Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple - and more

[Coventina]

There’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.

We’ve entered into a Faustian pact with these companies: “While it’s brilliant to have access to high-quality products and software, very often for ‘free’, it’s important to remember that there is a trade-off involved – often of our personal data and privacy,” says Lisa Barber, tech editor at Which? We give these companies our attention and our information, which they then turn into big bucks and apparently unassailable monopolies.

But the good news is we can go elsewhere. The rest of the world is weighing up its reliance on US technologies, and in Europe especially we’re realising there are better alternatives to just about everything big tech is shilling, if by “better” we mean greener, more ethical, more independent, more respectful of your privacy or simply less disturbingly, monolithically powerful. Making the switch is easier than you might imagine. Here are a few pointers.

Google has cornered 90% of the search market for the past decade, but it is often no better, and sometimes demonstrably worse than its rivals, perhaps on purpose – Doctorow has called Google: “the poster-child for enshittification” citing its alleged strategy of worsening search quality so that users spend more time on the site. But changing the default search engine on any device is extremely easy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/how-to-replace-amazon-google-x-meta-apple-alternatives

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