Google knows I searched for “rash on arm” at 2:47 AM last Tuesday. Meta has mapped my social connections better than I have. Amazon predicts what I’ll buy next month with unsettling accuracy. Three companies process roughly 70% of all internet traffic, and they’re just the visible layer.
But here’s what they don’t have yet.
Your encrypted Signal messages still belong to you — for now. The photos on your hard drive that never touched the cloud. The cash transactions that bypass digital payment systems. These aren’t grand acts of resistance; they’re mundane choices that preserve small pockets of privacy. Local mesh networks are sprouting in cities from Detroit to Hong Kong. Neighbors sharing internet through community-owned infrastructure, routing around corporate gatekeepers. It’s not about paranoia, but options.
Real digital ownership isn’t philosophical — it’s technical. When you run your own email server, you control the infrastructure. When you use open-source software, you can see what it does with your data. When you pay for services instead of using “free” ones, you’re less likely to be the product. The Mastodon server I joined last year has 847 users and costs $73 monthly to run. Everyone chips in. No shareholders, no advertising algorithms curating our feeds. It’s not perfect (federation has its own problems), but it’s ours. Most of this, however, is tedious. Setting up encrypted email is a pain. Learning to use Tor slows everything down, and self-hosting requires technical knowledge most people don’t have or want. And that’s the real battle: convenience versus control. Facebook makes staying in touch effortless. Google makes search instant and accurate. Amazon delivers tomorrow what you need today. The trade-off isn’t just data, it’s time and effort.
Not digital purity. Not some fantasy of complete privacy in 2025. Just the right to choose where our boundaries are. Maybe you’re fine with Google reading your email if it means better spam filtering. Maybe you want your financial transactions private but couldn’t care less if Netflix tracks your viewing habits. The goal isn’t to escape the system entirely, but engage with it on your own terms. The internet doesn’t have to be a choice between total surveillance and digital hermitage. There’s middle ground, but only if we keep building it.
Your phone knows you better than your spouse does. It knows you check Instagram at 11:23 PM most nights, that you panic-search WebMD symptoms, that you listen to sad songs after breakups. Every tap, swipe, and search builds a profile worth actual money — your data generated $164 billion in revenue for Meta alone last year. But the real question isn’t whether companies collect your data. It’s whether you have any say in what happens to it.
Take Sarah, a marketing manager in Austin, TX. She posts workout photos on Instagram, orders Thai food through DoorDash, and uses Spotify during her commute. Each action feeds an algorithm somewhere. Her fitness posts tell advertisers she might buy protein powder. Her food orders reveal she’s willing to pay delivery fees on Tuesday nights. Her music choices suggest she’s stressed (lots of lo-fi hip-hop) and nostalgic (surprising amount of early 2000s pop-punk). Sarah thinks this data belongs to her because it came from her life. But legally, it belongs to whoever’s terms of service she clicked “agree” on. Instagram owns her workout selfies. DoorDash sells her ordering patterns. Spotify knows her emotional cycles better than she does. This isn’t some dystopian future — it’s Tuesday.
The uncomfortable truth is that Sarah’s digital twin, assembled from thousands of data points, is more valuable to advertisers than Sarah herself. They can predict what she’ll want before she knows she wants it. They can manipulate her mood with targeted content. They can influence her purchases, her politics, even her relationships. And she doesn’t get a cent of the revenue her data generates.
Some people are fighting back with more than just complaints. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, spent the last few years building Solid, a system that lets you store your data in personal “pods” instead of corporate silos. You decide who sees your photos, who accesses your messages, who gets to know your browsing history. It’s like having your own private internet within the internet. The European Union’s GDPR gave people real legal rights to their data for the first time. You can demand to see what companies know about you (it’s usually terrifying). You can make them delete it. You can refuse to let them sell it. When GDPR launched in 2018, Facebook’s user growth in Europe slowed dramatically. Turns out people don’t love being tracked when they have a choice.
Blockchain projects like SelfKey and Civic promise to let you control your digital identity with cryptographic keys only you possess. Instead of logging in with Google or Facebook, you’d use your own encrypted identity that no company could access without permission. It’s elegant in theory, messy in practice. Most blockchain identity systems are still too complicated for regular people and too energy-intensive to scale.
The most effective resistance happens in boring, everyday choices. Using Signal instead of WhatsApp. Paying for email instead of using Gmail. Running a VPN when you browse. Deleting cookies regularly. These are maintenance tasks that preserve tiny islands of privacy. DuckDuckGo processes over 100 million searches daily from people who’ve decided they don’t want Google tracking their queries. That’s small compared to Google’s 8.5 billion daily searches, but it’s growing. Privacy isn’t just for paranoids anymore; it’s for anyone who’s tired of being the product. Even these small rebellions have limits. Your VPN provider could log your traffic. DuckDuckGo still operates within a surveilled internet. Privacy-focused browsers can be fingerprinted in other ways. Perfect privacy is impossible, but partial privacy is still worth fighting for.
The goal isn’t to become invisible online — that’s neither possible nor practical for most people. It’s about maintaining some control over how your information gets used. Maybe you’re fine with Netflix knowing your viewing habits if it means better recommendations. Maybe you want your location data private but don’t mind targeted ads based on your shopping history. The point is having a choice. Right now, most people don’t realize they have options beyond accepting surveillance or going offline entirely. You can use privacy tools selectively. You can read terms of service occasionally. You can pay for services instead of trading your data for “free” ones. Companies spend billions convincing us that privacy is dead, that surveillance is inevitable, that resistance is futile. But every person who chooses a privacy-focused alternative proves them wrong. Every encrypted message, every declined cookie, every paid subscription instead of an ad-supported service is a small declaration of independence. Your data will never be completely yours again because that ship sailed when the internet became commercialized. But some of it can still be yours. The question is how much you care enough to reclaim.
Reddit has 100,000 active communities, but you’ve probably never heard of r/ObscureMedia, where 246,000 people share forgotten TV shows and lost commercials. There’s no algorithm pushing engagement, no sponsored posts, just volunteers sharing weird stuff they found. It’s one of thousands of internet spaces that exist below the radar of mainstream attention—and corporate surveillance. These digital hideouts aren’t just about privacy. They’re about purpose. While Facebook optimizes for engagement and Twitter maximizes time-on-site, niche communities optimize for their actual interests. The 1,200 members of a vintage synthesizer forum don’t care about going viral. They want to discuss filter resonance and envelope decay with people who actually understand what those terms mean.
Independent bulletin board systems still exist, decades after most people forgot they existed. There is an interesting amount of active BBSes worldwide, many accessible through telnet or specialized software. These systems run on ancient technology (some literally use computers from the 1980s) but they’re invisible to modern web crawlers and immune to social media data mining. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) represents a different approach to decentralization. Instead of storing files on corporate servers, IPFS distributes content across thousands of volunteer nodes. When you download a file, you’re getting pieces from multiple computers worldwide, making it nearly impossible to trace or censor. The system currently hosts about 2.5 million unique files, from academic papers to software archives to art projects.
Tor’s hidden services—what most people call the “dark web”—process roughly 2.5 million daily users. Most aren’t buying drugs or weapons; they’re reading news sites, participating in forums, or accessing information censored in their countries. The BBC, Facebook, and The New York Times all run Tor versions of their sites specifically for users in countries with heavy internet censorship.
These spaces aren’t digital utopias. Reddit’s “obscure” communities still operate under Reddit’s rules and can be banned without warning. The company eliminated over 2,000 subreddits in 2020 alone, including many that weren’t breaking any obvious rules. Niche doesn’t mean immune. IPFS requires technical knowledge most people don’t have. You need to understand how to run nodes, pin content, and navigate using cryptographic hashes instead of normal web addresses. The barrier to entry keeps the network small and limits its impact. The dark web’s reputation for illegal activity isn’t entirely unfair. While most users are there for legitimate privacy reasons, the anonymity does enable criminal marketplaces. Every few months, law enforcement shuts down major dark web services, proving that even Tor’s encryption has limits. The 2013 Silk Road takedown, the 2017 AlphaBay seizure, and dozens of smaller operations show that determined investigators can crack most anonymity systems.
The real value of these communities isn’t perfect privacy — it’s intentionality. A 200-person forum about extinct programming languages exists because those 200 people genuinely care about the topic. There’s no venture capital demanding growth, no advertising algorithm optimizing for engagement, no data harvesting for profit. When you join a niche community, you’re opting into a different set of priorities. Quality over quantity. Depth over breadth. Actual expertise over viral content. These aren’t accident; they’re design choices that mainstream platforms can’t make because they’re beholden to shareholders and advertisers. The technical barriers that keep many people out also keep corporate interests out. It’s hard to monetize a community you can’t easily access or analyze. A peer-to-peer network sharing public domain books isn’t attractive to advertisers because there’s no way to insert ads or track user behavior.
These spaces survive, however, through obscurity, not strength. The moment a niche community becomes too successful or too visible, it faces pressure to either commercialize or disappear. Discord servers get shut down for terms of service violations. Independent forums lose their hosting when payment processors decide they’re too risky. Tor hidden services get raided when they attract too much law enforcement attention. The people who create and maintain these spaces are usually volunteers doing it for passion, not profit. They have day jobs, limited time, and no legal departments. When external pressure comes — whether from law enforcement, platform policies, or simply the cost of hosting — they often don’t have the resources to fight back.
But their existence proves something important: the internet doesn’t have to be a choice between surveillance capitalism and going offline entirely. Small groups of people can create digital spaces that prioritize their values over corporate profits. These spaces may be fragile, but they’re real. Every person who learns to use Tor, joins a niche forum, or contributes to a decentralized network is participating in a quiet form of resistance. Not revolution, but evolution. Not perfect freedom, but meaningful choice. Not digital utopia, but something better than what most people accept as inevitable.
Upload a video to YouTube and you’ve just signed away more rights than you probably realize. YouTube’s terms of service grant the platform “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use” your content. Translation: they can show your video to anyone, anywhere, forever, and make money from it without paying you a cent beyond their ad revenue split. Instagram’s terms are even more aggressive: they claim the right to sublicense your photos to third parties, use them in advertising, and modify them however they want. That sunset photo you posted last week? Instagram can legally sell it to a stock photo company or use it to advertise their own services. Most users have no idea they’ve agreed to this. The promise is always the same: upload your work, gain exposure, build an audience. But the fine print tells a different story. You’re not just sharing your creativity—you’re feeding it into a machine that profits from your labor while offering you increasingly smaller returns.
The real issue isn’t just platforms using your content for advertising. It’s AI companies scraping everything you’ve ever posted to train models that will compete with human creators. Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, trained their image generator on billions of images scraped from the internet without asking permission or paying creators.
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft’s AI coding assistant, was trained on millions of open-source code repositories. Many of those projects had licenses requiring attribution, but Copilot can reproduce code snippets without crediting the original authors. Developers are essentially competing with AI trained on their own work. OpenAI’s GPT models were trained on text scraped from across the web, including articles, blog posts, and forum discussions written by millions of people. None of those authors consented to their writing being used to train a commercial AI system, and none of them are getting paid for it.
This isn’t some distant threat — it’s happening now. AI-generated art is flooding stock photo sites. AI writing tools are being used to create content that competes with human writers. Musicians are discovering AI-generated songs that sound suspiciously like their own work. Some creators are fighting back by choosing platforms that respect ownership. Bandcamp lets musicians keep 85-90% of their sales revenue and doesn’t claim any rights to the music itself. When Epic Games bought Bandcamp in 2022, musicians worried about changes to this model—and they were right to worry. Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr in 2023, leading to layoffs and uncertainty about the platform’s future. Substack has built a business model around respecting writers’ ownership of their content. Writers keep their subscriber lists, own their content, and can leave anytime. But Substack still takes a 10% cut of paid subscriptions and has been criticized for platforming controversial content, showing how even creator-friendly platforms face pressures. Creative Commons licenses give creators more control over how their work gets used. You can specify whether people can use your work commercially, whether they need to credit you, and whether they can modify it. But Creative Commons only works if people actually respect the licenses, and enforcement is difficult for individual creators. Self-hosting gives you complete control but requires technical knowledge and ongoing costs. Running your own website, email list, and payment processing means you’re not dependent on any platform’s terms of service. But it also means you’re responsible for everything — security, backups, legal compliance, marketing.
Open-source software represents one of the most successful examples of creators maintaining collective ownership. Projects like Linux, Firefox, and WordPress are built by thousands of contributors who retain rights to their code while sharing it freely. The licenses they use ensure that corporations can’t just take the code and make it proprietary. But even open-source faces pressure: when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, they gained control of MySQL, one of the world’s most popular databases. The MySQL community had to fork the project as MariaDB to maintain independence. When IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion, it raised questions about the future of Red Hat’s open-source projects.
Smaller communities on platforms like Reddit or Discord create their own rules for sharing and attribution. A subreddit for amateur photographers might require that people credit the original photographer when sharing images. A Discord server for game developers might ban AI-generated art. These community standards can be more protective of creators than the platform’s own terms of service. But these communities exist at the mercy of their host platforms. Reddit has banned entire communities overnight, and Discord can delete servers without appeal. The community standards only matter as long as the platform allows the community to exist.
Perfect ownership of digital creative work is mostly impossible once you share it online. But you can make choices that preserve more of your rights and give you better terms.
Start by reading the terms of service before uploading to any platform. Most are terrible, but some are worse than others. Understand what rights you’re signing away and decide if the trade-off is worth it.
Consider using platforms that explicitly support creator ownership, even if they have smaller audiences. Your reach might be smaller, but your rights will be better protected.
Use Creative Commons licenses to specify how you want your work to be used. Include copyright notices and licensing information directly in your work when possible.
Consider registering important works with the copyright office. It costs money and takes time, but it gives you stronger legal protection if someone steals your work.
The internet promised to democratize creativity by giving everyone a platform. Instead, it’s created a system where a few platforms profit enormously from millions of creators’ work. Perfect solutions don’t exist, but better choices do. The key is understanding what you’re trading away and making that decision consciously rather than by accident.
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