Massive List of Privacy-Focused Alternatives

4 Comments

1. I already ranted about Gab and Parler being fake “free speech” platforms in the comments before, so I’ll ignore them for this comment.
   Minds too, but at least they admit they censor from day 1.

   But I’m seeing a few more fake “decentralized” and fake “privacy” platforms on this list that definitely needs some caution (from own experience that is).

   To start off, DuckDuckGo was caught on multiple occasions for not being privacy focused after all.
   Obviously it has more privacy than Google, but it still uses Bing for the results, it does cuck out at some aspects, and it seems to censor certain content too.
   https://dzone.com/articles/duckduckgo-has-a-privacy-problem

   On the browser side:
   Waterfox: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/waterfox_classic.html
   Brave: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html
   You can use the frontpage (https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/index.html) for a lot more software, both spyware and not spyware (and everything inbetween).
   Lists reasons why too.

   But Brave is especially fake privacy simply because it promotes itself as “privacy oriented” as its main selling point, while it’s clearly not.
   For in depth reference: http://ebin.city/~werwolf/posts/brave-is-shit/

   As for the messengers, don’t put your trust in Telegram and Signal.
   Telegram has these obvious red flags like requiring a phone number and having a closed source backend (both of which has proven again and again that it’s always to violate privacy).
   The link I posted under the browser section has a Telegram article included.
   As for Signal, not saying it’s fake privacy per se, but considering they’ve recently committed an entire year of work on the server side code to Github (meaning that it has effectively been closed source for a year) does seem pretty questionable.
   https://linuxreviews.org/Signal_Just_Made_One_Years_Worth_Of_Server-Side_Source_Code_Available_In_One_Huge_Dump

   Odysee, Rumble, and Bitchute all censor.
   On top of that, Odysee is not a decentralized platform.
   They recently took down an entire channel for a few days from a fellow citizen because 1 snowflake flagged 2 of their videos as “sexual content”, which is really just a video game.
   The take down affected both Odysee and LBRY by the way.
   On top of that, they have a DMCA system in place, which is on their own Github page.
   It even shows how they even take down videos about hydroxycholokin or vaccines just because somebody claims to have the original video hosted on their blog (which they then take down after the fact), or because it includes a few seconds of music in it.
   Sorry, but attaching a blockchain in the backend and lying about not having centralized control over content doesn’t make a video platform decentralized.

   On the OS side, I will only say that LineageOS while not being bad per se, it was never made to be privacy focused.
   It’s only privacy focused for not having any Google on board, but you can achieve the same effect by just installing vanilla Android AOSP.
   LineageOS is more about the tweaks.

   I’ll leave it at that, because the rest is either confirmed as indeed privacy focused and/or not marketing themselves as whatever they’re not, or simply because I’ve never heard of them before and never used them, therefore I can’t rate those.

   • Thanks for the great info. I will dig into some of these links. I agree about a few that I am knowledgable about (such as DuckDuckGo), but they are still marginally better than Google-direct. Even then, I’ve been preferring ones like SwissCows and Qwant as of late, but I’m not sure how privacy-centric they are, either. It’s a massive blackhole. And if the feds want you, they’ll find a way to get you. But I still prefer using platforms that are at least somewhat in our interest, rather than vocally and obviously opposed (Google, Bing, Twitter, etc).

     • I can recommend you to look into Searx.
       It’s open source, you can self host an instance, or you can even host it on your own PC so only you use it (and therefore, all the logs and everything remains on your local machine).

       • Thank you. I will do so!