How Do I Avoid Big Tech Surveillance?
Privacy is sovereignty. The moment you accept that your thoughts, conversations, location, spending, relationships, health, and political views are being continuously recorded, profiled, and sold — and that this data is also routinely shared with law enforcement and government agencies without your knowledge or consent — the question stops being theoretical and becomes urgent.
For Black Americans specifically, surveillance is not an abstract concern. COINTELPRO was not an aberration. The FBI infiltrated, surveilled, and actively dismantled Black liberation organizations — the NAACP, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — through systematic surveillance and infiltration. That infrastructure did not disappear when COINTELPRO was officially ended. It expanded. Today, the NSA mass surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden, the use of social media monitoring by law enforcement, and the deployment of facial recognition technology in Black neighborhoods are direct continuations of the same logic: monitor and suppress organized Black resistance.
You do not have to be an activist to be affected. You simply have to be Black in America, which has historically been sufficient reason for the state to take interest in your movements.
What Is Actually Being Collected
Before choosing tools, understand the threat model. The major categories of surveillance you face:
Device-level tracking. Your phone is a tracking device that also makes calls. It constantly broadcasts your GPS location to your carrier, to the operating system (Google or Apple), and to every app you have installed. Your phone’s IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) can be captured by Stingray devices — IMSI catchers deployed by law enforcement without warrants — without your knowledge.
Internet traffic. Every website you visit, every search you make, every email you send is logged by your internet service provider. ISPs in the United States are permitted to sell this data and can be compelled to share it with government agencies.
Platform data. Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Amazon, and Apple collect comprehensive behavioral profiles — not just what you do on their platforms but what you do everywhere their tracking code appears, which is the majority of the web. Google Analytics runs on approximately 56% of all websites. The Facebook pixel runs on approximately 30%.
Financial data. Every credit card transaction is a data point that is sold, shared, and profiled. Your spending patterns are more revealing than anything you post on social media.
Degoogling: The First Step
Google is the most comprehensive surveillance operation in history. It controls your search queries, your email, your browser, your phone operating system (Android), your video consumption (YouTube), your maps and location history, your calendar, your documents, and your smart home devices. De-Googling means systematically replacing Google products with alternatives that do not build a profile on you.
Search. Replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo or Brave Search. Neither tracks your queries or builds a search history profile.
Email. Replace Gmail with ProtonMail or Tutanota. Both are end-to-end encrypted, based in privacy-respecting jurisdictions, and cannot read your email content.
Browser. Replace Chrome with Firefox (with privacy settings configured) or Brave. Firefox with the uBlock Origin extension and the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension eliminates the majority of cross-site tracking. Brave has privacy protections built in by default.
Maps. Replace Google Maps with OsmAnd or Organic Maps, both based on OpenStreetMap data. Neither tracks your location history or sends it to a corporate server.
Cloud storage. Replace Google Drive with Proton Drive or Nextcloud (self-hosted if you have the capability). For photos, replace Google Photos with a local backup or an encrypted service.
Operating system. If you use Android, consider switching to GrapheneOS, a privacy-hardened version of Android developed by the open-source community, which removes all Google services and replaces them with privacy-respecting alternatives. It runs on Google Pixel hardware (an irony worth accepting).
Open-Source Alternatives for Daily Use
Open-source software is software whose code is publicly readable and auditable. When code is open-source, any researcher in the world can verify that it does what it claims to do and does not contain hidden surveillance capabilities. This is the opposite of proprietary software, where you are asked to trust the company’s word.
Messaging. Replace WhatsApp and standard SMS with Signal. Signal is end-to-end encrypted, open-source, and operated by a nonprofit foundation. WhatsApp is owned by Meta and, while encrypted in transit, shares metadata — who you communicate with, when, and how often — with Meta and law enforcement.
Office software. Replace Google Docs and Microsoft Office with LibreOffice (local) or CryptPad (encrypted, collaborative, online). Your documents should not live on a corporate server.
Password manager. Use Bitwarden (open-source, self-hostable) or KeePassXC. Never reuse passwords. Never let your browser save passwords to a cloud account.
VPN. A virtual private network encrypts your internet traffic and hides your IP address from the websites you visit and from your ISP. Use a reputable, no-logs VPN like Mullvad (paid with cash or cryptocurrency for maximum anonymity) or ProtonVPN. Free VPNs are almost universally surveillance operations themselves.
Privacy as Sovereignty: The Deeper Point
The tech industry’s surveillance model is the digital equivalent of sharecropping. You provide the land (your attention, your data, your behavior), the corporation takes the majority of what it produces (your profile, sold to advertisers and data brokers), and you receive in exchange only the tools you use to generate value for them.
Every time you use a free platform, you are paying with data. The question is whether you are aware of the exchange and whether you have chosen it or simply defaulted into it.
Privacy is not about having something to hide. It is about having the right to determine what you share, with whom, on your own terms. That right is foundational to any concept of freedom worth the name.
Begin where you can. Replace one tool this week. Then another. Build a communications network with family and close community members on Signal. Move your email to ProtonMail. Install Brave on your phone. Each step narrows the surveillance perimeter around your life and reclaims a piece of your digital sovereignty.
The ancestors did not survive everything they survived so that you could hand your inner life to a corporation headquartered in California for free. Protect yourself.