A French dad got tired of watching his kids get tracked by Google before they could even talk. His name is Gaël Duval. He built Mandrake Linux back in the 90s, one of the first desktop Linux systems a regular person could actually install and use. He wasn't new to building alternatives to the tech giants. But the thing that pushed him into his next project wasn't a business plan. It was watching his own children grow up holding phones before they could hold a pencil. Every tap and every app was building a permanent record of who they were, years before they were old enough to understand what a record even is. He has said the phrase "this is just how things are" stopped being an acceptable answer the moment he was watching it happen to his own kids. In 2017 he started a project on Kickstarter called Eelo, named after eels, because they're fish that know how to hide in the sea. A trademark dispute forced a rename a year later. It became /e/OS. The idea is a full strip-down of Android. Every call the phone makes back to Google, from the operating system itself, gets physically removed. Not opted out of. Removed. A stand-in called MicroG answers the requests apps still expect, so your banking app or your maps still work, just without a single byte reaching Google's servers. It ships with an ad blocker on by default, a scanner that shows you exactly which trackers are hiding inside any app before you install it, and a widget that can fake your location or hide your IP whenever you want. It now runs on 271 phone models. User numbers have climbed from around 30,000 a few years ago to nearly 800,000 today, one household at a time, starting with his own.