Hello, World! I've decided to (attempt) to start a personal, tech-oriented blog. This blog, at least in the short-term, will consist of posts relating to my progress in ditching as much SaaS/cloud software as possible. The plan is to shred my Google account, delete or at least corral my Facebook usage, and zap a few other accounts along the way. This has been a popular topic lately, and I'm glad to see I'll just be adding one more voice. My intention is to make as much functionality as possible self-hosted, farm out one or two services if needed, and do without if a service isn't providing much value.

I've watched the rise of "Big Tech", and somewhat foolishly participated in it as a consumer. I told myself I was okay with the privacy invasion, as I got functionality in return. I'm no longer happy with that deal, and have started down the path of parting ways with as much of the "cloud" as possible, at least in my personal life. Hopefully anyone stumbling upon this can make use of what I've found, or take it as inspiration if they are doing something similar.

If you're on the fence about tackling this yourself, I'd encourage you to try and find out exactly what information about you is out there, being stored and processed by various companies. Get a Google Takeout of your data. Depending on your settings, they might have millions of GPS fixes, full search history, all of your conversations with the Android Assistant, all of your photos, and potentially much more. While it shouldn't surprise you, it being laid out in front of you how deeply they can know you with the aggregation of all that data might.

So, join me as I attempt to migrate not only myself but also my wife away from "cloud" tech solutions, in an attempt to regain privacy, keep from being deplatformed, and maybe learn a few things along the way.