You are the labor

Here is a number that should bother you more than it does.

In 2025, Meta's average revenue per user reached just over $57 globally, and somewhere around $227 in the United States and Canada. That's per person. Per year. From a service that you do not pay for, that does not send you a bill, that does not ask for a credit card. The money is real. It comes from somewhere. It comes from you.

Google does not publish a clean per-user number, but its 2024 advertising revenue was roughly $264 billion, divided across an active user base in the low billions. The math lands you in the same neighborhood as Meta — somewhere between $50 and $300 per user per year, depending on how you count and where you live, with the wealthier countries cross-subsidizing the rest.

You generate that revenue without being told you generate it. You generate it by living your life, near a phone, in a browser tab, with the wifi on. You don't see an invoice because the transaction was structured so you wouldn't recognize it as a transaction.

That is the trick of the last twenty years, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

You're not the customer. You're the labor.

The cliché — if you're not paying, you're the product — is half right and ages badly. The honest version is harder.

You are the labor.

Every search you type, every photo you upload, every voice command, every map query, every email you send, every video you watch to the end and every video you scroll past — all of it is work. You are producing a corpus. The corpus is the most valuable raw material in the modern economy. You are not paid for producing it. You did not negotiate the terms under which it was extracted. You were given a free service in exchange for unlimited extraction rights, and you signed the agreement by clicking past a screen designed to make you click past it.

This is not a metaphor. The companies themselves treat it as labor in their own internal language. They speak of "user-generated content" and "engagement" and "session time" the way industrial firms once spoke of throughput. The product they sell to advertisers is not a product. It is the prediction of human behavior, and the prediction is built on data that was generated by humans behaving. Behaving is the work. The pay is the service you would have wanted anyway.

The phone in your pocket is the point of extraction.

A 2018 Vanderbilt University study put a stationary, idle Android phone — sitting on a desk, doing nothing, with only Chrome running in the background — on a network monitor for twenty-four hours. The phone, doing nothing, sent location data to Google 340 times. Under typical use, the same phone sent location data 450 times in a day. An idle iPhone, the same study found, sent under a megabyte of data per day to Google services; under typical use, around eighteen requests per hour to Apple alone.

Three hundred and forty location pings per day from a phone that was sitting still.

Multiply by your phone's actual usage. Multiply by the dozens of apps on the phone that have their own location permissions. Multiply by the ad networks each of those apps integrates with. The location data industry alone is worth roughly $12 billion a year. In 2019, The New York Times obtained a single dataset from a single location data company that contained over 50 billion location pings from 12 million phones — collected over a few months, in a few American cities. They were able to reconstruct the daily routines of named individuals, including military personnel, government officials, and private citizens, by name and address.

That dataset cost less than a corporate sales meeting. It existed because every phone in it was working — generating, generating, generating — every time it moved.

And now the corpus trains the model.

Until recently, the deal was at least transparent in one direction. They took your data; they sold ads against it; you got a free service. The transaction was extractive but it was, at least, finite.

That changed when the same companies that have been collecting your data for fifteen or twenty years pivoted to building artificial intelligence. The data Gmail scanned for ad targeting starting in 2004 is the data that trained the language models now writing emails. The photos Google Photos quietly indexed for "smart search" are the photos training the image models now generating photographs. The voice recordings Alexa kept of your kitchen are the recordings training the voice models that will replace human call centers. The code you committed to public GitHub repositories trained the model that will write code for the company that doesn't hire you.

You provided the training data. You were not paid. You are not a shareholder. The model competes with you, and your kids, and your colleagues, and the labor market that supports your industry. And the model improves every quarter on more data — your data, still, because you're still using the services, because you didn't have anywhere else to go.

The honest framing: you have spent a substantial fraction of your adult life, possibly hundreds of hours, doing unpaid labor for companies that used the labor to build systems intended to make your future labor less valuable.

That's the deal. That's what was happening while you were checking email.

Why escape feels impossible — and isn't.

The reasonable next thought is: yes, fine, but what am I supposed to do? My whole life is in there. Fifteen years of email. The photos of my kids. The contacts of every person I've ever known. Two-factor codes for my bank. Reservations. Receipts. Documents. Calendar history. The sheer mass of it is a wall.

The wall is real, and the companies built it on purpose. The technical term is switching costs. Every feature that made the service convenient for you also made it harder to leave. The integration that synced your contacts is the same integration you'd have to undo to migrate. The convenience is the cage.

But people leave. Every day, people leave. They do it gradually, one service at a time, and they do not regret it.

Here is the path most of the people we work with end up taking. It's not the only path. Pick what suits you and skip what doesn't.

Email. Move to Proton Mail. Set up forwarding from Gmail so you don't lose anything during the transition. Update your most important accounts (bank, identity documents, work) to the new address over a month or two. Leave Gmail running in the background as a forwarding inbox until the trickle of stragglers stops, then close the account. Cost: roughly the price of a fancy coffee per month for a real plan. You were always paying. Now you're paying with money instead of with your inbox.

Search. Move to Kagi (paid, ad-free, exceptional results) or DuckDuckGo (free, ad-supported on the privacy-respecting side). Both make Google look like the cluttered mess it has become. Kagi in particular is a genuine pleasure to use after a few weeks. The price of a paid search engine is, again, less than a coffee — and it returns the part of your day that searches used to take.

Phone. This is the hardest move and the one with the largest payoff. GrapheneOS is a de-Googled Android that runs on Pixel phones, supports the apps you actually need, and removes the data extraction wholesale. The Pixel hardware is the best phone privacy hardware in existence; ironic, given Google made it. For people who can't or won't change their phone, the second-best move is to go through every app's permissions and turn off everything that doesn't strictly need to be on. It will not be most things.

Messaging. Signal. Just Signal. Tell your three most important people you've moved and ask them to come along. Most will. The ones who won't would have stopped texting you within a year anyway.

Browser. Firefox, hardened, or LibreWolf, or Brave with the right settings. Whatever you pick, install uBlock Origin. The web becomes a different place — quieter, faster, less hostile.

VPN. Mullvad. Pay anonymously. Don't pay for one of the VPNs that advertises on YouTube; those companies are mostly the same problem in a different costume.

Anonymity, when you need it. Tor. Slow, weird, indispensable for the times you need it.

Photos and files. Proton Drive if you want it managed for you. A self-hosted Immich instance if you have a home server or are willing to set one up. Either way, the goal is to get your photos out of Google's index, where they are training models, and into a place you control.

Office. LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets. Nextcloud for shared drives if you want the team-collaboration feel without the surveillance.

More ideas. The /r/digital_escape subreddit and the awesome-privacy lists on GitHub are useful jumping-off points for the categories we haven't covered.

One at a time. One a month. One a quarter. Whatever pace works.

The trap most people fall into is treating this as all-or-nothing. They look at the wall, decide they can't move all of it at once, and move none of it. Then they feel bad about themselves for using Gmail. Then they do nothing for another year.

Pick one thing. Move it. Live with it for a month. The world doesn't end. The convenience you thought you'd lose mostly wasn't worth what it was costing. Then pick another thing.

The version of you who signed up for Gmail in 2009 made a reasonable choice with the information available then. The version of you reading this in 2026 has different information. Use it.

You don't have to go all the way. You don't have to be a purist. You don't have to live in a cabin and read your email by candlelight. You just have to stop being free labor for systems that have, at this point, demonstrated what they intend to do with the labor.

Start somewhere. Email is a good place to start.