The Big Tech Dependency Audit: Where You Are Actually Locked In

Before you can leave Big Tech, you need to know exactly how deep you are in. Most people who talk about “de-Googling” or “leaving the ecosystem” are working from vibes — a general sense that they depend on these companies too much, without a precise inventory of what that dependency looks like service by service. The sovereign approach starts where it always starts: with an honest audit. You cannot reduce what you have not measured, and you cannot make proportional decisions about what to keep and what to cut without seeing the full picture first.

This is not an exercise in shame. If you complete this audit and discover that you use thirty-five Big Tech services across five companies, that is not a moral failure. It is the predictable result of living in an economy where the most talented engineers in the world have spent two decades designing products specifically to become indispensable. The audit is simply the balance sheet — the sovereign individual’s prerequisite for any deliberate action.

Why This Matters for Sovereignty

Thoreau could tell you to the penny what his cabin cost. He logged every nail, every board, every bushel of beans. He did this not because he was obsessive but because he understood something fundamental: you cannot live deliberately if you do not know what your life actually costs. The same principle applies to your digital life. Every Big Tech service you use represents a dependency — on their servers, their policies, their pricing decisions, their willingness to continue offering the product as you know it.

Zuboff documented in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism how these dependencies are not accidental. They are the architecture of behavioral surplus extraction. Each service you use generates data that feeds prediction markets. The product is free because you are the product — not in the paranoid sense, but in the straightforward economic sense that your behavioral data has market value and these companies have built trillion-dollar empires on collecting it. Understanding your dependency map is the first step toward deciding which of those data streams you are willing to maintain and which you are not.

The sovereignty case is not “leave everything.” It is “know everything, then choose deliberately.” That distinction matters.

How It Works

The audit framework is simple. For each of the five major Big Tech companies — Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — list every service you use. For each service, rate three things: how heavily you depend on it (light, moderate, or deep), how difficult it would be to replace (easy, moderate, hard, or impractical), and what data that service collects from you.

Google. Most people use between five and ten Google services without thinking about it. The usual list: Search, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, YouTube, Google Maps, Android, Chrome, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Home or Nest devices, and Google Fi. Gmail and Google Drive tend to be deep dependencies — your email is your digital identity, and years of documents are hard to migrate. YouTube has no real alternative for consumption. Chrome and Search are easy to replace but habitual. Android is a deep dependency if you are on it; switching phones is a significant project. Google Maps is genuinely superior to most alternatives for navigation and local search.

Apple. The ecosystem lock-in here is deliberate and effective. iPhone, Mac, iCloud, Apple Music, the App Store, iMessage, Safari, Apple Pay, HomeKit, AirPods, Apple Watch — each product works best with other Apple products, which is the point. The dependency is not on any single service but on the integration between them. Leaving Apple means giving up the seamless handoff between devices that most users have come to take for granted.

Amazon. Shopping, Prime, AWS (if you run any online infrastructure), Kindle, Alexa, Ring, Twitch, Whole Foods. Amazon’s dependency is primarily commercial and logistical. The convenience of two-day delivery and the breadth of selection make Amazon the default purchase path for most Americans. For builders who use AWS, the infrastructure dependency runs much deeper.

Meta. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, and the Quest VR platform. Meta’s lock-in is almost entirely social graph — the service is valuable because your friends and family are on it. This is the network effect at its most potent. The product itself is replaceable; the network is not.

Microsoft. Windows, Office 365, Outlook, Teams, LinkedIn, GitHub, Azure, Xbox. Microsoft’s dependency is primarily professional. If your workplace runs on Microsoft, your personal sovereignty efforts do not change that. LinkedIn is the professional social network with no serious competitor. GitHub is where most open-source code lives.

The Proportional Response

Complete the audit before reading the rest of this series. Take thirty minutes, open a spreadsheet or a notebook, and list every service from each company that you use. For each one, mark your dependency level and replacement difficulty. Be honest — “I could replace this” is different from “I would actually replace this given the friction involved.”

Most people who do this exercise discover twenty to forty Big Tech dependencies. The distribution is usually uneven: heavy Google and Apple dependency, moderate Amazon, and Meta dependency concentrated in one or two services (usually Instagram and WhatsApp). Microsoft dependency correlates strongly with your employer’s choices, which you may not control.

Once you have the list, sort it. Put the services where you have deep dependency and high data exposure at the top. Put the services where dependency is light and replacement is easy at the bottom. You now have a prioritized map for the rest of this series. The articles that follow will address each company and service category in turn, with honest assessments of what is worth leaving, what is worth mitigating, and what is genuinely not worth the effort for most people.

Do not try to leave everything at once. That is the prepper fantasy, not the sovereign practice. Thoreau did not build his cabin in a day. He started with a clear-eyed inventory of what he needed, what it would cost, and what he was willing to give up. Your dependency audit is the same exercise, applied to the digital infrastructure that shapes your daily life.

What To Watch For

The most common mistake in this exercise is underestimating indirect dependencies. You may not think you use Google, but if your email provider routes through Gmail, your website runs on Google Cloud, and your phone’s default search is Google — you are a Google user whether you chose to be or not. Check your defaults, not just your conscious choices.

The second mistake is overestimating your willingness to tolerate friction. Switching from Gmail to ProtonMail is technically straightforward. Actually updating every account that uses your Gmail address over two to three months is a project that many people start and few complete. Factor your realistic tolerance for inconvenience into the audit. Honesty here saves you from the cycle of ambitious plans followed by quiet abandonment.

The third thing to watch is network dependencies. WhatsApp is trivial to delete — unless your family group chat, your neighborhood coordination, and your kids’ school parent group all run on it. Services with network effects are not just about the software; they are about the people on the other end. Your audit should note where the lock-in is technical and where it is social, because the strategies for addressing each are different.

Finally, remember that this audit is a snapshot. The Big Tech landscape shifts, alternatives improve, and your own needs change. The sovereign practice is not to audit once and declare victory. It is to maintain awareness of your dependencies as a living document, revisiting it when your circumstances change or when a better alternative emerges for something you have been meaning to replace.

This article is part of the Leaving Big Tech (Realistically) series at SovereignCML.

Related reading: Leaving Google: Service by Service, The Realistic De-Big-Tech Priority List, Life After Big Tech: What Changes, What Doesn’t