David Pierce

If I was trying to get rid of big tech apps in my life, my top three or four recommendations would definitely start with Proton.

Proton is this company started by a bunch of CERN scientists in Switzerland that is very privacy focused.

And over the years, they've actually built

a series of apps that are basically as good as everything you get from Google.

They have a drive, they have an email, they have calendar, they have all this stuff.

The next one is probably Signal, which is the messaging app I think everyone should switch to.

There are things that are good about WhatsApp, even though it's owned by Meta, but Signal is a organization run by the right kind of people who believe in the right kind of things.

And then the third one is slightly more a field, but I would say anyone who wants to do smart home stuff in their life right now should use Home Assistant.

You can use Alexa, you can use HomeKit, you can use Google.

But Home Assistant is this very specific, hackable, open system that you control much more completely than you control any of those other systems.

Everything from the stuff on your doorbell that's looking out at the world and seeing people come up to your door to like the baby monitors inside of your house.

Who runs that stuff matters.

Netflix, absolutely.

Disney and Netflix, yeah.

David Pierce, I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge.

That is the big one.

It's also the most complicated one to sort through because fundamentally it's about feelings.

So a thing to understand is that everybody has always believed they're being censored on social media.

Since time immemorial, this is the story of social media.

What's happening on TikTok is at this particular moment, I believe less about censorship and more about normal internet problems.