With having a background in IT and a keen interest in reducing waste, I’m going to start experimenting with recycling old laptops and Android phones.

It’s also a step towards increased privacy, as we’ve all been blindsided by Big Tech giving us free things while harvesting our data to sell us more stuff we don’t need. With living costs rising we can save a fortune by keeping devices running for longer.

Android Phones – Data Mining At Source

Android is a version of Linux that’s been hijacked by Google to harvest our data at a base level. It’s not even the apps we install, or the junk apps like Facebook that come pre-loaded – it’s the base operating system that’s invading our privacy. This doesn’t have to be the case though, as there are lots of versions of Android that don’t rely on Google or their products.

Laptops – Waste For Profit

Modern versions of Windows have so much extra crap installed and a lot of it is intended for selling us things or stealing our data. Most recent laptops are more than powerful enough for web browsing, writing letters etc. when all this guff is removed. This makes it a great option for extending the life of laptops and reducing cost of ownership. Privacy invading data mining is baked into commercial operating systems and planned obsolescence leads to us being pressured to buy new devices every few years when there’s not much wrong with our old machine.

My Macbook Air is getting slower and slower as Apple introduce new things I don’t care about, and they will drop support for my laptop entirely soon to try and make me buy their newer laptop containing their own processors.

I’ve been learning about the operating system called Linux lately and trying it out on my old computers. It’s an alternative to Windows and MacOS that is free and open source and comes in various flavours that focus on particular things.  Some flavours are for beginners, others for servers or developers. I’ve been trying out Ubuntu and Fedora version of Linux.

Read the rest of the article at Intention: Laptop & Phone Recycling Project