Your PC, Your Data, Their Rules - How Big Tech Turned Customers Into Hostages

I've spent the last few months extracting myself from big tech platforms. Not because it's trendy. Not because of some ideological purity test. Because they keep proving - with my money, my data, and my time - that they don't think any of it belongs to me. This is the story of seven companies that lost a customer, and why I'm building software that can't do what they did. Meta: "Prove You're You Or We Delete What You Paid For" I don't have Facebook. Social anxiety and a general distrust of Meta as a company kept me away. But the Quest 3 is a genuinely nice piece of hardware, so I took a chance - bought the 512GB model sometime around spring 2025. My daughter loved it, so for her birthday in August we got her her own Quest 3S (256GB). Two headsets, two Horizon Plus subscriptions, games for both of us. Her friend from next door would hop on mine so the kids could play together in the same world. It was a family thing - exactly what Meta markets the Quest as. I knew the hardware was wrapp