I’ve spent a lot of recent blog posts on what the AI industry takes without asking — your data, your privacy, your content, your professional expertise, all treated as raw material for someone else’s product. I’ve made the case for regulation. I’ve made the case for lawmakers to slow down. But I’ve gotten a few emails lately asking a fair question: fine, Joe, so what do I do about it?
Here’s my honest answer: you probably can’t opt out of the AI economy entirely, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But you can make it a lot harder for these companies to profit off you by default, without you ever agreeing to the terms.
Here are a few tools I actually use, in no particular order:
- DuckDuckGo
- A search engine that doesn’t track what you search for, build a profile on you, or sell your habits to advertisers. It works. Use it like you’d use Google, minus the surveillance.
- Duck.ai
- DuckDuckGo’s answer to the AI chatbot boom, built with the same premise: you can use the tool without the tool cataloging you. If you want to try generative AI without your prompts becoming someone else’s training data or marketing profile, this is a solid place to start.
- Cloudflare 1.1.1.1
- A free, fast DNS resolver that Cloudflare has committed to not selling your browsing data to advertisers, with independent audits to back it up. It’s a small, mostly invisible switch that closes off one more way your internet activity gets logged and sold.
- Signal
- End-to-end encrypted messaging and calls, run by a nonprofit with no ad business and no interest in reading your texts. If you’re still texting anything sensitive over SMS, this is the upgrade.
- Mozilla Firefox
- A browser built by a nonprofit-backed company, not an ad company. It doesn’t need to know everything about you to make money, which is more than you can say for the browser most people are using without thinking about it.
- Proton Mail
- End-to-end encrypted email out of Switzerland, built by a company whose business model is charging you for the product instead of selling you as the product. If you want an inbox that isn’t also a data mine, this is worth a look
- Proton VPN
- A VPN (stands for “virtual private network”) from the same people, with a free tier and a genuinely independently audited no-logs policy — which matters, because plenty of “private” VPNs quietly log everything and just say otherwise. This hides your browsing from your ISP and anyone else sitting on the connection.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Not a product — a nonprofit that’s been litigating and lobbying for digital privacy rights since long before “big tech” was a household phrase. Their site is a good resource if you want to understand what’s actually at stake, not just what tools to install.
None of this makes you invisible, and I’m not selling you on some off-grid fantasy. What it does is put a little friction back between you and the companies that have gotten very comfortable assuming they’re entitled to your data by default. That’s worth something.
I’ll try to add to this list as I come across other tools worth your time. And if you’ve got a favorite that belongs here, let me know.
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