In a Brooklyn bar, with DJs playing into the early hours, a new kind of party is underway. The dress code is casual, the drinks are flowing, but the goal is serious cybersecurity. This is the “Break Up With Google” event, a gathering where attendees flirt, dance, and learn how to scrub their personal data from the internet. It’s a model being replicated across the United States and speaks to a growing, global desire to reclaim digital autonomy, one where the mission is to make ditching big tech as social as a night out.
“People need a familiar environment to deal with a little friction,” said Imani Thompson, the 26-year-old cybersecurity organiser leading the event with the New York City-based Cypurr Collective. “Learning to script a little at your local bar is less fight-or-flight-inducing than doing it in an environment that feels like school.” Thompson describes these meetups as “cybersecurity disguised as a party,” designed to help people divest from Google, Apple, and Microsoft in a space that feels accessible, not intimidating.
The Scale of the Exposure
This grassroots movement is a direct response to an unprecedented scale of data collection and surveillance. The services that underpin modern life constantly harvest our information, creating profiles of startling intimacy. Luc Rocher, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, cited research from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) showing this data allows companies to infer precise details such as who has “suffered sexual violence,” who is on “bail bond,” or who has “very low net worth.”
This sensitive information is not kept in a vault. It is broadcast globally through real-time bidding (RTB) advertising auctions, where thousands of firms bid for the chance to target a specific user. The ICCL likens this process to having a personal data breach 747 times a day. Public concern is high on both sides of the Atlantic: a YouGov poll found 61% of Americans are concerned about digital security, while a separate UK poll showed 59% of Britons are worried about the amount of data collected about them.
Yet the surveillance landscape extends far beyond commercial data brokers. “Generally speaking, we’re living under the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in all of human history,” said Daly Barnett, a senior researcher at the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Government agencies have vast monitoring programmes. In 2023, the FBI was found to have overstepped its authority to spy on protesters affiliated with the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations. More recently, Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a budget increase to $85bn, with funds flowing to contracts with Palantir, an AI company founded to serve intelligence agencies.
The FBI’s methods also include purchasing commercially available data. The agency’s director, Kash Patel, recently admitted in a congressional hearing that his department buys Americans’ data via online brokers. Reports also indicate the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has heavily surveilled protests, though its specific methods are unclear. Barnett connects this escalation in surveillance capability to a troubling parallel trend: “While the reach and sophistication of these surveillance apparatuses escalate, so too are authoritarian movements.”
Building Alternatives, Together
Confronted by this reality, community groups are forming not just to educate, but to build alternatives. In Seattle, the volunteer group Resist Tech Monopolies (RTM) has seen an explosion of interest. “We had to pause onboarding because our interest form has been growing faster than what we can keep up with,” said a member who uses the name Fairouz. The group hosts book clubs, movie nights, and “discover tech” events to demystify technology for both tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy audiences.
RTM is part of an international tech federation called Co-op Cloud, a collective committed to building and sharing tools based on libre software—transparent, democratically built, and sustainable alternatives to proprietary systems. This can range from using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office to collaborating on entirely new, communally maintained tools. The philosophy is that you don’t need to be a programmer to contribute; artists, teachers, and ethicists all have a role.
This hands-on approach is evident at workshops like those run by the Los Angeles digital archive space TAPE. At one session, a participant created a voicemail exporter for iPhones, allowing users to download messages to a laptop or hard drive, making them less vulnerable to loss or surveillance. Jackie Forsyte, an archivist with TAPE who co-led the workshop, explained the core risk of relying on corporations: “Apple uses third-party Google and Amazon datacentres to store user data. When data is out of your hands and into the hands of a corporation, you lose autonomy, period.”
For those taking first steps, accessible tools provide immediate relief. The EFF’s Privacy Badger is a free browser extension that automatically blocks hidden trackers. Services like ProtonMail offer secure email. There is also a growing geopolitical dimension to tech choices; a survey by Proton found 55% of UK respondents following US-Europe tensions reported an increased preference for European-made software over American counterparts, hinting at a desire for “digital sovereignty.”
A complete break from tech giants remains challenging—even organisers use platforms like Instagram to promote their privacy-focused events. But the movement’s growth suggests a fundamental shift in mindset. As Imani Thompson puts it, the goal is not to have “nothing to hide,” but to recognise that “I have something to protect.” In bars, community centres, and online, people are finding that protecting it can start with a party.
