You probably saw the notification.

Google sent an alert. The kind that arrives in your inbox looking like housekeeping but reads, if you take a moment with it, like a quiet renegotiation of everything you thought you agreed to. They were updating their terms. They were going to use your data to train their models. Not just the data you produce going forward. The data you have already given them. The emails you wrote in 2014. The searches from the year you were going through something you would rather not think about. The photos. The documents. All of it, now formally enrolled in the project of making their product smarter.

You could opt out, technically. There was a button.

But here is the thing about the button: a policy is not a promise. A policy is a document that can be updated. You clicked the button today and they changed the policy tomorrow and now you have to find the button again, assuming they put it in the same place, assuming they tell you the policy changed, assuming the new version of the opt-out covers the same things the old version did. The button exists to give you the feeling of control. The feeling and the thing are not the same.

I have been in enough rooms to know how this works. You do not ask for permission to take something from people who do not understand what they have. You make it convenient to give it away. You make the alternative feel complicated. You make the opt-out three menus deep and the opt-in the default. You call it a service. You call it free.

I switched my email to Proton.

I want to be honest about what that did and did not do. It did not make me invisible. It did not undo the years of data already sitting in Google’s servers. It did not solve the larger problem of living in an economy that runs on surveillance. What it did was stop the bleeding. It moved one piece of my life onto infrastructure that answers to different laws. The piece where I think out loud, where I make plans, where I have conversations I did not intend for an audience., operated by people with a different business model, in a country with stricter privacy protections than this one.

It took about twenty minutes.

The practical guide is below if you want to do the same. But before you go there I want to say something that the guide will not say:

The goal is not Proton specifically. The goal is to start asking, for each service you use, whose interests it actually serves. Not whose terms say it serves yours. Whose business model. Because the business model is the honest document. Everything else is the button.

Start somewhere. Start with email if that feels right. Start with the question if that is all you have today.

The guide is here: LINK TO GUIDE

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