Anyone who knows me knows that I can get very preachy about ditching proprietary systems in favour of free or open ones. However, this time it’s not just about preaching some abstract ideals that you may or may not care about. This time to safety of many is at stake.
How so? As you likely already know, Donald Trump just got inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States of America. And how did his inauguration go? Well of course, with the richest man alive, Elon Musk, sieg heiling.
Yup, that’s real.
But he wasn’t the only rich and powerful at Trump’s inauguration. TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, and Facebook founder and owner of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg were also all present. Apple CEO Tim Cook congratulated Trump and stated “We look forward to working with the administration to drive continued innovation and jobs for future growth across our great nation”. Microsoft contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
The writing is on the wall: the rich and powerful are kowtowing to Trump. And what does Trump want to do? For starters, one of the largest deportations in human history. And let’s not forget the executive orders he signed on the first day, including outlawing trans people, an action he also promised during his campaign and with which Meta preemptively complied.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to tell you this, and if you just looked at the state of things then you already knew this, but things are BAD.
Now some of you might be wondering, though: how is any of this related to ditching proprietary systems?
Well, as you may have noticed, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all kissed the emperor’s ring. They also make the 4 operating systems that dominate the market: Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS. These systems also very famously spy on you. Now you tell me, how does that fit in with a government looking to find immigrants, trans people, political opponents, activists, and critics in order to silence them? Yup, the government can just ask the makers of these operating systems to give them lists of people based on the data they collected from users.
Same thing applies to providers of social media, email, and instant messaging applications: the companies operating them may, willingly or under coercion, tell the government exactly who they’re looking for and where to find them, so if you’re using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or any other corporate-ran services, maybe think twice about what you’re saying on them, or about using them at all.
Convinced yet? You should be. So, if you should ditch proprietary software and services, what can you use?
For your PC’s operating systems (yes, Macs are just PCs, even with the ARM chips), Linux is probably the most accessible. BSDs are great too, but they may be a bit more capricious about hardware support. Stripping the spyware from Windows using tools like AME is an option, but it’s not 100% guaranteed to completely neutralise Microsoft’s spyware apparatus from inside Windows, so I don’t recommend it.
On mobile, a Linux phone is ideal in terms of privacy, but out of reach for most people. A lot of Android phones can be degoogled, but not all, especially for US models. iOS spying can be limited if you jailbreak your phone, but, just like with AME, it’s not guaranteed, so I recommend you instead avoid iPhones. KaiOS can’t be made to not spy on you, so avoid it as well.
For social media: ditch everything corporate, including BlueSky. Use community ran and open source social media on the fediverse (that’s Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, PeerTube, Misskey, and many others). They can also all talk to each other, so don’t worry too much about which one you pick, but be mindful of what you post: the feds can see it.
For instant messaging, avoid all proprietary or centralised things, including Signal. Instead use federated and community-ran messaging protocols like XMPP, or fully distributed ones like Tox. If you have the technical know-how, you can host your own thing using IRC or XMPP.
And of course: learn how to be a paranoid schizo, online and offline. That includes learning how to use Tor to browse the net anonymously. VPNs will not suffice: they’re corporate entities, they can be persuaded or coerced.
I’ve already written more in-depth articles about some of these things, and I intend to write articles about the others. I’ll add them at the bottom of this article as they’re out. In the meantime, stay safe out there.
Articles going more in-depth into some of the aforementioned things you can do: - On VPNs: what VPNs do and don’t do. - A Tor starter guide: The basics of using Tor.