Online Privacy on Desktop and Mobile

[mahoroa]

So I'm a bit of a paranoid person. Knowing that people could be spying on what I'm looking at scares me. I really only look at wikipedia articles but even then I'm scared of my information being leaked. Is there a way to go basically invisible on both desktop AND mobile? Preferably free? Thank you

[Audball]

A word of the wise is that, usually at least, if you use a service to hide ur internet activity that's free, that's usually because how they make their money is by still selling your data that they're seeing before it gets hidden. When it comes to things like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), your best bet in terms of Actual privacy tend to come from the paid services.

As far as VPNs go, I use ProtonVPN at the moment. It does what I need, it is a paid service though.

[drmollytov]

If you mostly read Wikipedia, I'd recommend learning to use Lynx: https://lynx.invisible-island.net/

From a privacy perspective, Lynx is cool because it cannot load trackers. It's not that it doesn't load trackers - it's that it can't. Lynx does not recognize most trackers as loadable, so it doesn't even try.

It's like if you made a batch of cupcakes, and they sat on the counter for a week, and you said "hey, why is no one eating the cupcakes" and your family went "...??? cupcakes aren't a food????"

Lynx can load cookies, but it asks you to accept or reject each one individually. You can test them until you find which ones will actually break the page and which ones won't.  You can also tell it to accept or reject all of them at once.

You won't get images or page formatting. But if you're mostly there to read text, that doesn't matter anyway.

Because it requires a terminal, Lynx doesn't work on mobile. Unless you happen to be running Sailfish OS, which does offer access to a terminal from the handset.