Breaking Up With Big Tech: Bunk's 2026 recommendations for WNC

Our work at Bunk is driven by the belief that big tech is a net-negative for the people and economy of Western North Carolina. Big tech companies shoehorn us into enclosed apps where they control what we see and say, they build walled-garden platforms that prevent local infrastructure from getting built, they harvest our private data and sell it for cash or use it to train AI, and they keep us scrolling and afraid rather than talking to our neighbors.

Breaking up with big tech may feel impossible because their tools and apps are so ubiquitous. But you can do it! Here's our 2026 recommendations for how to do so, geared specifically toward people in Western North Carolina.

Tier 1 breakup — “That was easier than I thought”

These Tier 1 breakup strategies are easier than you might think, but still make a big difference in how much data (money), time (also money), and power (haha, it's money) we're giving to big tech.

1. Break up with Chrome, Edge, and Safari web browsers — switch to Firefox

Web browsers are a major part of how big tech companies harvest our private data and maintain their global infrastructure monopolies. Firefox is our preferred alternative to big tech browsers because it's very user-friendly, it's entirely open source, it has a 21-year track record of prioritizing privacy and user autonomy, and it's made by a non-profit.

Switching to Firefox will feel like a big change at first, but you can do it and it's worth it! And in 2026, it's easier to switch than you might expect:

  1. Install Firefox
  2. Import your private data from your old browser
  3. Set Firefox as your default browser

2. Block big tech trackers across the whole internet — install uBlock Origin in Firefox

Switching to Firefox helps a ton in breaking up with big tech. Now that you've quit the big tech browsers, Google and Microsoft and Apple can't automatically see everything you're doing online.

But big tech's monopolies across the rest of the internet ecosystem mean that their trackers are everywhere, and they harvest tons of information about you even if you aren't using their browsers. But you can block those trackers in Firefox. Here's how:

  1. Open Firefox, and go to the official uBlock Origin extension page
  2. Click “Add to Firefox”

uBlock Origin is truly an open-source wonder, and it does so much to stop big tech from slurping up our private data and selling it for cash.

It's worth noting that you won't be able to install uBlock Origin on Firefox for iPhone, because Apple doesn't allow it. So no luck there if you're an iPhone user.

That being said, you can install it on Firefox for Android, and we highly recommend doing so.

3. Break up with Google Search — switch to Hopniss, DuckDuckGo, or Startpage

Most browsers default to Google Search, including Firefox. Think about how much private information we type into that search bar. It's basically every question and thought we have every day. Typing every passing thought into the big tech search box is antithetical to breaking up with big tech.

Luckily, you just moved to Firefox and Firefox lets you set your own default search engine. Hopniss is a private search engine that we run here at Bunk Computer Cooperative. It doesn't track you at all and logs nothing about your activity.

  1. Go to https://hopniss.net
  2. Right-click the search box in the center of the page and click “Add Search Engine”
  3. In Firefox, go to Settings > Search, and change the default search engine to Hopniss

Unfortunately, Hopniss sometimes gets blocked by the upstream search providers it's querying. We hope to keep improving this issue, but there's no easy fix. Until then, we recommend using DuckDuckGo or Startpage if Hopniss is struggling.

4. Break up with Ring camera (and other surveillance tech)

Surveillance technologies like Ring doorbell cameras make our communities less safe. Companies like Amazon have a track record of providing video to police departments without a warrant, bypassing our fourth amendment rights.

Whatever results from Amazon's relationship with Flock, we do know that Amazon is already using that data against us and our neighbors. If you're worried about your packages getting stolen, P.O. box and personal mailbox services are often cheaper and always safer than doorbell cameras, both for your neighbors and for your packages. If you're worried about being a victim of violence, get to know your neighbors! We live in a less-violent moment in history, and knowing our neighbors helps all of us feel safer. If that's not enough, then get some pepper spray or hit the shooting range! We don't want big tech or the government in our homes; let's take them off our doors!

5. Make your phone harder to mindlessly scroll (and harder to hack)

How easy is it to unlock your phone? Do you use a 4 digit PIN? A 6 digit PIN? Your face? Your fingerprint? If so, you can probably unlock your phone before you've realized you've started scrolling. Setting your phone up with a password/passcode (letters and numbers, as long as you want) rather than a PIN (just numbers, fixed length) can provide that extra little bit of friction to help turn reactive scrolling into thoughtful phone usage. It also adds greater protection to the data on your phone, should some malevolent miscreant pry it from you. Extra points for using a password manager to generate a random 3 or 4 word passphrase as your new passcode! (See Tier 2 for help)

Android users: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9079129 Apple users: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119586

6. Wear a regular old watch

Building on the previous recommendation, Bunk's favorite trick for checking our phones less is to just wear a watch. If the time is on your wrist, you don't have to pick up your phone to check the time. And if you don't pick up your phone to check the time, there's zero chance you'll see an unnecessary notification and get tempted to scroll.

We also love this big tech breakup strategy because you can turn it into a public transit excursion. Here's some instructions for the Asheville area:

  1. Check the ART bus schedule
  2. Take the bus to the Bleachery Walmart or the Hendersonville Rd. Walmart
  3. Buy a great cheap watch, like a Casio or a Timex
    • Pay with cash if you're feeling extra offline
  4. Return home
  5. Contact City Council and advocate for better bus service

7. Remove unnecessary big tech apps from your phone

If you have a Gmail address, then you probably need the Gmail app on your phone. But do you really need the TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram apps on your phone? If you think you can get away with only using them in a laptop web browser, give it a try. Not only will you probably use them less, which is part of breaking up with big tech, but not having the apps on your phone actually helps protect your private data.

Apps on our phones have more access to our private data than websites in our browsers do. If you're looking at Instagram in Firefox, Firefox can stop instagram from grabbing quite a lot of your other private data (and uBlock Origin will help immensely). But if you're looking at Instagram on your phone, there's no such help. The phone app only has the guardrails that Android and iOS put there, and since they're all selling our data to each other those guardrails suck.

8. Disable unnecessary notifications and big tech snooping on your phone

This is really good to do after you've already removed unnecessary apps, because it could be a weekend project if you've got a lot of apps. The goal here is twofold: 1. Reduce the anxiety of constant notifications 1. Reduce the data your phone siphons away to the cloud

How you go about this will vary based on wether you're an Android or Apple user, but for every app you want to tune the system settings to change notification settings. We recommend only allowing the name of the app to be displayed on your lock screen. We also recommend turning off notifications for apps that are low urgency.

Next, you will want to turn off your phone's digital assitant's access to data for each app. Siri weasles it's way into our lives by hoovering up our data and processing it in the cloud outside our control. Just say no!

Tier 2 breakup — “OK that was a little harder but I'm really glad I did it”

These tier 2 breakup strategies take more effort, and maybe a little money, but they will facilitate a full big tech breakup later down the road.

1. Get a password manager

A password manager is an app that saves all your passwords for you. It sounds simple, but it changes everything. Once you have a password manager, it's trivial to make very strong passwords for all your online accounts, because you don't have to remember any of them. You only have to remember the password for the password manager. This significantly decreases your likelihood of getting hacked.

Once you have a password manager and you've moved all your passwords into it, you also now have a list of all your online accounts. This makes it possible to change your email address away from a big tech email provider, because you have a list of all the places you need to update your email address. Moving to a new email provider is still a huge task, but getting a password manager takes it from impossible to possible.

Bunk recommends 1Password or Bitwarden for password management. We think 1Password is a little more pleasant to use, but Bitwarden has a free tier. We recommend paying for this service if possible, because the service that your password manager is providing is mission-critical.

Once you've gotten a password manager, you have to move into it. This is the hardest part, but you can make it less unpleasant by scheduling time with friends and doing it together.

2. Break up with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and the rest — get a Fastmail email address

The arc of internet history is long, but it has bent, confusingly, towards our email address being the root of our entire online identity.

Even though we rarely use email to send messages to our friends and loved ones anymore, our email addresses are hugely important to our online lives, and they're the number one thing that keeps us locked into big tech.

Moving to a new email provider is a major task, but getting a new email is not. Once you've got the new email, you're ready to move any time in the future.

“Free” email isn't free — you've probably gotta pay for this one

We're used to thinking of email as free. But for a variety of complicated historical, political, and engineering reasons, running email servers is actually very, very hard. This means it's expensive, and this means that “free” email services are almost never actually free — you're paying with your data! If you want an email address that won't munge the contents of your inbox and sell it to data brokers and AI trainers and governments, then you have to pay money.

There are a few email providers with free tiers that aren't big tech, but Bunk strongly recommends paying for email if at all possible. It's not too expensive — as cheap as $12/year and at most $60/year.

Here's Bunk's current recommendations for big tech breakup email providers:

  1. Fastmail
    • All-around best
    • Dedicated phone app
    • Integrates with all iOS and Android native email and calendar apps
    • Most expensive ($60/year)
  2. Proton
    • Dedicated phone app
    • Doesn't integrate with iOS and Android native email and calendar apps, must use theirs
    • Encrypted (though we recommend never treating email as private, having encrypted calendar and docs is nice)
    • Free tier
  3. Posteo
    • No dedicated phone app
    • Integrates with all iOS and Android native email and calendar apps
    • Budget-friendly at $12/year
    • Powered by green energy
  4. Mailbox
    • No dedicated phone app
    • Integrates with all iOS and Android native email and calendar apps
    • Budget-friendly at $12/year

All these providers are great and none of them sell your data — do more research if you'd like, but we recommend Fastmail as an all-around best alternative to big tech email for most Western North Carolinians. Fastmail doesn't have an alternative to Google Docs, but Bunk does! Scuppernong is an encrypted document store that we run on a donation basis for Western North Carolinians.

Tier 3 breakup — “Do I need to ask off work for this?”

These tier 3 big tech breakup strategies are the final boss. They include things like changing your email address everywhere in your life, and deleting your Google account. They may take many hours to complete, but this is the true big tech breakup and you only have to do it once!

1. No really, move into that password manager

There's no secret sauce here, you've just got to sit down and put all those logins into that password manager.

If you're already using the browser autofill feature to remember some passwords for you, you should be able to export those as a CSV and import them to your password manager.

You can also try looking through your browser history to remember what websites you login to regularly.

There will always be some dangling logins that you haven't quite managed to save in the password manager, but once you've made a best effort at moving in, you're ready for the next step.

2. Migrate to your new email address

Like we said above, our email addresses are the root of our entire online identities. Most of us have big tech email addresses from providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. If you really want to break up with big tech, you've got to get a new email address. Luckily, you already got a new email address in a previous step.

To move out of your big tech email account:

  1. Open your password manager
  2. Work down the list of logins, visiting each site and changing the email address associated with your account
  3. Reach out to friends, family, work, and colleagues and let them know you've changed your email address
  4. If applicable, move your calendar from your big tech email provider to your new email provider

You'll need to watch your old email inbox for at least a year, seeing what comes in and migrating stragglers from your old email to your new email. It's a real chore, but this is one of the biggest steps you can take on your big tech breakup journey.

3. Delete your big tech accounts for good

After you've moved into your new email address, you're ready. All your big tech accounts will let you download all your private data before you delete them, thanks to a specific California privacy law. We recommend doing this ahead of actually deleting any of your accounts. The process can be more or less difficult depending on the service and usually will involve submitting a request that is filled a few days later. Make sure you have enough storage for your files!

There will often be a waiting period once you submit that account deletion request. Congrats! You did it!

After deleting big tech accounts, especially big tech social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, it's normal to feel unsure, even a bit afraid, of what to do instead. This is a huge change! Here's some of Bunk's recommendations for things to do instead of big tech social media doomscrolling:

Tier 4 breakup — “I'm ready to change my life”

The surprise second stage of the final boss fight of breaking up with big tech is leaving big tech operating systems entirely and installing Linux on your personal computer. It's a big task, but if you want help, you can come to our public event at Firestorm Books in Asheville, at 6pm on Wednesday, April 8th. We'll get together and help each other install Linux! Check the event listing on Firestorm's website.