Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Note: This setup is both for my android and pc Edit: For those recommending paid services and selfhosting, I don't have the money nor resources for either. Also it seams some people are confusing my android setup with my PC setup so I'll write it down. Android: Brave(movies) + Ironfox, Search: Brave + DDG, VPN: Proton ( not always on), GPay = Cash, Auth= Aegis Auth, Pass: KeepassDX, PC: Firefox= Librewolf, VPN = No VPN (VERY slow internet), Search: Searxng + DDG, Pass: KeepassXC,
Arch BTW.... π
I use LibreOffice BTW
It is getting to that point tbh. If you work with people who have to use office suites often, there is a growing presence of the LibreOffice guy.
Try Aves Library, from fdroid, it's really nice and has a metadata viewer built in
My recommendations:
Organic Maps -> CoMaps (they got forked because of some bad decisions.)
Brave -> Helium (has full uBlock Origin and Ungoogled Chromium patches, and no crypto bloat)
LibreTube -> PipePipe (has some nice features like live chat, and less buggy in my experience)
LibreOffice -> OnlyOffice (has better Microsoft Office compatibility, and easier to use in my experience)
Disable your third-party DNS, that only works to make you more identifiable as you're already using a VPN. You can also use Syncthing to sync your password vault etc. between your devices. I'd also recommend using Posteo instead of Tuta because it is cheaper and its privacy policy is kinda better.
Brave -> Helium (has full uBlock Origin and Ungoogled Chromium patches, and no crypto bloat)
Does it have a way to sync between devices? This is one of the things Brave does fairly well that the recommended alternatives tend to lack.
Brave nor duck duck go can be trusted.
Brave has been known to inject their own referral links in people urls.
Duck duck go serves bing results and has to give Microsoft special acces to do so.
The actual alternatives are:
Firefox based browsers (waterfox, librefox)
Self hosted searxng for search-engine. This one will get results from all possible configurable engine and allow zero trackers.
Notable mention: self hosting isnβt for everyone, startpage.net is to google what ddg is to bing, but it hasnβt had any scandals proving that they give special acces to google yet. Still self hosting is not that hard with docker, i do recommend a local searxng.
open source software β privacy
though it is preferable. 3rd party verification of closed source can be accepted in some cases.
Iβve been using Vivaldi for browsing on desktop and mobile. Seems pretty nice. Any concerns people have with them as an app or org? Iβm staying away from Brave, the consensus seems to lean toward bad acting org and bloated app.
Since I recently setup a yunohost server, I use Nextcloud instead of google Drive pr Filen, Vaultwarden/Bitwarden for passwords, and searxng as a search engine; all self-hosted. My internet service provider makes self-hosting for emails complicated, if not impossible, so for that I currently use Disroot (which offers other services as well btw, like git and xmpp, good to check out).
For youtube, on my phone it's mostly through Newpipe, but I also use peertube for the content that exists there. Otherwise, I just access youtubw through the web... Which leads me to browsers. I avoid chromium-based ones, but I also disapprove of Firefox's turn towards AI, so I use waterfox on desktop and fennec on mobile.
As for Arch Linux... I was with you a few days ago, but I just switched to Artix. I'm not a huge fan of Systemd, and Dinit makes it boot a bit faster.
For DNS I use Pi-hole with Unbound which is used to contact the DNS root servers directly and recursively find IP-addresses. The first lookup becomes a little bit slower than through say Google but the IP is then cached locally and then it actually becomes faster. This is also more private since it doesn't require a third-party DNS resolver.
I know the focus here is privacy, but how is Arch Linux compared to Bazzite or Cachy OS in terms of gaming?
Good choices. Congrats
This was fun:
I am still using Samsung's own gallery and contacts app, but their network connection and internal trackers are blocked and they don't show up on packet inspections.
Also, "Plex -> NewPipe" is not true. It's "YouTube/Bandcamp -> NewPipe" and "any streaming service -> torrenting + sshfs + mpv into the torrenting server" in my case.
I don't trust any listical with brave browser in it claiming it's for privacy.