Imani Thompson shows up at Wonderville Bar in Brooklyn looking ready for a DJ set, or to drink, or to dance the night away with friends. While she’ll probably do the latter, she’s also a cybersecurity organizer leading the evening’s event.

Thompson is the host, along with the New York City-based tech organizing coalition Cypurr Collective, of Break Up With Google. Its purpose isn’t a mystery; the main goal is to help attenders understand how to mitigate their vulnerability to surveillance through major tech services. But it’s also important for people to have fun while they do it, Thompson said – hence the DJs playing until the wee hours of the morning.

“People need a familiar environment to deal with a little friction,” Thompson said. “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, 26, has hosted lots of these events, which she calls “cybersecurity disguised as a party”. Wine nights with friends, gatherings at a local lesbian bar and the February get-together are all designed for people who want to divest from companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple. At one of these parties, participants might sip cocktails and flirt with strangers while they learn how to get their personal data scrubbed from search engines or how to turn on their phone’s most advanced privacy settings.

Other workshops, conferences and parties are popping up across the country, too – in Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta and Pittsburgh – where activists are teaching communities how to regain agency over their digital lives by using more secure, transparently run platforms or even building their own digital tools.

According to a YouGov poll conducted in December, 61% of Americans are concerned about their digital security, saying that limiting access to personal data is very important to them, but only 33% say they’re actively doing something about it. The tech privacy-focused conferences, workshops and meetups are giving people the support and agency to protect that information without giving up the tech that underpins modern life.

“When it comes to digital security, the idea is not ‘I have nothing to hide’,” Thompson said, “but rather ‘I have something to protect’.”

Why people are turning away from big tech

The services most people rely on to message their friends, shop or navigate a new city can make our lives easier and more connected, but they also leave us extraordinarily exposed. The data that tech companies sweep up from our online activities “allows them to infer precise details such as who has ‘suffered sexual violence’, who is on ‘bail bond’ or who has very ‘low net worth’,” said Luc Rocher, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, citing research from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL).

That information is broadcast to thousands of companies worldwide through real-time bidding (RTB) auctions, allowing companies to bid for the chance to show a user a targeted ad. It’s like having a data breach 747 times a day, according to the ICLL.

Add to those concerns consumers’ vulnerability to surveillance. US government agencies have employed various monitoring programs for years, including the National Security Agency’s sweeping collection of Americans’ telecommunication data. 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) an enormous budget increase to $85bn, some of which is going to contracts with Palantir, the AI company created to serve intelligence agencies, as well as the Israeli spyware company Paragon. Reports from multiple protesters and journalists indicate that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also heavily surveilling protests in Minnesota, Los Angeles and elsewhere – but it’s not clear what methods they are using. And the FBI director, Kash Patel, recently admitted in a congressional hearing that his department is buying Americans’ data via online brokers.

Then there is the enormous power tech giants have over Americans’ lives – how we communicate, what we buy, even how our appliances operate. Corporations such as Meta and OpenAI that once promised connection, convenience and free expression are extracting attention and data from users to further enrich their owners and erode democratic freedoms.

“Generally speaking, we’re living under the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in all of human history,” said Daly Barnett, a senior researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “While the reach and sophistication of these surveillance apparatuses escalate, so too are authoritarian movements. It makes sense [that] those two things would escalate at the same time, but I think people are recognizing those two trends and trying to figure out what to do about it.”

Taking back control from big tech

Fairouz, who works with Resist Tech Monopolies (RTM) in Seattle and whose full name is being withheld for privacy reasons, told the Guardian that the volunteer group has seen an explosion of interest recently. RTM hosts community events like a book club, a movie night, open office hours and a regular “discover tech” event that introduces community members to tech concepts.

“We had to pause onboarding because our interest form has been growing faster than what we can keep up with,” they said. “We see interest from both tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy people; most notably we see interest from political and grassroots groups that want to train their members [or] community.”

RTM is part of a larger, international tech federation called Co-op Cloud. It’s a collective of tech-based organizations committed to building and sharing tools based on libre software, which users can use and distribute freely – whether it’s LibreOffice, a Microsoft Office alternative, or the Apache web server. The guiding principles of the federation are to keep technology transparent, democratically built and sustainable.

On a smaller scale, building systems that rely less on major tech companies both protects users from surveillance and allows them to collaborate on new tools that are democratically designed and communally maintained. And you don’t have to know a programming language or be especially tech-savvy to contribute; artists, teachers, writers, ethicists and other interested parties can contribute to libre or open-source projects.

For instance, at a recent workshop through the Los Angeles-based digital archive space TAPE, one participant created a voicemail exporter for iPhone voice messages, which allows users to download all their voicemail messages to their laptop or to a hard drive rather than saving them on their phone in an effort to make them less vulnerable to loss, surveillance or degradation.

“Apple uses third-party Google and Amazon datacenters to store user data,” said Jackie Forsyte, an archivist who works for TAPE and co-led the workshop. “When data is out of your hands [and] into the hands of a corporation, you lose autonomy, period. Let alone the risks if a corporation bends to the political will of an administration or police agency, it puts sensitive data at risk.”

A future free from powerful tech monopolies isn’t exactly on the horizon – indeed, Thompson, TAPE and other organizers use Instagram to advertise events and share information. But there are plenty of easy-to-use, free or inexpensive tools like the Privacy Badger browser extension or ProtonMail that can help mitigate the risks of widespread data collection and surveillance.

In the meantime, Thompson continues to organize de-Googling parties. “I just want people to feel empowered in general in their relationships to technology,” she said. “I’m finding when people dip their toes, they get really excited and creative.”