Becoming independent of big tech

28 Jan 2026

big tech independence, data ownership

2026 is the year that I will move out of big tech (as much as possible). It will also be the year that I gain more control of my data.
This has been on my mind for a long time, but as a European, recent political events have made it a bigger focus for me this year.

This will be the first post of hopefully many. The purpose is to outline what I consider big tech, what my dependencies are, and constraints for replacements.

What is big tech?

To me, big tech is all the companies that have weaved their way into being omnipresent in my every-day personal life, often without me asking for it.
That list includes:

The companies exist for a reason and are everywhere for a reason: they provide useful services. But they also have considerate power and often very little regard for my personal data. The very worst are the ones relying on advertisements to have their services running. This is where incentives really align against mine.
For Apple in particular, I am just too dependent on them being nice to me. Global politics aside, if they ever decided to just lock me out of all my pictures and other data, what would I do? What if their harddisk RAID with my data happens to fail at the systematically?
To be fair to Apple, I am using them because they seemed like the least bad alternative. I have mostly left Google years ago and payed the premium for Apple devices, on the condition that I was not the product. By now, I am deep into their ecosystem, but that only makes my dependence on them too big.

What are my dependencies?

Whew, mapping out these really is interesting :)

Phone apps:

Constraints

This is mostly my own experiment and I will do my best not to impose on family friends.
Remember back in the day where Netflix was the only viable streaming provider, and Netflix had basically everything for cheap? That was the awesome, golden times of streaming. Today’s Netflix is a different beast of advertisements, home-grown series ending after two seasons, and here and there some genuinely good content.
But even if I wanted to completely cut ties with Netflix, I acknowledge that sometimes they have a series I or someone in the family will want to watch. They still provide value to me, even if it has gotten quite expensive.

This is an experiment only in my private life. In my professional life, I will continue to stay within the boundaries of my employer.

Whenever viable, I will go for a European provider of a services. This is purely a personal standpoint, growing from political changes in the last year.
I self host a few things. In some cases, I may also opt for self hosting. Self-hosting will continue to be a learning journey that I enjoy.

Even though I am seriously considering ditching iPhones, there are no great alternatives. Especially considering that I am Danish and our national authentication solution cannot run on rooted or jailbroken phones.

Next

With big tech ingrained in every corner of my life, this will be a big change with wide impact. It will be technically hard, and sometimes I will fail. Now, I already expect to be unable to replace YouTube for the simple reason that people put their contents there.
For other services, I may choose between self-hosting on my private server or pay someone to handle that for me. Let’s see. This will all be an interesting challenge.