privacy/security/anti data-harvesting megalist!

[shevek]

Related: A lot of privacy focused places like to recommend Brave as a private browser and search engine (the site I linked earlier in the thread does this too), and I myself have used the Brave search until today. But in case you care about the people and their values behind the products you use, you may want to research the history of Brave and its founder, Brendan Eich*. Only found out today .
*Side fun-fact: He also created JavaScript :0.

[arcus]

Use privacy focused frontends as alternative to search engines, lurking social media, and other services.

Search engines:
SearchXNG (uses various search engines): sx.catgirl.cloud
LibreX (uses various search engines): librex.me
Whoogle (Google): whoogle.privacydev.net

Social media:
Nitter (Twitter): nitter.net
Proxitok (TikTok): proxitok.pabloferreiro.es
Invidious (YouTube): yt.artemislena.eu
Teddit (Reddit): teddit.artemislena.eu

Others:
BreezeWiki (Wikia/Fandom): breezewiki.com
Linva Translate (Google Translate): lingva.ml

There are a lot of other frontends out there. I'm slowly working on compiling a big list of them for my lipu.li wiki and site.

Related: A lot of privacy focused places like to recommend Brave as a private browser and search engine (the site I linked earlier in the thread does this too), and I myself have used the Brave search until today. But in case you care about the people and their values behind the products you use, you may want to research the history of Brave and its founder, Brendan Eich*. Only found out today .
*Side fun-fact: He also created JavaScript :0.

Sadly yeah. The only browsers that are decent are Ungoogled Chromium, Libre Wolf (has minor issues), and Firefox if you manually disable various options. Text based browsers are good too, however, they don't fully support the modern web.

ok, so for search engines i looked into searx, which doesn't hold any logs, can be completely self-hosted (it looks like you can only do that if you're using linux?), and has a lot of publicly hosted instances if you want results from other engines but with the privacy and security of searx.

does anyone else have any experience with searx/searx instances? i would love to hear any suggestions for instances (i'm trying out https://searx.tiekoetter.com due to the google and marginalia search results support) or other search engines in general!

Use SearXNG instead:

• SearXNG actively tries to find and push fixes as soon as possible when an engine is not working anymore, always trying to keep a working user experience. Meanwhile, SearX backports our changes 2 or 3 months later, resulting in a very long broken experience for the user.
• SearXNG user interface doesn't look like the same as SearX anymore.
  
• The core of SearXNG has vastly changed compared to SearX: HTTPX support for a much more stable experience, metrics for faster reporting of broken engines, built-in limiter for defending against bots and much more.

From: https://github.com/searxng/searx-instances/discussions/336 (privacy disrespecting link)

[pinkvampyr]

Aside from Proton Mail, I reckon Disroot is a pretty trustworthy service with various providers to choose from, including emails.

I've heard good and bad things about Disroot, like their privacy practices being shady, anyone know anything about it?

[starbreaker]

I've heard good and bad things about Disroot, like their privacy practices being shady, anyone know anything about it?

I found this post about Disroot.

https://proprivacy.com/email/review/disroot

They also have opinions about Fastmail, which I've been using for email.

https://proprivacy.com/email/review/fastmail

[PurpleHello98]

From what I've seen Vivaldi is a browser with very good privacy. It has a built-in ad and tracker blocker, and the team apparently goes through Chromium to get rid of all the spyware crap from Google. (It also has the only interface I can stand out of any modern browser.)

Edit: I looked it up and apparently they make money the same way as Firefox, with search engine deals to be the default and the like, and everything is totally open-source besides their UI layout. They're also headquartered in Norway, which has really strict privacy laws.

[pinkvampyr]

From what I've seen Vivaldi is a browser with very good privacy. It has a built-in ad and tracker blocker, and the team apparently goes through Chromium to get rid of all the spyware crap from Google. (It also has the only interface I can stand out of any modern browser.)

Edit: I looked it up and apparently they make money the same way as Firefox, with search engine deals to be the default and the like, and everything is totally open-source besides their UI layout. They're also headquartered in Norway, which has really strict privacy laws.

Unfortunately I believe using Chromium still means that Adblock will soon be unusable once that rolls out.

[PurpleHello98]

Unfortunately I believe using Chromium still means that Adblock will soon be unusable once that rolls out.

I read a blog post from one of the Vivaldi devs and apparently they've made some changes that should keep their ad and tracking blocker usable, and they'll try to keep old extensions working as best as they can. They seem really dedicated to this issue thankfully, and not owned by an ad company. (nudge nudge, Brave.)

[Memory]

I'm not sure about their privacy standards, but I use Ecosia as my search engine instead of Google or DuckDuckGo, I don't really see any ads that feel super targeted and they plant trees with the money from ad revenue! They show a little counter in the corner that shows you how many trees you've planted, and I just looked up the steps they take towards privacy right now and apparently they do not sell your data to third-party advertisers or create personal profiles based on your search history, and searches are encrypted and not stored permanently. They're not only carbon-neutral but actually carbon-negative, each search is said to remove 1kg of CO² from the atmosphere. Of course, there could be something I don't know about, but they seem decent.