Privacy & anti data collection
October 03, 2022
Protecting sensitive and personal data is important. It's a way to protect yourself from attackers, Big Tech sales, or fraud. This can often be quite simple if you change certain everyday patterns and use alternatives, or adjust your settings.
Important: This page simply explains what I do to protect my data. It is not intended to promote any particular service, nor to denigrate others.
Services I replaced with others:
| Old service | New service |
| Google Search | Brave Search, sometimes Startpage or Qwant |
| Google Drive (Docs, Sheets, Slides, ...) | Collabora Online (in Nextcloud) |
| Any online storage service | Self-hosted Nextcloud |
| WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger | Threema, Signal |
| Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook | Self-hosted Domain with Mail service, Proton or Tutanota |
| Browser (Google Chrome, Edge) | Safari on iOS (with Firefox Klar extension), Firefox (combined with strong tracking protection and/or uBlock Origin), Brave |
| Google Maps (App/Web or embedded) | Apple Maps, Openstreetmap |
| Google Analytics (never used on my site!) | Matomo, Plausible, plenty other privacy-friendly services |
| Apple/Google Calendar | Tutanota Calendar, Proton Calendar |
| Google/Bing Translator | DeepL Translator |
Services I use to strengthen my privacy online
- Firefox Focus and Hyperweb filter lists as an extension to Safari browser
- Proton VPN to secure my connection
- Piped as a privacy-friendly YouTube client (no ads and trackers)
- Nitter as a privacy-friendly Twitter client (without having an account)
- Apollo App as a privacy-friendly Reddit client
In general: The web is always more privacy-friendly than an app. On the web, you can block trackers with appropriate extensions or reject them in the consent banner. This is not always possible in an app, where consent is often not asked for or is even implicitly generated.
I will post more parts of privacy and data protection advices in future.