Does anyone like privacy? So what sites did we forget?
Search Engines:
Duck Duck Go Over 55 Billion anonymous searches - DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.
Lukol
GibiruStartpage - gives every page a privacy rating plus lets you search without trackers!
Secure Browser:Brave.com Brave stops online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.Tor Protect yourself against tracking, surveillance, and censorship.Duck Duck Go Browser - For Windows, For iOS, For Mac.
Instant Messaging:Telegram
MeWeGETTR A brand new social media platform founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought and rejecting political censorship and “cancel culture.”
Secure Email:Proton Email - No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first.
Videos:
Rumble - you'll like Rumble! Check them out!!
Brave has its own search engine.
ReplyDeleteOther things to consider:
- A VPN. Be careful about what vendor, though. Free VPNs are sometimes honeypots.
- A more secure or privacy-oriented operating system (e.g. Whonix, QubesOS, etc.). It's not as hard as some people claim.
- Privacy-oriented phone (e.g. Purism/Librem). A little pricey, but no Google or Apple.
- Having a second cheap burner phone, using one phone for calling and the other for apps. You don't need the $1000 phone for 99.99% of what you do. I have a $50 phone and use it with wifi for playing games and browsing.
- Email encryption (e.g. GPG). Not the built in stuff, but a system where you have control. Not that built in encryption isn't good, but it doesn't protect you against the vendor, sometimes.
- Getting an additional cheap laptop. Using one laptop for some functions (e.g. browsing and risky stuff) and the other for more core stuff, or installing a virtual machine on your own laptop (e.g. Virtualbox) and browsing from a client OS. I run Whonix on a virtual machine in my laptop and use it for browsing.
- Run your own mail or web server. There's a learning curve for this, of course. Some ISPs will not sell you a static IP address or let you run a server from their cable service. Starlink doesn't really support it, and its expensive "business" service basically fakes a static IP address. That likely means you will need to rent a VPS. Nonetheless, with your own server, nobody else should be scanning your logs, messages, etc.
- If you run your own servers from a VPS, be careful what VPS you use. Just as some VPNs are honeypots, many VPS's are not secure against the vendor. If you rent a VPS that allows the vendor to manage the box for you, then you have no privacy with respect to the vendor. It's a tradeoff. I have a web site at bluehost and they maintain the machine. I have root privileges, but they have complete access to everything. I rent another VPS from a different vendor, and they don't touch it. The only service they offer is reprovisioning it from scratch if I screw it up beyond repair.
- Regularly delete unnecessary files on your computer (e.g. bleachbit). Remember. all those thumbnails and cache files from "privacy mode" show everywhere you go. All those journal files show every contact you've made. All those email caches are readable.
- Regularly delete your operating system and reinstall from scratch. A lot of people disagree with me on this, but I completely wipe my machines every two or three months, and reinstall the operating systems from scratch. It takes about an hour, but you don't have to sit there and watch it. That means that any spyware/malware that sneaked onto your machine will be deleted. I know some Windows users who have not changed their machine in three years. They are *guaranteed* to have some sort of malware/spyware installed.