I Don’t Want to Be the Product

For a long time, I treated privacy as a niche concern. Something for people who wanted to disappear from the internet, run everything themselves, or make daily life harder than it needed to be.

That is not where I have landed.

I do not want to become a hermit. I still use the internet, subscribe to services, talk to people online, and rely on technology every day. What has changed is that I no longer want every service I use to hold the same complete picture of who I am.

I do not need every website to know my real name. I do not need every sign-up tied to the same email address. I do not need every search, photo, message, purchase, and click feeding one giant advertising profile.

I do not want to leave the internet. I want to stop being its product.

It started with de-Googling, but became more than that

“De-Googling” is often where this conversation starts. Google touches a huge amount of modern life: search, email, calendars, photos, documents, browsers, phones, analytics, advertising, and more.

Moving away from some of those services is useful, but it is not the whole goal.

The question I keep coming back to is simpler:

Where can I take control of my data, and where I cannot, who am I prepared to trust with it?

That produces different answers for different services.

For photos and media, I want copies that I control. I use self-hosted tools such as Immich, backed by my NAS and home-lab setup, alongside other copies of the things I care about. My photos are not only sitting in one cloud account, waiting for a pricing change, an account issue, or a provider decision to become my problem.

The same applies to music and digital media. Streaming services are convenient, but convenience can hide how little control we have. A catalogue changes, a licence expires, an account is closed, or a service disappears, and access can go with it.

Keeping your own media takes work. Storage costs money. Backups need checking. But your collection remains yours, rather than something you are temporarily allowed to access.

This is not about rejecting cloud services. It is about avoiding a situation where one company is the only doorway to your own life.

Self-host where it makes sense

Self-hosting is not free, effortless, or automatically more private.

When I run a service myself, I am responsible for updates, backups, monitoring, security, and what happens when something breaks. If my server goes down, the service goes down. Redundancy and recovery plans are part of the deal, not optional extras.

There is also a point where self-hosting something badly is worse than paying someone competent to run it properly.

The trade-off is worth it for data I care deeply about, especially data that would be difficult to replace, export, or rebuild later.

A useful question is:

If I wanted to leave this service tomorrow, how hard would it be?

If the answer is “I would lose my data” or “I have no idea how to move it”, that is a problem.

Portable formats, documented exports, backups, and more than one copy all create options. They mean leaving a service is inconvenient rather than catastrophic.

Pay for services that respect the customer

There are services I do not want to self-host. Email is the obvious example. Running reliable email infrastructure is difficult, and I would rather use a provider that takes privacy and security seriously than operate it badly myself.

That is where paid services matter.

Paying for a service does not automatically make it trustworthy, and subscriptions do not magically make a company good. But the business model matters. A company funded by subscriptions has less incentive to build its entire operation around advertising, profiling, and extracting value from personal data than one offering “free” access in exchange for attention and behavioural data.

That is part of why I use Kagi for search. Paying for a search engine can sound strange when Google is free, but the point is straightforward: I would rather be the customer than the inventory.

The same thinking sits behind services such as Proton for mail, storage, VPN access, email aliases, and password management. I am not claiming that any company is perfect, or that handing data to a privacy-focused company means I can stop thinking about privacy altogether.

I am choosing providers whose incentives, privacy posture, and business model make more sense to me than giving everything to the largest advertising companies on the internet.

Trust should be earned, and it should remain reversible.

Reduce the damage when something leaks

Privacy is not only about keeping secrets. It is also about limiting the damage when a website is breached, sells data, or handles it badly.

Using one email address everywhere creates a neat little map of your online life. Reusing passwords turns one breach into access to multiple accounts. Giving your real name, phone number, and date of birth to every service makes it easier for data brokers to build a profile you never consciously agreed to create.

I am changing that by treating each sign-up as its own decision.

I use unique passwords stored in a password manager. I create aliases or one-off email addresses for services where that makes sense. If an alias starts receiving spam or appears in a breach, I know where it came from and can disable it without having to change my main email address everywhere.

For important accounts and infrastructure, I am also moving towards hardware-backed authentication. It adds a small amount of friction, but that is a sensible trade for protecting accounts that matter.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is to reduce the blast radius.

Privacy is a habit, not a weekend project

It is easy to use one password, one email address, and one familiar provider for everything. That is why so many people do it. Simplicity is appealing, especially when a website wants personal information in exchange for a discount code, a download, or access to one feature.

Changing this is not something you finish in a weekend.

It starts messy. You find old accounts, duplicate files, forgotten subscriptions, and years of habits built around default settings. Some services are difficult to leave. Some data does not export cleanly. Some companies make the exit suspiciously less convenient than the sign-up.

Over time, it gets tidier.

You move one service. You improve one backup. You replace one reused login. You make the next sign-up a little more deliberate than the last.

Private conversations deserve the same thought. For conversations with family, partners, and close friends, I prefer tools designed around private communication, such as Signal, rather than treating advertising-funded social platforms as the default place for everything personal.

Open source is part of this too. Open source software is not automatically secure, and most people will never inspect every line of code themselves. But it allows users and independent researchers to inspect, audit, improve, fork, and maintain software.

It removes some of the “just trust us” that comes with closed platforms.

Start with one thing

Nobody needs to replace every service at once.

A good first step is a password manager and stopping password reuse. The next might be enabling multi-factor authentication, using email aliases for new sign-ups, or making a proper backup of your photos outside the service that currently hosts them.

The point is not to win a privacy purity contest.

It is to become more intentional about what you give away, who receives it, and whether you have a way back out.

That is the approach I am taking: self-host where it is practical, pay for services that earn my trust where it is not, use open tools where I can, and keep my data portable enough that no single company gets to hold it hostage.

Because I do not need to disappear from the internet.

I just do not want to be the product.