a detailed guide separately. You can find it here: A Pragmatic Guide to DeGoogle

The honest parts

I still use Google Sheets. Haven’t found anything that replaces it well enough for the work I rely on it for. That’s a real compromise but it’s the reality.

Signal is better than WhatsApp. I use it with the people who use it. That’s about 20% of my contacts. The other 80% are still on WhatsApp and I can’t just leave because that’s where people are. I keep nudging. But, it’s slow moving.

Social media is the same problem. The Fediverse, Mastodone, or eYou is a genuine alternative in principle. In practice, everyone we know is still on the old platforms and network effects are hard to fight.

Not everything is smooth. Some things are somewhat annoying. Certain websites don’t behave perfectly with a hardened browser. Some searches take longer. A few services broke slightly during the migration. None of it was catastrophic but it’s worth naming because the people who write these posts often skip this part.

Why this actually matters

There are obvious benefits of this: better security, fewer data breaches, less exposure. All true.

But the real reason is something harder to articulate. I find it genuinely uncomfortable that a small number of companies have built detailed behavioral profiles on billions of people. That they know our habits, fears, and patterns in ways we never consciously agreed to. Even if nothing bad comes of it directly, that kind of power grip is strange and it got normalized way too fast.

I wanted the tools I use every day to be tools I actually chose. Not tools that were just the default because switching was annoying. That’s a small thing but it matters.

If you’re thinking about starting

Just get the domain first. Everything else can wait. It costs almost nothing comparing to the cost of not doing it, and it means you own your identity online regardless of whatever else you decide later.

Then move slowly. One thing at a time. Trying to replace everything at once is how people burn out and give up. It will take months, not just a weekend, and there will still be some parts you figure out later. Everyone has different use cases, different threat models.

Accept that it won’t be perfect. I’ve made compromises. I’ll probably make more. The point isn’t purity. The point is being pragmatic. The point is that you made deliberate choices instead of just accepting someone else’s defaults.

That shift, once you make it, is harder to undo than you’d expect.