Many of my dreams…or at least the pursuit of them…start with this fundamental question:

What would it look like if I/we ______________ ?

That blank has been filled in numerous times over the years, sometimes with not-so-scary things in the blank like, “changed my haircut”. That one turned out not to be scary, but also not a good idea…

One of the more frightening times, I filled that blank with “quit my job and started a business”. KS Technologies is the result of that thinking, and it is really the culmination of many other blank-ridden questions.

This isn’t meant to be a sales pitch for KS Technologies so much as a peek into my technology philosophy, so please read it that way. There were a number of reasons to start KS Technologies, but one of the greatest was to provide a place – primarily for Christian-owned businesses – to store their data without the ad-mining and censorship that often comes with big tech.

I run a business that encourages people to think about where their data lives, who’s making money with it, and with whose values are you tacitly aligning yourself. Because, if the product is free, you are the product. I have been on a personal journey of removing my own usage of big tech, but I’ve found certain difficulties along the way.

So, what would it look like if I lived a life free of big tech?

Without calling out the names of the big tech companies (where possible), as though we don’t all know who they are anyway, I do have my own feelings as to which are worse than others, but ultimately this journey only ends (successfully) with owning your own data or fully trusting the company holding your data, and when I look at it in that light, I realize I have work left to do.

So instead of naming names, let’s define categories.

Internet Service Providers (ISP)  ☐

This is a tough one for a number of reasons. Currently, at least where I am, there are limited options, and they are about the biggest of big companies. I suspect many are “stuck” in this category. Even if you chose to employ the use of an anonymizing VPN or the like, the physical connection to the internet belongs to the ISP.

Computer Operating System  ✓

This one is tough for me. I’m a life-long Windows user and long-time Windows Server administrator. I built a career for myself largely based on my knowledge of Windows. I have a severe distaste for MacOS, but that is largely due to a lack of familiarity (everything feels wrong simply because it’s different from Windows).

Ultimately, there are very large companies behind these operating systems, and they have they own agendas and platforms. There is a clear winner, or perhaps I should say a clear category of winner here, and that is the open source software community. The best-known branch of operating system in this category is Linux, and there are literally thousands of variants to choose from.

As I began writing this post, I was running Windows on my main computer. As I continue writing it now, I am indeed running Linux (in the form of Kubuntu 23.04, for those wondering).

My Data  ✓

This category includes anything that is yours or has your personal information tied to it. For the purposes of this post, let’s say it’s the files on your computers, your email, and files you have in cloud storage (think Dropbox, OneDrive, Box.com, etc.), whether as a place to store and use them or as a backup.

Here again, we are met with the question of how much do we trust the entity on which our data sits, or through which it travels. For a long time, I didn’t personally act on this more than to simply take the “lesser of the evils” from my perspective. I kept my email and my cloud storage with the big tech companies that I found the least awful, from a political and privacy perspective.

Admittedly, this one is difficult to do properly, and even if you’re tech savvy, there are a number of potential pitfalls that you must avoid. It can be a very long road to receiving forgiveness for losing someone’s data. This is probably the area where you most need to find someone you trust to help you. It is largely for that reason that I started KS Technologies. The initial offerings from KS Technologies were email and cloud storage.

I won’t dive into all the reasons why email in particular is difficult to host yourself in this post. If there is interest, I can write another post devoted to that.

Cloud storage is less difficult and more expensive to do yourself. This is again a reason to let someone else do it for you, but there has to be so much trust there. Perhaps ideally, a family or a small business could choose to keep all of their data in-house through the use of tools provided by a technology vendor. This allows the data to stay home while not needing to dream up the solutions on your own. Experience is key here, and most people – even those that have worked in IT – don’t have it.

Digital Assistants  ☐

As I continue, there are so many aspects of this that apply to my own daily life, and the thought of not using them is frankly quite daunting. This is a BIG one.

“Alexa, turn off the living room lights.”

“Alexa, what time is it?”

“Alexa, play songs by Cody Carnes.”

“Alexa, is it going to rain?”

“Alexa, if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a sound?”

The amount of data coming from straight from our own mouths to the tech companies behind the digital assistants is massive, and that’s without getting into whether or not they’re listening before you tell them to, which I’m not suggesting they do…or denying.

I hope to eventually develop a system (or systems) that can replace the functionality provided by the numerous Echo devices that are around the house, but to say I have a lot of work to do to get there is a gross understatement.

I barely scratched the surface of how we use them. I asked my children the other day what would they think if we didn’t have any Echo devices anymore.

“How would we set timers?”

“How would we listen to music?”

“How would we turn off the lights?”

Oh, so many first-world problems… Moving on…

Cell phones  ☐

Virtually every cell phone (ignoring anything that isn’t a smartphone, because let’s be real…everyone has a smartphone these days) is either made by a big tech company or runs a big tech company’s software. I have my own feelings about which of the two major sides is the lesser of the two evils, but again, the lesser of two evils approach is never ideal.

There are phones that run Linux, and there are phones that run de-Googled Android, but while I’ve not done much research on those too recently, I can confidently say you’re giving up a lot to go those routes. But then, this entire conversation is based on having given up privacy and data independence, so perhaps our (my) perspective is skewed.

In Conclusion

I’m sure I’ve missed entire categories of big tech usage, so perhaps I’ll go back and append ” – Part 1″ to this post. For that matter, I intend to make myself a checklist of action items, and I will probably share that with you all as well. Of the five categories I’ve mentioned, I am currently able to check two boxes. It’s a start.

So, what did I miss? What would you miss the most without big tech? Or maybe I should be asking:

What would it look like if you lived a life free of big tech?