If technology by itself can and should help anybody, the big corporations and those who own and drive them demonstrate to be working consequently against humanity and its growth, rather than for or with it. We are constantly harvested, data and metadata are collected, analyzed and used for all sort of purposes, including AI training. Despite this, it is still possible to avoid giving up the good side of the technology. It is crucial though, to be informed and actively claim and retain our independency in the digital world, as we should do in the real one.
In general, the level of understanding and knowledge about IT and technology is shamefully low, one reason more to try to educate as many as possible.
Digital Life
Communication
The most commonly used communication platforms are still Skype (owned by Microsoft), Messenger and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), Zoom, FaceTime (owned by Apple), Discord, Google’s Meet, Hangouts and Duo… They are the most popular and also the most dengerous ones. Fortunately there are intelligent and nice people that create alternatives! These apps can be run and their service hosted practically by everyone anywhere, they are free, open-source and very user-friendly and effective. Element is an advanced chat platform with end-to-end encryption for private and public communication, suitable also for groups, communities and organisations. It works on most of the web browsers and the app can be installed on any OS (Linux, Mac OS, Windows, iOS and Android). It is one of the various applications built to work with and within the matrix.org network, and it can well substitute among others: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord and Skype. Jitsi is an audio/video conference software that works from any web browser and its app version exists for Android and iOS. It can well be compared to Zoom and Google Meet. Searching and surfing the web For many, “to google” has even become a verbe that means “to seach the web”. The problem is, that a search engine should not filter, prioritise, censor and manipulate results and information, as Google, Bing or Yahoo do. If the removal of such verb is an educational task, the use of better search engines is much more simple and action can be taken within seconds: DuckDuckGo is a good search engine that does not censor or track you, and it can be set to be the default search engine for most of the internet browsers. Qwant and StartPage are valuable alternatives too. Talking about browsing the web, Firefox and Brave (even if the last one is built on Chromium) are good substitutes for the various Chrome (Google), Edge (Microsoft) and Safari (Apple) and they are available for any Operative System, desktop or mobile. An internet browser can help to avoid sending all sort of data to undesirable hands.
Social
Facebook and Twitter are still very popular, but they are more and more involved into censorship and open promotion of the current propaganda. Again, there are valuable alternatives it is definitely worth enforcing. Fediverse is a system of decentralised social platforms, all interconnected. The most known names among them are Mastodon, Friendica, diaspora, GNU Social, Hubzilla and PeerTube (that is also a video-sharing platform itself). Flote is an other social network, privacy aware and user centered and oriented.
Video platforms
YouTube (owned by Google) and Vimeo are still giants among video sharing platforms, but they totally conform with the other corporation-owned platforms when it comes to censorship and propaganda. Therefore are there again very good reasons to leave them alone, and there are many ways to do so: BitChute is one of the good alternatives, together with OdySee (based on LBRY) Theta DTube DLive Verasity LivePeer
Personal cloud
The same said above about other aspects of our digital life is true for our data storage and sharing. The “cloud”, if it can be indeed convenient, permitting to access our data from anywhere and with several devices, it is also an other way to put our “stuff” in other people’s hands! And what is being done with it, it is not easy to know (or is it?). That’s why the various iCloud (Apple), Google Drive, OneDrive (Microsoft) or Dropbox, to mention just few very common solutions, are not to be trusted. NextCloud can be hosted on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or on a physical computer -even on a Raspberry PI!- and gives the confort of the cloud services with the advantage of total control on the data. It is a fork of OwnCloud and it is well maintained and rich in functions and extensions. It manages contacts and calendars as well.
Economy
The digital life is not just pictures and music! Today it is also money, credit cards, bank accounts, health and much more! And these aspects suffer the very same problems mentioned already above. Here some ways to face the current reality and start claiming some degree of independence. OpenBazaar is a decentralised marketplace where anyone can buy, sell or exchange anything anywhere. It is hosted by the users, and do not suffer censorship. Particl is an other example of marketplace, in this case with integrated crypto currency. AgoristMarket is an example of project aiming to put offer and demand in free connection, without mediations and speculation, following the Agorist philosophy. Monero is so far a particularly privacy oriented crypto currency (BitCoin is definitely not the only one!), as a possible way to own money instead of being owned by it.
Operative Systems
The system driving your computer can also be used to collect all sort of information from the users. Apple computers ship with Mac OS, most of the other machines with Windows (Microsoft), But there is at least a third alternative, called Linux! Years ago it was not for everyone to have a distribution of Linux running as the “daily driver”. But today things are different! Most of the Linux distributions (often called “distros”) can be installed with a fully automated process, where the user needs just to download an image file, transfer it to a USB stick (using for example Balena Etcher) and boot the computer from the stick. The advantages of Linux over the other two system are:
Free
Open Source
Users/community maintained for most of the distros
Clear policies for privacy and data
Fast and light
Can run on older hardware with astonishing results
Can be personalised and look the way you like
“If silence is consent, acquiescing is collaboration”.