Now, I am hoping I am not the only one in this community who has realized that privacy should be one of the top considerations when choosing what software to use on any device.
Leaving Reddit has been the catalyst for me to realize this, as silly as that might sound, and now I have to re-evaluate my list of “convenient” apps that are in NO WAY secure or private.
I want to ask everyone here if they have any recommendations for essentially replacement applications for all of the major categories of software that we use on our computers and mobile devices.
For example, here are some of the switches I made today: Chrome Mobile > Opera Mobile Chrome Desktop > Opera Desktop Facebook Messenger > Signal Facebook Social Media > No alternative just deleted it.
My hope with this post is that we can have a discussion on privacy apps in general as trying to track down information for each sector one by one and test each out can be arduous.
To kick off the discussion here are some other categories that I have not figured out an answer for yet:
Search Engines (duckduckgo is mentioned a lot, why?) Operating Systems Cloud Storage Email Providers Podcasts Video/Music Services (Youtube, Paid services, etc) Environment Specific advice for Android, iOS, and any others.
Also if it makes sense, should we consider privacy when choosing, say, a news website to frequent? Or would browser choice ultimately be the decider there.
Some of these replacements are just sending your data to a different organization. For example, Opera is no more secure than Chrome. You will want to check out privacy-focused browsers, like Tor Browser, Mullvad’s, or xombrero. Signal’s server is closed-source, and it requires a phone number, so it is not as private as alternatives like Matrix.
DuckDuckGo is closed-source and just white labels Bing results. It basically functions as a proxy server to Bing. A more private option is Searx since you can self-host it.
Yup, you need to use Linux here. MacOS and Windows are closed-source and phone home for telemetry and automatic software upgrades. They also try to make you log in to a iCloud or Microsoft account.
Don’t use it unless you encrypt it end-to-end. (As in, only upload files that are already encrypted, don’t trust the provider’s server-side encryption, which is functionally useless.) (A “simple” way to do this is mount the cloud storage as a network drive and layer FUSE encryption on top of it, I think it’s either EncFS or eCryptFS?)
This one is hard. The larger email hosts give you the most anonymity because you’re sharing the server with multiple other users. But the larger ones also scan your emails for ads and training AI, like Gmail. You can host your own email (which is not as hard as it sounds, and gives you complete control over the encryption scheme) but this is less private because the server’s IP belongs to one single user. My compromise here is to use a paid, independent email host.
iOS isn’t customizable enough for serious privacy and security. You can’t even change the default browser. On Android, there is https://grapheneos.org/.
undefined> Cloud Storage
Very interesting, I was considering writing off the idea of using cloud services altogether but that makes a lot of sense. Don’t trust their encryption.