I don’t have anything to hide, but I don’t have anything to show you either
Online services, including free of charge software that you use on a daily basis retain the rights to scan, analyze, and depict your profile for “research and performance improvement purposes”. At the end of the day, it will be transfered to the highest bidder.
Still, there are alternatives to regain sovereignty over what happens on your device once you’ re online. For instance, a project called “Cutting Google out of your life” provides a solid list of links including search engines, applications, and even OSes to keep that data yours if you want to.
Below is an excerpt of what is proposed.
Browser extensions
These extensions can help prevent connections to Google domains and also improve your privacy/security online.
- uBlock Origin
- Privacy Badger
- Decentraleyes
- HTTPS Everywhere
- Cookie AutoDelete
- DDG Privacy Essentials
- I don’t care about cookies
- minerBlock
- Terms of Service; Didn’t Read
- uMatrix
- TrackMeNot
- AdNauseam
- An expanded list from u/R0B0LUT10N:
Web browsers
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- DuckDuckGo – 5-eyes – One of the best privacy-focused search engines. Domain is hosted in USA which could potentially be problematic for some.
- searx.me – Open-source (thanks for clarification u/Sheezdudeln) privacy search engine. Domain hosted in Germany.
- MetaGer – 14-eyes – MetaGer is the search engine project from the registered nonprofit organization SUMA E.V. in Germany.
- Qwant – 9-eyes – Major improvements since 2018’s guide.
- Swisscows – A Swiss search engine that offers a unique search experience for the web, images, videos, music, and more. They are currently funding a mail service. Read through their datacenter about page, it’s really interesting.
- Mojeek – 5-eyes – Unlike other privacy search engines which act as a “middle man” between you and Google/Bing/Yahoo, Mojeek has their own crawler and index. The results aren’t as complete as some of the others, but it is still impressive and they are actively building their index to include more results with better accuracy.
- Ekoru – Privacy focused search engine that also aims to clean up the oceans.
- Cyberd – Decentralized Google. A web 3 alternative for the Google search engine. In Beta testing mode. Uses IPFS and Tendermint consensus for security and economic incentives. Please see their ELI-5 FAQ for more info.
- Toki – Decentralized search engine. It is “designed to be anonymous, private and censorship-resistant.” (Parent company is Swiss, which is outside of 5/9/14 Eyes, however in testing I connected to a few USA and Canadian servers).
- YouTube
- PeerTube – Decentralized video hosting network. Still quite small, but is growing and has a dedicated community.
- BitChute – Also P2P, but not decentralized. Due to it being proprietary, if BitChute goes down then the whole thing goes down (unlike PeerTube).
- DTube – Looks very similar to YouTube. Advertised as “first crypt-decentralized video-platform”. Built on Steemit and IPFS.
- Bit.tube – Appears to be a crypto-powered decentralized video sharing service.
- Invidious – An open-source front-end alternative to YouTube. Seems to work pretty well from my experience so far, and it hasn’t triggered anything on my adblocker/privacy extensions. Also offers downloads in many formats for videos (including .vtt subtitles).
- Hooktube – A slightly better way to use actual YouTube.
- LBRY – A decentralized platform for distributing and supporting creators’s work.
- US.TV – PeerTube instance hosted by Epik.com.