With Trump running amok imposing tariffs on anyone he thinks will knuckle under it is becoming pretty well universal here in Canada to try to find alternatives to US suppliers when spending our dollars. For the most part, produce, alcohol, clothing etc, that is surprisingly easy to do, but there is an exception … the Internet and social media. When we talk to each other we are almost always doing it by means of something based in the US and deeply embedded in our everyday world. Something, what’s more, that is putting money into the bloated pockets of people like Zuckerberg (Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram), Bezos (Amazon), Musk (Twitter-X), and Pichai (Google/Alphabet). The biggest offenders.
So I thought that it would be an interesting exercise at least to seek alternatives that keep my dollars well away from those guys and their companies and my privacy under my own control. It is the “duty” of a Canadian right now to do what we can to stay well north of the border and keep our dollars at home. Avoiding some of these companies might be inconvenient but it’s (mostly) not impossible. Here’s what I found:
For something so fundamental to our lives these days, this one is surprisingly easy to find alternatives for. Looking through my own address book a huge majority of people have email accounts with gmail addresses. I have three such accounts. There is no denying that Google and Yahoo etc. have provided a very convenient, stable and user-friendly tool and it costs us nothing to use. Except that although we don’t pay money when accessing Gmail we are handing over ourselves and our interests and contacts to these people and thereby enabling the companies to make huge amounts of dollars by selling our details to advertisers and marketers who in turn flood us with uninvited buying opportunities. I have never liked that, I detest advertising in pretty well all its forms and especially uninvited adverts … but now the USA has provided an incentive to look outside of the US for email tools.
Here is a list of several such, often more secure, alternative companies offering email facilities and they are not based in the US: https://cyberinsider.com/email/secure/
The one that keeps coming coming up, and which certainly has a stellar reputation, is Proton Mail (https://proton.me). They operate out of Switzerland and are subject to the most stringent security regulations on the planet. They certainly don’t sell your soul to advertisers. At the moment their website headlines with “Break free from Gmail” and goes on to say Big Tech, such as Gmail, makes money by scanning your emails and collecting your data so it can target you with ads. Proton Mail believes your emails belong to you. We do not track your data or show ads. And we provide all the features you need. You also get end-to-end encryption and trackers and marketers are blocked etc. The downside? There is always something and in this case it is that it isn’t free if you want all the bells and whistles. There is a free starter option with basic features to try out – it may well be adequate for most people – a bit hard to find on their website. FWIW worth they say “Moving your existing emails, contacts, and calendars to your new secure inbox is easy. Our Easy Switch tool handles it all in a single click”.
For me, I can’t yet dump Gmail entirely if only because so many other websites that I use, including medical records etc, use my gmail address to verify who I am. Resetting all those will be a big task unless done one at a time over a lengthy period and friends often don’t get around to updating their address books when notified of a change. None of that is insurmountable and maybe worth the minor inconvenience and a few dollars to cut down on marketing scams. I am working on it.
For now, the best compromise is for me to make more use of my existing Apple Mail accounts, because even though they are geographically within the orbit of Trump, at least they don’t sell personal information to the advertising industry in the way that google does. Apple are very privacy focussed. Quote: “Google’s business model is monetizing data about you. Apple’s business model is to sell you a device”.
Chats and Texts
This is another of those cases of having to be where the people you message with already are.
The thing to note, again, is that so many of the main messaging apps are available only because they are yet another means for the oligarchs to harvest your personal data and sell it on. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, the most widely used, are owned my Meta so you are being monetized every time you log on and your data is certainly being stolen and used against you.
Good, old fashioned, SMS texts are reasonably safe from prying eyes – especially so if you can make use of iMessenger
A recent article pointed out that Signal is totally E2EE (end to end encrypted) and safe from the outside world. I would use that, if anyone I know actually had an account there 😉
This one is the hardest, and also the first one I would junk if only I could easily do so. Well, of course, closing an account can be as simple as just not using it any more and walking away but it’s not quite so simple. My issue with FB? The incessant advertising making it impossible sometimes to find conversations that I want to interact with for pages of adverts. Right in my face adverts. Did I say that I hate adverts? All those, plus the silly, stupid, click-bait reels and videos culled from Tik-Tok by the looks of them. Harrumph.
On the other hand, if you can tear yourself away from your personal feed/page and join special interest groups those are pretty well advert free and very useful. There is one running in our small town and it is about the only way to keep up with local events and small-town politics – of course, you continue to sell your soul to “Meta” when you visit the group pages and they make a damnably good profit out of what they can learn about your activities and interests. If that doesn’t worry you too much, then fine – just remember that it is putting money into the pockets of Zuckerberg and into the evil Trumpist economy.
Facebook is so dominant because it is so ubiquitous and it’s “where everyone is”, including many personal friends scattered around the globe with whom I very much want to stay in touch. There are alternatives (link below) but they are mostly small, inhabited by techno-nerds for the most part and although I have investigated a couple there is nobody there who I know so the keeping up with distant friends benefit is absent. I fear that I will, pro tem, probably have to keep an active FB account going for now, but I will do my best to restrict most of my activity to the town community group and only check for friends post on the personal page once a day. Boy, that’s going to be a hard thing to do.
Some alternatives. See: https://alternativeto.net/software/facebook/
Cloud storage
Like most people, I use secure cloud storage a lot. It is invaluable, as a secure back up in case the house burns down or my computer dies. You can start a document on one computer and access it later from another, or from a mobile device. I couldn’t manage my life without cloud storage. For years, I have relied on Google Drive which really is a functionally effective tool … but Google again. They make their money by selling your personal activity and interests and contacts to the media and advertising world. A couple of years ago I moved most of my important documents over to Apple’s iCloud and have been extremely pleased. iCloud is designed to work best with Apple devices, which are all I have, and it offers strong background syncing across my iPhone, Mac, iPad and more. But – still American.
For me, there is not much practical difference in daily use, but iCloud win because they are not selling my details to the advertisers and, importantly, have a solid privacy policy. On the other hand, both are US companies so any money they make from you ends up supporting a nation that is actively trying to screw the one I live in. I have found that there is a cloud facility available with some of the more expensive Proton accounts which will give ultimate privacy – though reviews tell me it is not yet as sophisticated as the Google and Apple offerings.
One Canadian service with all its servers based in Canada that has recently surfaced is https://www.sync.com … works very much like Dropbox but totally Canadian. It looks rather good
There are other paid storage companies offering services, Dropbox and iDrive for example, but pretty well all of them are based in the US so there is no real gain from moving.
Decision – stick with iCloud for now but keep an eye open for other offerings and remember Sync.com as a possible. Secondary back up of the financial stuff I cannot afford to lose is on Proton Drive.
Instagram etc
I had an account once. I think I still do but I have no idea where the password is. Never been of any use really. But I know it’s popular.
One alternative that seems to be increasing in popularity is on the Fediverse (a good place to be) – It’s called Pixelfed (https://pixelfed.org/) and claims to offer a fresh take on photo sharing with privacy baked in.
Twitter-ish internet tools
Long ago I had a Twitter account, didn’t get any value from it and never used it beyond the first week, ten years or more back. Then Musk surfaced, took over, turned it into X and we all hate President Musk, don’t we.
But the concept has its uses – there are two alternatives that I can commend if you want to make the break.
Mastodon – this is part of the non-commercial Fediverse and you can find it at https://mastodon.social/explore. It is not as nerdy as it might at first appear, and it is totally out of reach of the US government as well as not invested at all in advertising and gathering your personal data. All good points. I quite like it for nerdy things associated with birds and birding etc but it does not have a huge user base and probably never will. Recently, I have been exploring …
Bluesky – find it at https://bsky.app/. Now this I do rather like and have been using intermittently. Millions of Twitter users jumped ship and came over to Bluesky recently which mean that is has a decent user base. It is located in the US but it doesn’t gather and sell on your data and it is free. Not sure where they make their money but it isn’t by exploiting information about its users. It is excellent for scanning news headlines each morning and for following posts by experts in various fields that interest you. Well worth taking for a walk around the block.
My personal bottom line
For me, for now, it is going to be a compromise – take most accounts outside the US and the ones that stay, just be very careful how I use them. The nuclear option of simply walking away from the internet is not practical, unless I plan on becoming a digital hermit.
- Open a personal email account at Proton, for business, financial coal, tax etc exchanges at a minimum.
- Minimise use of gmail wherever possible. For now, use my iCloud address for personal emails … until such time as Apple fall to the privacy invasions of trump – at the moment they are standing firm
- Use iCloud storage instead of Google Drive. Back-up financial and tax etc documents to Proton Drive. Watch Sync for possible future use.
- Use Bluesky and sometimes Mastodon for the things they are good at. Mastodon is especially safe, but also smaller in scale.
- Try hard to reduce use of Facebook except for town community things that I can’t get elsewhere.
… and then, Amazon
Getting things delivered the next day with no shipping fee is enormously convenient and anything that helps me not have to visit shops (I hate shopping in all its forms) has got to be a really good thing. But most things, except in emergencies ( a widget to fix a leaking tap etc), don’t have to be delivered tomorrow and there are other online sources, even if we do do have to pay shipping sometimes.
The single thing I value Amazon for is its cloud storage of my 20+ years of digital photographs. Yes, there are indeed other places I can put them but almost none will allow you to store RAW files. I have back-ups on several SSD drives but the “what happens in a fire” question has to be overcome … and I have almost overcome it. My account expires in the fall, by which time I expect to have departed from their clutches.
Working on this, but I am actively increasing my withdrawal and conversion to real suppliers in Canada and Europe for most future purchases.
Wildlifing with Richard Gregson 
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