Most of us are aware of the problems with the tech giants but don’t know what to do about them. Google profiles us relentlessly, from our web searching and our phone activities. Amazon treats its workers poorly. Microsoft has a history of anticompetitive practices and Windows can be insecure.

This is a lot to take in for many people, and it is fair to shrug and say “what can I do?” before going about your day. Still, there’s a lot that is in your control as a user, and it starts with exercising choice.

Ditching Google, for most of us, comes in three parts: search, our phones, and our emails.

For search, there are options like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or Qwant. These are all privacy friendly, and don’t build up the substantial user profile that Google does in order to advertise at you. Their business models still revolve around advertising, but not around targeting based on personal data.

Phones are a challenge because most Android builds provided by handset manufacturers will send telemetry to the manufacturer, Google, or both. Still, there are alternatives here too: for the casual user there is /e/OS/, a Google-free android build which comes pre-loaded on a number of handsets available from the e foundation.

For the hard core of developers, there are even phones running real, non-Android Linux. The PinePhone (and its newer sibling, the PinePhone Pro) can run a number of major Linux distributions, and double up as a desktop. This is a choice for the stout of heart as it is early days for Linux on mobile, but it is an increasingly viable choice.

Finally, setting email free from the big players is easy too. For the privacy minded there are lots of options with free tiers and cheap upgrades, like Tutanota. These services don’t do what Google (and Microsoft) do, scanning your emails to get a better picture of what you’ll buy. Their entire purpose is to not do this, and to make your email experience as private as a conversation in your own home.

These are just a few of the ways users can start to break away from companies that misbehave. Ten years or more ago some of these choices were nearly impossible, limited to the hard core of self-hosters, developers and other professionals if any options existed at all. Today we’re in a better place where the market and the open source community have come together to give us something great: privacy to the people.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is an old and troubled thing. Used for turning an address like makeuseof.com into an IP address your computer can connect to, it was built in a happier time when people didn’t expect that anyone would spy or tamper with it. It has no encryption built in, and generally no assurance the response hasn’t been maliciously altered on the wire.

This leads to unhappy consequences: in some parts of the world (including the US) ISPs whose servers handle customer DNS requests can use that data for advertising. They are free to snoop and can make a profit from it.

Fortunately, there are solutions. Mozilla came up with DNS over HTTPS, a way of cutting out the ISP’s view of people’s traffic. That only works in browsers though, and isn’t on by default in all regions.

A more far reaching solution is DNSCrypt, which (as the name suggests) encrypts your queries to DNS servers and again, cuts out middlemen to make your online experience safer and more secure.

There is a problem though, because historically this has been hard to set up.

That is no longer the case: Quad9, a Swiss foundation that runs the DNS resolver 9.9.9.9, has an app for Android which will secure your phone’s DNS, whatever the app. It works by acting as a VPN, but only for your DNS traffic. Everything else passes through, giving none of the lag or battery drain that can often come with a full-blooded VPN.

Better yet, Quad9 also has options for malware protection. Malware often dials home, connecting to malicious servers for command and control, or to pull data out of your phone. It is hard to detect, but Quad9’s DNS servers use threat intelligence systems to block bad domain names, and the app tells you when it has done this.

The security that Quad9 offers is a real bargain given that it is free. You don’t pay with your personal information, either: the whole thing is sponsored by the likes of IBM, the Packet Clearing House, and the Global Cyber Alliance.

The funding Quad9 receives is the result of those corporate sponsors knowing that better security benefits everyone, but only if everyone can access it. Quad9 is a huge leap forward for Android users on that basis, and will leave users a little safer than they were before they found it.

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