My Techtonic show this week inaugurated the Creepy Awards, which I hope to give annually to the most creeptastic tech oligarch. This year the winner was – well, you can probably guess, but no spoilers: listen to the show on the episode page (where, to warn you, you’ll see an image of the Creepy Award itself, which . . . lives up to its name).

I could have run the Creepies as a year-end recap, reviewing the most egregious behavior from Silicon Valley in 2025. But as I prepared for the broadcast, I realized that just the past month of tech news was more than enough for the hour-long show.

If there’s one thing 2025 demonstrated, it’s that it’s time to get off Big Tech and look for alternatives. Here are a few reasons why.

Your data isn’t safe with them

I’ve said for a long time that we can’t trust Big Tech. (For example, see this, from 2022.) To be more specific, we can’t trust these companies with our data.

Leave the phone, take a camera (by Alex White, Dec 17, 2025) explains why it’s so important to store your data somewhere other than Big Tech cloud providers like Apple and Google:

Who Owns Your Memories?

You might answer “well I own my memories of course, nobody can take that from me!”, and sure, you own the ones in your head, but not the ones you captured. For Android users, Google owns your memories and for iPhone users, Apple does. What does this mean? Well they could delete 20 years of your life in seconds for starters. Don’t like that? Good luck moving to something else. Tech companies intentionally make it hard to move platforms, a concept known as “platform stickiness”.

But what about the convenience features they offer, such as searching photos by a person’s name or an object? All of that is powered by analyzing and training models on your photos. If you truly think they’ll keep that data private and away from third-party advertising partners, you have a lot more faith in big tech than I do. Not to mention your susceptible to a data breach leaking your photos online at any moment.

As for “delet[ing] 20 years of your life in seconds”: earlier this month, Paris Buttfield-Addison, a tech developer and author living in Australia, was horrified to discover that he had been locked out of his Apple profile and all associated data. From 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple (Dec 13, 2025):

A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse.

Emphasis on “no recourse”: despite being a somewhat well-known Apple developer, days later he’s still trying to find a way back to his data.

This incident highlights the risks of depending on Big Tech for data storage. I’ll repeat what I posted in You can’t control your data in the cloud (that’s a Forum link for Creative Good members). Here are some of the risks:

• losing control (of your data)

• data gets used against you

• inability to delete

• losing access to your data

• cloud providers turning bad

• you’re the product

• inability to control what goes into the cloud

• losing cloud service

• it’s not always bad intention[s]

• forced insecurity by law and agencies

• no such thing as anonymity

• what to do about it?

(Read the original post by Karl Voit that supplied the list.)

All of this is before we get to the risks of AI and surveillance “helpfully” installed on Big Tech systems, analyzing your data in ways outside of your knowledge or consent - and possibly at some point quietly editing your data.

We have alternatives, and they’re often what existed before the Big Tech techover. For taking photos, Alex White recommends going back to a pre-iPhone digital camera, like a point-and-shoot model. He favors his 14-year-old Canon Digital IXUS 110:

What’s the alternative to using your phone to capture memories? Leave your phone in the car, and instead take a purpose built device with you. One that can’t distract you, doesn’t train LLMs on your photos and forces you to be selective and present.

As for tools, White suggests some Good Reports-friendly alternatives:

For importing and retouching photos, there are a number of great software applications available. Personally I use Shotwell on my Ubuntu computers and find it to be excellent. I’d recommend finding software that is free, open-source, offline and simple to use. Digikam and Dark Table are great options.

Let’s move on to another reason to get off of Big Tech, which is . . .

Their whistleblowers are punished

It’s often difficult to hear about the monopolies’ unethical behavior because their employees are barred from talking about it. Those who do speak out pay a steep price.

For example, a story in the Washington Post (gift link, Dec 15, 2025) describes what happened to Yaël Eisenstat:

Eisenstat, Facebook’s former head of election integrity, alleged the social media platform allowed political operatives to mislead the public with sophisticated ad-targeting tools in a 2019 op-ed. Meta has argued that these ad policies were to prevent censorship of political speech.

Soon, she said, former colleagues started gossiping about her. It was hard to find a new job. Eisenstat said she would routinely interview with senior managers who would later ghost her. One institution courted her for months for a leadership role but then told her they wouldn’t hire her. That day, the organization announced a major donation from the philanthropic organization of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

The article also mentions Careless People author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who I wrote about here.

The mistreatment of whistleblowers is hardly limited to the tech industry, of course. Today’s New York Times includes the obit of John E. Olson (here’s a gift link), who in the 1990s worked as an analyst at Merrill Lynch. His assignment was to evaluate Enron, an energy company that – it later emerged – was running a giant fraud. Olson resisted tremendous pressure to praise a company he felt was doing wrong, and he was fired as a result.

Their robots are dangerous

He’s the Godfather of Modern Robotics. He Says the Field Has Lost Its Way (gift link, NYT, Dec 14, 2025) is a profile of Rodney Brooks, iRobot/Roomba founder, who expresses his skepticism about Silicon Valley’s hype - especially that of Elon Musk - concerning AI-powered humanoid robots. Emphasis mine:

The results can seem impressive, at least on video, where humanoid robots from Figure and other companies can be seen folding laundry, putting away toys, even sorting components in a South Carolina BMW factory.

What you don’t see in most of these videos is people standing near the robots. Mr. Brooks says he wouldn’t get within three feet of a humanoid bot. If — when, he says — they lose their balance, the powerful mechanics that make them useful make them dangerous.

So the inventor of the Roomba won’t go within a meter of a humanoid robot. I’ll keep my distance, thanks.

(BTW I invited Rod to speak at Gel 2004 - 21 years ago now! - about his robotics career up to that point. That was four years before he founded iRobot. Here’s the video of Rodney Brooks at Gel 2004 at the Internet Archive.)

Their data centers don’t belong in space

Big Tech data centers have deservedly gotten a lot of attention this year: their power and water draw, pollution, regulatory capture, and other problems are now affecting communities worldwide.

When I wrote Don't let the data center come to town, I should have added “also don’t let the data center go to low-earth orbit.” Because now the tech oligarchs are pushing yet another bad idea. This Verge piece (Dec 17, 2025) describes the problems with putting data centers in space:

The group of satellites would need to travel through millions of pieces of space debris, or “a minefield of random objects, each moving at 17,000 miles an hour,” Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, associate research scientist of space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, explained to The Verge. This space debris is especially concentrated in popular orbits like the Sun-synchronous orbit. This is why Google’s plan is looking, well, “a little iffy,” he said. Dodging each object requires a tiny propulsion to move out of the way. For context, Akhavan-Tafti wrote in a recent Fortune article that the approximately 8,300 Starlink satellites made over 140,000 such maneuvers in just the first half of 2025. Given the close proximity of each satellite in Google’s plan, Akhavan-Tafti thinks that the entire constellation, rather than each individual satellite, would need to move out of the way of any incoming debris. “That’s really the big challenge,” he said.

Adam Becker (author of More Everything Forever, who I wrote about) had this to say about the article:

Scientists are “skeptical” of this the same way I am “skeptical” that the moon is made of green cheese. This is pure hype created to justify pouring more money into the AI bubble.

See also my warning about falling space junk: in fact, just yesterday a Starlink satellite fell out of orbit. Are you ready for an entire data center to scream down to earth?

If the past is any guide, 2026 will bring even more dubious ideas and investments from the tech oligarchs. And even more reasons to get off Big Tech.

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Thanks, and have a great holiday.

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Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good ← please join as a member
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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