One of the most precious things in this modern world is data, our own personal data.
With data, companies can persuade us to do, buy, like, and ...
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Excellent article David. I'm becoming ever more concerned about these issues as the years go by.
@ronsoak had recommended Brave to me a few months ago and it's all I use for browsing on all devices now. Along with DuckDuckGo, it's definitely a start.
Just need to wean myself off GMail next. Anyone got any suitable alternatives when managing multiple different email addresses and aliases from the one account?
Thanks, Alan! Glad you enjoyed it.
Would also love a recommendation for the Gmail alternative, I feel it's the hardest product to let go so far.
If you think Gmail is hard to give up, try finding an alternative for YouTube
Great post, but one note is that WhatsApp don't read your message contents as they use E2E encryption. They do utilise metadata, but that wouldn't tally with what's above.
However, the Facebook changing the backend to be unified between IG, FB messenger and WhatsApp worries me and I've been trying to get people to switch over to Signal. I'm having the same problem as you and have found that the market share of WhatsApp is too high to get much traction.
Thanks, Josh. As you say, that backend unification is worrisome. I'm pretty confident Whatsapp didn't read your messages before the Facebook acquisition, but now I'm sure it does.
I have tested it a couple of times; chatting with friends about random stuff, never speaking nor searching about it in any other way, and still receiving ads about that same random thing. There's no way they could have figured that out without reading my messages :( I did these tests with and without a native keyboard with the same result. I could be missing something...
Hmm, could be that they track behaviour before and after a conversation for both participants and then follow that on to whoever else they talk to. Eventually, someone follows up on something and it gets traced all the way back to you?
I'm less inclined to believe they read messages than I am to believe that the ML algorithms and data collection process is now good enough to make it seem that way. I actually think that the latter is more dangerous because it's less obvious how they do it and the potential for misuse is higher e.g. Cambridge Analytica.
Really interesting thought 🤔
I was just going to write this article, but you beat me to it. Good job! I would have also mentioned ProtonMail, NextCloud, Privacy.com and Temp Mail as well.
Great article David. You've made a good progress on protecting your info 😬.
This site can come very handy:
nomoregoogle.com
It lists good alternatives for the hard-to-replace products, Gmail and YouTube, and even for business tools such as Analytics and AdWords.
Thanks, Arturo! That's a nice resource.
I'm going to try their Gmail alternative, FastMail, and see how it goes ;)
Great post!
The list it’s very good, I wold like to share another service to privacy list!
10minutemail.com generates an email can be used for 10 minutes, it’s great for one-time email logins :)
Thanks LuisPa! I just used your recommendation and it worked like a charm; it should definitely be on the list ;)
Thank you, David, for so meaningful article!
Absolutely agree with you, important to know this info about privacy.
Thanks, Ivan!
I also created a suite of open source offline Android apps Simple Mobile Tools at simplemobiletools.com if you are interested ;)