Mar 20
Privacy-focused Services and Tools
In the world of mass surveillance, targeted ads, data gathering, and more, it’s nice to use open-source and privacy-focused services and tools. I’ve personally ditched many tools I used to use and started using more privacy-focused tools. I’d like to share some of that today alongside some lists of such tools.
I keep a list of tools that are known for better privacy or anonymity and are, I think most of them at least, open-source.
Search Engines
I think one of the last straws for me was when Google started presenting me with the following Cookie popup:
That’s presented any time one wants to search and is not logged in or has not confirmed this before.
Searching for information is absolutely key for me, but I’m not logged in to Google at all times — because of privacy, or because I’m using a work laptop where I don’t want to sign up into personal accounts. Having to confirm this popup is a major annoyance that slows me down and breaks the train of thoughts.
So I more or less ditched Google seach engine for two other search engines:
I used DuckDuckGo for quite some time (about half a year), but then discovered Startpage. The major difference between the two is that Startpage actually uses Google’s index on the backend, so seaching on Startpage is very similar to Google. The layout, feel and look are also very similar to Google.
The major difference between these two and conventional search engines like Google is that they don’t really track you, hence you are not presented with any Cookie popups or bars. That’s a really refreshing experience, I think we almost forgot that something like this is even possible in today’s world :)
Startpage also offers one handy feature, Anonymous View. It’s a way to access a page from the search result page via essentially a VPN, but without any logging or using credentials. It should hide your identity, block some ads, website cookies and trackers. the feature is accessible by clicking on the glasses to the left of the search results:
A nice thing about Startpage is, at least for me, that it’s an European company based in the Netherlands, so the European strict privacy rules apply to the company, which should eventually bring more privacy to its customers. DuckDuckGo is based in the USA.
Messengers
There’re so many more apps and tools one can use in order to gain more privacy. For example, messengers are something we can’t really imagine our world without in many cases. I strongly recommend using a messenger with end-to-end encryption. That means that keys to decrypt the messages are present only on the target devices.
Let’s have a look at some messengers. Telegram, for example, does not by default use end-to-end encryption. It can be used when you start a Secret chat, but I’ve always found this option a bit hidden in the mobile app and I think it can’t be used on the desktop app at all. A good substitute is Signal or Session. Both apps use end-to-end encryption by default.
Video
I don’t know what your experience with YouTube is, but by my standards, it’s unusable nowadays for a couple of reasons:
- too many ads — one vlog can have several ads in the space of 10 minutes, so my exprience is broken several times
- the mobile app not only has a lot of ads, but YT also promotes heavily its paid version, so every now and then I get a popup asking me if I want to buy the paid version
- and obviously it has a lot of cookies, tracking, profiling, so nothing privacy-focused at all
Fortunately there are alternatives like Invidious. It’s a different YT frontend and you can access it using one of the public instances on this list. You are presented with no cookie popups, no tracking, no profile building. Again, a really refreshing experience today.
Cloud Storage
Perhaps last area I’ll mention is cloud storage. It’s handy to have additional storage somewhere else in case your hard drive dies. But cloud services are not usually privacy-focused and your data could be accessed by the cloud company. One way of dealing with this is obviously finding a cloud provider that encrypts the data first on your side before uploading them to the cloud — one such service is crypt.ee. Another way would be to enrypt your data before uploading them to the cloud — your can use PGP keys for that.
Other resources
What are some other resources of such privacy-focused tools and services?
There’re a few I know of. You can check the following GitHub repositories:
I hope I’ve pointed you to the right direction in this blog post. You can go through the lists of tools and decide for yourself what you’d like to use and why. There are alternatives, it’s just a matter of finding them.
