You’re the Product, Not the Customer (The Paid, Private Internet) - Family IT Guy Podcast | Lyssna här

The apps are free, the games are free, email and search and videos are free. But free is not really free. The payment is your family's data, time, and attention. There is another internet where you pay a few dollars and become the customer instead of the product, and here is what it costs and where to start.

One question sorts the whole internet: how does a company make its money? If the answer is advertising, the product being sold is your attention, and the app is built to collect as much of it as it can. If the answer is subscriptions, you are the customer, and the company stays in business by keeping you happy. Ben walks through the paid, privacy-respecting options by category: email like Proton or Fastmail for about ten to twenty dollars a month, search like Kagi for about five dollars a month, messaging like Signal, which is free and run by a nonprofit, and paid kids' games without the ads and tracking built into free ones.

He also explains how to check a "we're private" claim: open source, which means the app's code is public so outside experts can inspect what it actually does. You do not have to switch everything at once. Start with one, like search, then try getting your close friends and family onto Signal with you.

Proton: https://proton.me

Fastmail: https://www.fastmail.com

Kagi: https://kagi.com

Signal: https://signal.org

Chapters:

0:00 Free isn't free

0:37 The one question that sorts the internet

1:07 The paid alternatives, category by category

1:47 How to tell honest apps from dishonest ones

2:20 Start with one change

Watch the whole series, How the Internet Really Works: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3jDQHQdQek