You don't own anything anymore. They do.
You used to buy the DVD and keep it forever. Now you rent the movie every month and they play ads at you anyway. Your car charges for seats it already has. Your phone reports where you sleep. Nobody asked you to sign this deal. Here's how to tear it up.
- Home address
- Worked out from where your phone sits every night
- Last Tuesday
- Every place you went, to within a few meters
- 2 a.m. searches
- Including the ones you'd never say out loud
- Your driving
- How hard you brake, sold to your insurer
- Your health
- Guessed from apps, purchases and searches
- Your money
- Income bracket, debts, what you'll buy next
- Your people
- Who you live with, text, and spend time near
747 times a day: Irish Council for Civil Liberties, 2022
They took the shelf.
Remember the shelf? VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, games, books. You paid once, and they were yours. You could lend them, sell them, or watch them in twenty years. That shelf is gone, and it didn't disappear by accident.
Movies
You bought the VHS or DVD once. It played forever, with no internet, and you could lend it to anyone.
You pay every month, they play ads anyway, and the movie vanishes when their license deal ends.
TV
Free over the antenna. Ads were the price, and you paid nothing else.
You pay for three or four services and still sit through ads. Want them gone? Pay again.
Music
CDs and records on your shelf, yours for life.
You rent the entire library. Stop paying and every song you "saved" disappears.
Games
The cartridge worked in 1990 and still works today.
A digital license. When Ubisoft shut down The Crew in 2024, players lost a game they'd paid for. Source
Books
A paperback you could lend, resell, or leave to your kids.
A Kindle license tied to an account that Amazon controls.
Software
You bought Photoshop once and used it for a decade.
Since 2013 it's a payment every month, forever, or it stops working. Source
You're not the customer anymore. You're the inventory.
Every show you watch, every song you skip, every place you drive gets logged, packaged and sold. They charge you for the service, then sell you to advertisers on top of it. Paying doesn't make you the customer. It just means they get paid twice.
Paid for it? Doesn't matter.
"Buy" used to mean it was yours. Now it means you rented a license they can change, pull, or put behind a paywall whenever they like. This isn't a theory. It's a pattern.
BMW charged monthly for heated seats
The heaters were already built into the car you paid for. In Europe and other markets, BMW wanted a subscription to switch them on. It backed down in 2023, admitting drivers wouldn't accept it.
Source: ArenaEVPlayStation tried to delete shows people bought
Sony told customers that more than a thousand Discovery shows they'd paid for would disappear from their libraries when a licensing deal ended. After a public outcry, Sony struck a new deal and called it off.
Source: ThurrottPrime Video put ads on people already paying
In January 2024, Amazon switched on ads for every Prime member by default, then charged an extra $2.99 a month to turn them back off. Same subscription, same price, now with commercials.
Source: Associated Press via NBCYour car snitched on you to your insurer
GM collected drivers' locations and braking habits through OnStar and passed them to data brokers, who supplied driving scores to insurance companies. People's premiums went up and they never knew why. In January 2026 the FTC banned GM from sharing that data with them for five years.
Sources: TechCrunch, The RegisterAmazon locked up the Kindle books you paid for
On February 26, 2025, Amazon removed the option to download your purchased Kindle books to your own computer. The books stay on their servers, under their rules.
Source: Libreture
That line comes from a 2016 World Economic Forum video imagining life in 2030, based on an essay by Danish politician Ida Auken. It was sold as a thought experiment. Look at the list above and decide for yourself how much of it is still hypothetical.
Source: Wikipedia
What renting your life costs
Tick what you pay for and fix the prices to match your bill. Then look at the number. That's money you'll never see again, for things you'll never own.
A used mini PC and a big hard drive covers most of the list. Many replacements need no hardware at all.
Swap it out
Every one of these is free. Most are open source, so nobody can quietly change the deal on you later.
| Stop using | Use instead | Effort |
|---|
Jellyfin and Navidrome play media you own: your music files, your ripped discs, free public-domain films. Owning your media is the point.
Get yourself off the market
People-search sites sell your address, phone number and relatives to anyone with a credit card. Removing yourself is free. They just make it tedious on purpose. Do these, then check again in three months, because they re-list people.
Spokeo
Find your listing, paste its link, confirm by email.
Whitepages
Removes you from public listings. Needs a phone call to verify.
BeenVerified
Search your name, pick your record, confirm by email.
PeopleConnect
One request covers Intelius, TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate and US Search.
FastPeopleSearch
Search, select your record, submit.
Radaris
Asks for an account to remove you. Use a throwaway email.
Acxiom
One of the biggest marketing data brokers. Opt out of their consumer file.
LexisNexis
Their consumer data feeds background checks and insurers.
In California? Since 2026, state law lets you send one deletion request to every registered data broker at once through the state privacy agency's DROP system. Look it up at cppa.ca.gov.
Exit Boxes. Built to order.
Don't want to set it up yourself? Reserve a box and we'll build it for you: plug it in and it works. No accounts, no subscriptions, no cloud. You own the hardware and everything on it. Want a whole home server or the offline survival library? Both are made to order below.
- 1. Reserve one freePick a box below. It sends us a short email from your own email app. You pay nothing.
- 2. We build a batchOnce enough people reserve a box, we order parts and build them. We'll email you the final price before anything else happens.
- 3. You decide, then payConfirm and pay only when your box is ready to ship. Changed your mind? Ignore the email. No charge, ever.
Ad Blocker
A Raspberry Pi running AdGuard Home. Plug it into your router and ads and trackers disappear for every phone, TV and laptop in the house.
Prices are estimates and depend on parts costs when your batch is built. You'll see the final price before paying.
Home Servers. Made to order.
Your own Google Photos, your own Dropbox, your own Netflix, running in your house instead of on someone else's computer. We build it, set it up, and hand you the keys. No monthly fees. Nothing phones home. If we disappeared tomorrow, it would keep working.
What comes installed
| App | What it does | Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Immich | Backs up every photo and video from your phones automatically, with face and place search | |
| Nextcloud | Your files, calendar and contacts, synced to every device | |
| AdGuard Home | Blocks ads and trackers for every device in the house | |
| Tailscale | Reach your server from anywhere, privately, without opening your network to the internet | |
| Status dashboard | One page showing that everything is running, and warning you if a drive fills up or fails |
Pick a server
Starter
Every app above on a silent, low-power mini PC. Room for years of photos and files from a couple of phones.
Media
Everything in Starter, plus Jellyfin and Navidrome to stream the movies, shows and music you own to every TV and phone, with hardware video conversion so playback stays smooth.
Family
Everything in Media, with two drives that copy each other so one can die without losing a single photo. Plus Home Assistant to run your smart home without the cloud.
Every server includes 30 days of remote help getting your phones and TVs connected, and a printed guide. You get every password; we keep none. Want your photos moved over from Google Photos or iCloud? Ask in your email and we'll quote it. Prices are estimates; you'll confirm the final price before paying.
The Survival Library. Made to order.
When the internet goes down, everything you "looked up" goes with it. This is the knowledge you'd need anyway: medicine, clean water, food, first aid, shelter. Stored on hardware you hold in your hand, readable with no signal, no account and no subscription. Each one is prepared by hand for the person who orders it.
What's inside every edition
| Collection | What it covers | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Post-disaster guides | Emergency response, shelter, sanitation and staying safe after a disaster | 615 MB |
| Medical encyclopedia | MDWiki's medical reference, written for health workers, with images | 2.2 GB |
| Field medicine | Practical first aid and treating injuries and illness without a hospital | 67 MB |
| Water | Finding, collecting and purifying drinking water | 20 MB |
| Food | Cooking, preserving and storing food without modern appliances | 94 MB |
| Knots | Rope and knots for shelter, rescue and hauling | 27 MB |
| Reader apps | Kiwix for Android, Windows and Linux, so it opens on what you already own | 360 MB |
Pick an edition
Every collection above on a USB drive with a printed quick-start card. Plugs into a laptop, or straight into an Android phone with a USB-C adapter.
Complete
Everything in Pocket, plus all of English Wikipedia with images (about 110 GB) and offline maps of your state, so you can navigate with no signal.
Hotspot
Everything in Complete, on a small computer that makes its own Wi-Fi network. Every phone in the house can read it at once, no internet needed. Runs off a USB power bank.
Request one and we'll email you within a few days to confirm the price and timing. You pay only when yours is ready to ship. Want something added, like a specific medical reference or another state's maps? Say so in your email. The library content is free and openly licensed; you're paying for the hardware and the work of preparing and testing it. Repair guides from iFixit are free but can't be resold, so we include instructions to download them yourself.
Hardware for leaving
Most swaps need no hardware. When you want to host things yourself, this is what we use. Some of these links pay us a small cut at no cost to you. That's how this site stays free and tracker-free.
- Raspberry Pi 5
Blocks ads and trackers for your whole home with Pi-hole, or runs Home Assistant. - Used mini PC (Intel N100)
Quiet, low power, and enough for Jellyfin, Immich and Nextcloud at once. - 4 TB hard drive
Your own cloud. Pays for itself in about a year of storage fees. - Zigbee USB stick
Smart-home gear that works with the internet unplugged.