The tech bro ecosystem

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 23, 2025 at 07:46 AM

Because this is not entirely irrelevant to knowledge management, I thought I’d pen a brief piece on my cross-platform experiments.

As you all know, the main data ecosystems out there like to keep a close eye on our activities. Microsoft, Apple, Google – they all keep tabs on us any way they can, usually very surreptitiously and while claiming to be strictly privacy-focused.

I’ve been working within the Apple ecosystem for quite a while now (ever since Windows 7 emerged into the world like a bloated hybrid butterfly). But I am well aware that my MacBook Pro is phoning back to the mothership thousands of times an hour.

About a year ago I acquired a cheap ’n’ cheerful 11” Android tablet to replace my very elderly iPad. And I was impressed (even though the “new” product I acquired was clearly a second-hand one; but it was astoundingly cheap!). The Android ecosystem now resembles iOS very closely, and has gained most of the latter’s benefits while bringing a whole bunch of features of its own.

But of course Android is dependent on the Google ecosystem, which is even more profligate with its mothership phone calls than Apple. However, there is a difference, in the form of an easy solution.

I installed DuckDuckGo (the browser) – and discovered that it comes with an entire built-in privacy suite that can be set up to block trackers from any and all apps on your Android device. Every few hours it generates a report on how many trackers it has blocked, from which apps, phoning back to whichever motherships (mainly Google, but also a surprising number of specialist companies I’ve never heard of). You can look at the report or totally ignore it, up to you.

It’s very impressive, and totally free. And as a result, when I managed to break my beloved iPhone XR, I replaced it with a generic but well-reviewed Chinese mid-range phone (brand new at half the price of the equivalent refurbished iPhone – a Realme 14 Pro+ for those who care). And immediately installed DuckDuckGo.

I’ve experimented with Android before, and promptly abandoned it after finding that I was just too dependent on the inter-device syncing that characterises the Appleverse. But nowadays, such syncing is ubiquitous – and my main task and information repository is Obsidian, which uses its own Sync service. TickTick collects calendar info from any platform and syncs it across all platforms. There are numerous contact syncing apps, again for all platforms (and years of using Apple Contacts have shown me that the latter has a nasty habit of losing contact notes, often curtailing them for no obvious reason, so I avoid using it in any case).

Keeping track of cross-platform services is easier than it’s ever been, but clearly one has to buy into the Big Tech ecosphere.

However, apps like DuckDuckGo on Android (not, unfortunately, on macOS or iOS) return agency to users. Opera also offers a high level of tracker blocking, but it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as DuckDuckGo’s. Both of them offer paid VPN services, but DuckDuckGo’s FOC privacy suite operates like a pseudo-VPN in any case, inserting a blocking layer between your software environment and all outgoing “calls”. You can unblock certain apps if DuckDuckGo’s blocking disrupts them, but I’ve taken the all-in approach and blocked everything, so far without ill effects.

I hope that’s useful to somebody!

Cheers,
Bill