Don’t Feed the Hand That Bites You
Buckle up.
There are a lot of things happening in the world today that are neither comfortable or convenient. While many of us would rather do just about anything else, there are some very difficult conversations we need to have. I don’t just mean between me and you, my reader. I mean between you and your friends, family, coworkers, and everybody you know. They are that important.
With the constant barrage of dystopian things in the news these days, I hope that many will have a greater appetite for these conversations, as we all have a lot of hard work ahead protecting our collective future.
I’m relatively new to all this. Prior to January 24, 2026, I certainly wasn’t as invested in what would later come to consume my life for the next couple months. I was out that morning – I can’t remember doing what. I came home later in the afternoon and checked my phone only to see a dramatic escalation of the ICE activity in Minneapolis where Alex Pretti was shot 12 times in the back while being subdued by eight ICE officers. This was already the second murder by Federal agents in Minneapolis I was aware of as Renee Goode was shot and killed the week before. Pretti hit harder though. The cumulative effect surely had some impact, but watching the video and clearly being able to see a man die shattered the fourth wall.
As a Canadian and a Winnipegger, this was extra concerning. I’ve been to Minneapolis many times. I used to go there shopping for clothes on a weekend getaway. I’ve visited Minnehaha Falls a few times. I’ve even walked around downtown patronizing a dozen breweries. This is not a place on the other side of the world. I am familiar with this place. I can leave after breakfast and be there before dinner. It is only 7 hours away from where I live. From where you live. From where your children go to school.
I understand that a dramatic escalation would be required for that mess to spill over across the border. I’m not suggesting that will ever happen, but I do think it’s worth taking a moment to think about. After all, Trump has made endless statements that he’d like to see Canada become the 51st state. Given what we’ve seen he is willing to do, we must treat any threat he makes as credible. Between claiming to annex us using economic pressure (tariffs he still has imposed on Canada) and supporting the Alberta separatist movement1, he is certainly making attacks on our sovereignty.
I digress. While this matter does present very real concerns for us, it is about something entirely else. We are enabling this kind of authoritarian control and abuse.
You, me, and everyone else.
We’ve all shared anecdotes with one another. You were discussing something with a friend and then all of the sudden you’re seeing ads for it on Instagram. We’ve all accepted the maxim for decades: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Time after time, we’ve accepted the free service, not understanding what we were giving way. We knew, to some degree, that our privacy was being surrendered. Maybe a growing sense of it in more recent years. In the early days, I think we understood that the cost of our privacy was that we had to sit through ads to use the services we didn’t want to pay for. Some of us maybe even understood it as a covenant. We get a free service, our personal data is used to serve us ads. Recent events has shown us how that covenant either never existed, or has been broken.
What the ICE raids in the United States have shown us is the very insidious ways our privacy is being violated.
Concentration of American Media
In 2011, there were already only 6 major conglomerates that controlled 90% of US media. That was down from 50 corporations in 1983.1,2 The America media landscape has changed little in the time since, except for the rise of social media platforms, of which there are still very few competitors.
Recently, that number has shrunk further when a merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery was approved3, bringing two media giants together under David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison who is himself the owner of Oracle, and now TikTok.
Larry Ellison has been positioning himself as the world’s AI data guy. His company, Oracle, started as project for the CIA to create a centralized database. It evolved into the multi-billion dollar corporation it is today and is used by governments, corporations, and institutions worldwide. The data stored on Oracle’s servers includes bank records, corporate contracts, government documents, and private communications.
Ellison has been a long time financial supporter (over $26 million) to Friends of the Israel Defence Force and has maintained a personal friendship with Israel’s Prime Minister and wanted war criminal by the ICC, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has even been accused of cancelling The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert criticized Donald Trump’s financial dealings on air.4
In a keynote speech at Oracle AI World, Ellison made remarks that Oracle is explicitly involved in making privately owned data available to AI models for reasoning so that AI can reason, “not just on public data, but also on private data.”5
The Ellisons now own: TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, Warner Bros, and much more.
Social media is similarly concentrated with only a few major platforms, largely owned by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp), X, and now Oracle.
The danger of having so few players is that we are at risk from a lack of diversity in voices – and editorial decisions.
In October and November of 2023, 25 house republicans demanded TikTok take action to combat what they called “terrorist propaganda and antisemitic content.” The hashtag #FreePalestine was viewed nearly 95 million times in just one month giving rise to the speculation that the forced sale of TikTok had more to do with censoring the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza. Atrocities which have since been officially found to qualify as genocide.
At the same time, Meta removed more than 90,000 posts to comply with requests from the Israeli government in an automatic process without human oversight. The Human Rights Watch document over 1,000 cases where removed content was regarding peaceful protests about Palestine.6
More recently, ICE activity all over the US, but particularly in Minnesota has become another source of concern over increased censorship. There was a point shortly after the killing of Alex Pretti where the number of posts I was seeing about ICE raids in Minneapolis decreased to basically zero. Family and friends noticed the same. Beyond speculation, California Governor Gavin Newsom launched a probe investigating if TikTok was suppressing anti-Trump content.7
There are plenty more examples on the topic, such as the Washington Post ending a decades long tradition of backing presidential candidates opening billionaire owner Jeff Bezos to criticism of bowing down to Trump.8 Or perhaps how X, owned by Elon Musk, has been accused of “manipulating its algorithm for ‘foreign interference’ purposes,” and amplifying hate speech.9,10
What is important for the purpose of this essay is to shine a light on how few players there are in the media landscape, and how that leaves us vulnerable to limited points of view and are more susceptible to state sponsored suppression.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6?IR=T
3. https://deadline.com/2026/02/massive-merger-confirmed-paramount-and-wbd-reveal-details-1236738785/
4. https://onepathnetwork.com/society/the-zionist-tech-billionaire-that-now-owns-your-data/
5. https://www.youtube.com/live/4eCFmbX5rAQ?t=317s
7. https://deadline.com/2026/01/zuckerberg-ice-agents-facebook-instagram-1236698897/
The Surveillance State
Digital privacy is an issue many of us are not nearly concerned enough about. The violations of our privacy exist in layers deeper than the surfaces we react with. You unlock your phone and open an app. You have now connected to the internet. Actions you take, things you click on, posts you comment on, emails you send, items you add to your cart, how long you linger on a page. Every single thing is tracked.
I recommend taking the time to read through this article1 (https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/digital-privacy-what-happens-to-your-data-online), but it’s still just the tip of the iceberg. It explains the thing, but doesn’t give you real world examples.
US Senator Bernie Sanders recently published a YouTube video2 where he questions Anthropic’s Claude on what the rise of AI means for the average American. Claude describes to Bernie how AI can help aggregate all the data being collected, what what it is being used for.
Another example is algorithmic pricing where retailers change the price for specific consumers based on what they think that consumer can afford and will be willing to pay3.
The article above from Science News World has a section on the psychological impacts of constant surveillance and how it changes our behaviour. Many kids today will be tracked from birth through photos posted on social media. There are people alive today who will never know what it was like to not be constantly watched.
Many tech billionaires have made statements on how they think the world will be safer because we are constantly being recorded and reported. Larry Ellison has said “citizens will be on their best behaviour.”5
The companies that collect your data will often sell your data to data brokers. From there, you can’t possibly know where it ends up. Your data isn’t safe with them either. Last year, it was reported that one such broker, Gravy Analytics was hacked sharing the location data for millions of users across more than 12,000 apps.6,7 The app makers themselves may not have even been aware of the leak as it was an exploited vulnerability in how they collect location data in a process call Real Time Bidding where advertisers bid to have their ads shown to you. 404 Media reported how ICE is using just that kind of data to track millions of people.8
This is where the story starts to take a darker turn. If you don’t know about Palantir, it would be well worth your time to do a quick search. Palantir has built a tool for ICE called ELITE that helps compile massive amounts of data they collect to guide ICE on where to raid. It is reportedly like Google Maps for deportations.9
Palantir deserves greater investigation For now, it is sufficient to note that your privacy is being violated with every interaction you make in the digital space, and how that data can be, and is used.
1. https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/digital-privacy-what-happens-to-your-data-online
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3AtWdeu_G0
3. https://globalnews.ca/news/11737806/canadians-algorithmic-pricing/
6. https://www.pcmag.com/news/major-data-broker-leak-might-have-exposed-location-data-of-millions
7. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2025/01/10/location-data-network-exploits-tinder-candy-crush-apps/
8. https://www.404media.co/email/0ba0f6a2-9195-4ced-9c40-92bb72367e7a/
9. https://newrepublic.com/post/205333/ice-palantir-app-raid-deportation
Private Prisons
Since the release of half of the Epstein Files on January 31, 2026, people have been circulating a “human meat theory” about McDonalds. You don’t need conspiracy theories to choose not to do business with them.
While my understanding is that this issue is especially prevalent in the state of Alabama, many companies all over the United States are profiting off of labour provided by private prisons where inmates are either forced to participate, or paid well below minimum wage.
The two largest companies running for profit prisons are CoreCivic and GEO Group who are both ecstatic about the growth opportunities presented by the ICE immigration crackdown. These companies raked in a combined $4.8 billion in revenue in 2025. On a recent earnings call, there was a complaint that earning were below what investors though it was going to be with ICE detentions at “fewer than 100,000 immigrants a day.”1
Meanwhile in Louisiana, inmates at a state penitentiary are forced to work hard labour for wages ranging from nothing (initially), then between 2 cents and 40 cents per hour. If somebody steps out of line or refuses to work, a guard may fire a bullet as a warning. The cost of the bullet comes out of their wages. Some of the labour performed is picking cotton on the same plantations where slaves worked more than 150 years ago. Others are forced to raise cattle that eventually ends up in the supply chain of companies like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Walmart.2
ICE and the immigration crack down in the United States is supporting the industrial prison complex. We as consumers can choose not to participate in enabling this system by not patronizing the companies profiting from modern day slavery. While there are more than 500 business allegedly using prison labour from Alabama alone3, it can be very difficult to stay on top of. It may be so widespread that we can’t boycott them all, but here are a few companies I have identified that I am familiar with and operate in Canada:
1. https://time.com/7378284/ice-immigration-detention-contractors-record-revenue/
https://www.careeraddict.com/prison-labour-companies
The results for a simple “how does Google track you” are telling enough. Many of the results are focused on the settings available to you to prevent Google from tracking your activity online. Google claims they use this data to provide you “more personalized experiences,” but you may not be aware of or comfortable with just how detailed the data they collect is. PC Mag has a great article1 about how to limit what information about you they track.
Most of those tips, however, are meant to be actionable and drive web traffic to their sites, often neglecting to tell the whole story. If you visit Google’s My Activity page, you may learn more about what they are collecting on you, such as if you viewed a business and then subsequently contacted that business through their services.
Beyond that, if you use Google Pay or Google Wallet on your phone, Google actually stores your credit card and banking information on their servers. They say it is safe, secure, and private because merchants don’t see your card information, but Google sees all. They have access to all your transaction data which they claim to sometimes use to give you personalized offers or loyalty rewards.2, 3
At surface level, that sounds palatable, and that’s what we thought we were agreeing to. Google has recently shown us that they do not take our privacy seriously. In February 2026, it was reported that Google handed over loads of personal information to ICE about a student journalist when presented with a subpoena that was not approved by a judge and therefore not legally enforceable. That personal data included physical addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, credit card and bank account numbers, contacts, and a list of all services associated with the Google account.4
Worthy of an honourable mention, Google recently made headlines for their AI chatbot Gemini instructing a man to commit suicide after sending him on “spy missions” including a failed attempt to destroy a truck, it’s cargo, and any witnesses at the Miami airport.10 Google now joins OpenAI in having open lawsuits against them for what appears to be a new trend with AI chatbots.
Antitrust and Enshitification
Enshitification is a new term popping up. It is the process of how good services become intentionally worse over time. Generally, a provider will offer a great service for free. Once the growth in consumer markets matures, they start to abuse consumers to attract business customers. Eventually they abuse all their customers for benefit of their shareholders.
Google controls 90% of the general search market in the United states. Starting in 2020, an antitrust case (US vs Google)5 where Google allegedly illegally monopolized the search engine and search advertising markets. There were a set of documents leaked briefly during the trial6 where there were two visions of Google, one being that since they already had such dominance in the search engine market, they could simply make Google search worse and nothing bad will happen to them. The idea is that if you have to search multiple times to get the results you want, they could serve you more ads and make more money.7
Prior to the 2024 US election, Trump had hinted that he wouldn’t rule out antitrust enforcement and later Googled donated $1 million to his inauguration fund.8 In September of 2025, the judge ruled against the most severe consequences9 where many had considered it best case outcome for Google.
Alternatives
Some Googles products are harder to get away from than others.
Google Search is fairly simple and there are good, though less known, alternatives. Duckduckgo.com has long been the privacy enthusiast’s search engine of choice. Ecosia.org is the environmentalist’s choice due to it’s focus on using renewable energy.
Google Mail is easily replaced by Proton Mail, a Swiss company with European data residency and European privacy laws which are stricter than in the US. Proton won’t work with your default mail apps without paying for their premium service (which unlocks access to their SMTP servers), however their own app works perfectly fine. Northmail is a Canadian service, though I cannot recommend it as it is relatively new and I have not personally used it.
Google Drive can be replaced by Proton Drive. While many services exist, I haven’t explored many since I have a private server at home for my photography.
YouTube is tough to get away from. Content creators have a decades long history uploading to YouTube at this point and no service has the content library to compete. For the last month or so, I have been using an open source desktop app called FreeTube that I have been really happy with. FreeTube is like an alternate front end for YouTube providing access to all the content while putting a barrier between you and Google’s servers blocking ads and trackers.
Google Maps is another one that I have found really difficult abandoning. Alternatives exist. OpenStreetMaps provides excellent navigation, though needs a subscription to work with Car Play. Google Maps provides usefulness beyond directions with a user filled database on businesses where you can search hours, contact information, and even restaurant menus. Google Maps has even proven to be more reliable than some business’ own websites for tracking down operating hours at specific locations.
Google Chrome is easy to break from. For me, I downloaded Mozilla FireFox and never looked back. There are many options for web browsers out there. Brave and Vivaldi are two more that are often highly rated and recommended. Brave would be the most similar to Chrome while being much more privacy focused.
2. https://www.joinkudos.com/blog/apple-pay-vs-google-pay-which-mobile-wallet-reigns-supreme-in-2025
5.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC(2020)
7. https://rudevulture.com/journalist-explains-why-google-deliberately-made-its-search-engine-worse/
8. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/google-donates-1-million-to-trumps-inauguration-fund.html
9. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/05/judge-finalize-remedies-in-google-antitrust-case.html
10. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-chatbot-google-jonathan-gavalas
Amazon and Open AI
If there’s a theme here, it just might be that Big Tech firms are more than complicit. Often, they are the main actors.
Amazon recently took a lot of flak in the court of public opinion. An ad they showed for Ring cameras at the Superbowl showed a network of home security cameras for the purposes of finding lost dogs. Amazon Ring had partnered with a company called Flock Safety. Flock builds surveillance for law enforcement agencies.1
The partnership was ended as a result of the public backlash in response to the ad. The program would have allowed Amazon to share footage from your doorbell camera with local law enforcement agencies. ICE would be able to pick up that video footage from local law enforcement agencies and thus your data feeds the oppression machine.
In addition to supporting half the internet, Amazon Web Services provide the digital infrastructure to ICE.
OpenAI is another tech giant. While there are a lot of reasons the makers of ChatGPT belong here (many of which you’ll find discovering the QuitGPT movement2), there are a few that are worth pointing out here.
Greg Brockman, who is the President of OpenAI has made a $25 million to Maga Inc., Trump’s largest SuperPAC making him Trump’s largest donor.3
Recently, Anthropic had a stand off with the US Department of Defence over a $200 million contract where the DoD insisted in being able to use the technology for any purpose. Anthropic took the stance of standing with their two red lines: 1. no domestic mass-surveillance, and 2, no autonomous weapons. When they refused, they were labelled a Supply Chain Risk. OpenAI immediately accepted the contract on the terms laid out by the DoD.
OpenAI is a great enabler of the surveillance state. Here are a few more things worth knowing about about them.
ChatGPT is anything but neutral. In a contract with Clock Tower X, OpenAI accepted a $6million contract to make ChatGPT responses more pro-Israel with a target of 50 million impressions per month targeted at Gen Z.4
There’s a growing number of lawsuits against OpenAI. There are currently at least seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide,5 a case alleging ChatGPT lead a man to psychosis,6 and it was used in planning the Tumbler Ridge School Shooting here in Canada.7
4. https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/22/israel-contract-chatgpt/
5. https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-lawsuit-suicide-56e63e5538602ea39116f1904bf7cdc3
6. https://abcnews.com/US/lawsuit-alleges-chatgpt-convinced-user-bend-time-leading/story?id=127262203
7. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/chatgpt-tumbler-ridge-shooter-account-police-9.7107569
Take Back Control
It is definitely a tough task taking back control of your data. Doing so totally may not even be within reach. The good news is all you have to do is start, and starting is easy.
I already mentioned a number of Google alternatives. They have been the lowest hanging fruit for me and proved to be a great way of getting my toes wet. You don’t have to switch over everything all at once. I’ve been adding one new service at a time.
Most phones can change the default search engine. On iPhone, both DuckDuckGo and Ecosia were available. DuckDuckGo is widely accepted as the best privacy oriented alternative. Ecosia is great for the eco-minded and they claim power their services entirely on renewable energy.
Swapping browsers on your computer is pretty simple too. I exported my bookmarks, downloaded and installed FireFox and then deleted Google Chrome. I imported my bookmarks into FireFox and never looked back.
There are lots of other great privacy focused browsers out there. Brave is also highly rated and will be a more seamless transition for Google Chrome users as it is also based on the same Chromium type browser.
https://privacyregistry.eu/alternative-to has been a great resource for more privacy focused alternatives. They rate apps and services based on a few factors including data residency (European), open source, privacy policy, trackers, and terms of service.
Proton Mail was one such highly rated alternatives to Google Mail. I have been using it for the last two months and experienced no learning curve switching over.
Another app I’ve been enjoying for the last couple months and now have installed on every computer I have is FreeTube. It’s in beta and there was a week it wasn’t working, but for the most part works really well. It is an alternate front end to YouTube that allows you to access the YouTube’s content library while putting a barrier between you and Google’s trackers and ads servers.
https://openalternative.co/alternatives has been a good resource for me as well, though many of the alternatives here may require self-hosting servers and not everything will be beginner friendly.
I wrote this entire post using LibreOffice, an open source alternative to Microsoft 365. It has powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and slideshow software. It may not be appropriate for enterprise level document creation, but I have not run into any limitations yet. OpenOffice is another option.
More recently, I’ve even gone so far as installing Linux on an old computer I had sitting around collecting dust. I chose Linux Mint as my operating system as it is widely considered the best for users switching from Windows. The experience has been pretty painless, and have been writing and researching this essay on it. There are forced AI features like CoPilot. When I open my start menu, I’m not bombarded with widgets and ads on a machine I bought and paid for. It just works the way you expect it to and doesn’t feel invasive. There definitely is a learning curve and I am keeping a journal of my progress. As I become more comfortable with it, I can see myself switching over from Windows permanently.
There are a lot of great options out there. It can certainly be overwhelming. I have had the benefit of time, and also some community of others who are interested in taking this journey too. Having a support network makes finding, testing, and using these Big Tech alternatives much easier.
https://www.firefox.com/en-CA/
Conclusion
If I could leave you with a few thoughts for reflection, it would be this:
There are fewer and fewer places to gather reliable and true information.
Digital privacy is sacred and should be protected as a human right.
Everything you do is being tracked.
We are feeding systems that fuel oppression.
You can and should take steps to prevent such tracking and protect your privacy.
It Is difficult and time consuming to stay on top of everything that is going on in the world today. It requires a lot of learning and unlearning. It can be emotionally exhausting. Protecting ourselves in the digital space may require knowledge we don’t currently possess.
It can be a lot easier though, if we work together and help each other out. I have been exploring alternatives to the services provided by these tech monsters and will continue to share my journey. I wrote this on LibreOffice, an open source alternative to MS Word, using a computer I installed Linux on. I’m not switching everything over all at once, but all it takes to get going is starting with something. Let’s connect if you would like to take this journey with me.
The fight to take back our digital privacy starts with you.