DEV Community

Cover image for My Favorite Privacy Tools in 2020: Be Safer on the Internet!

My Favorite Privacy Tools in 2020: Be Safer on the Internet!

Zaiste on August 16, 2020

This is a list of tools I use to increase my privacy on the Internet. I'm not a security expert. My goal is to have a good enough protection. Feel ...
Collapse
 
theshikharmalik profile image
Shikhar Malik

I would also recommend Brave browser, it feels faster and lighter than firefox and chrome while being heavily privacy focused with built-in features like brave shield which blocks ads and trackers on websites.

Collapse
 
rsa profile image
Ranieri Althoff

Brave replaces ads with their own, which not only is shady, it's also unethical.

Collapse
 
nkootstra profile image
Niels Kootstra

I don't think NordVPN should be on this list. Anything they do seems sketchy including the way they handled the hack.

Collapse
 
zaiste profile image
Zaiste

Why do they seem sketchy to you?

Collapse
 
nkootstra profile image
Niels Kootstra

I could start with the always 70% off promo.

Thread Thread
 
matthieu_rolland profile image
Matthieu Rolland

You don't like the work of their marketing team, but what is sketchy about their product?

Thread Thread
 
nkootstra profile image
Niels Kootstra

First of all when you always have 70% off it's false advertisement. They also lied in the first place about the hack. It's a marketing company with a VPN as it's side project.

Thread Thread
 
matthieu_rolland profile image
Matthieu Rolland

The marketing don't say much about the quality of the product, also most serious companies will wait until their security vulnerability is fixed and non existent on any of their servers until disclosing it to the world, it often takes a proper security testing of the system, which takes time. Sounds like a good thing to do.

Thread Thread
 
nkootstra profile image
Niels Kootstra

I have no idea why you are trying to defend NordVPN? Please explain yourself. They mislead the consumer and correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's against the law in a lot of countries.

Collapse
 
glennmen profile image
Glenn Carremans

For browser I would also suggest Brave, it has by default build-in tracking and ad blocking and the engine is build with Rust which is much faster than a javascript based extension.

For web analytics I would add Matomo Analytics, they have a free self hosted option. It has features like IP anonymization , respects Do Not Track, Opt Out function, disable cookies, ...

Collapse
 
rsa profile image
Ranieri Althoff

Please reconsider Brave. It is very far from privacy-focused, it does a lot of shady business with your pages such as replacing ads with their own and adding affiliate links without consent.

Collapse
 
glennmen profile image
Glenn Carremans

They don't replace ads on pages, I have been using Brave for over a year and never seen any ad on a webpage. Brave ads or shown as a browser notification and you can in your settings set how many ads max per hour you would like to see.
If so can you show any proof?

Thread Thread
 
rsa profile image
Ranieri Althoff

That definitely was the plan last year, I don't know where it stands today.

Collapse
 
hxii profile image
Paul (hxii) Glushak

To anyone recommending Brave - I would reconsider if I were you.
theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/bra...

Collapse
 
thejuju profile image
Julien Gabriel

Can I suggest protonmail.com as private email service and also protonvpn ?

Collapse
 
andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

Protonmail is cool I remember when it was still just a Beta and I managed to get an invite.

Collapse
 
gabeguz profile image
Gabriel Guzman
Collapse
 
madc profile image
Matthias Esterl • Edited

Has anybody tried ProtonVPN? I haven't used it myself yet but it sounds like a good option. Also not too expensive IMHO and swiss-based.

Collapse
 
rzdev97 profile image
Rene Zorzi

I use protonVPN free option since I do not need heavy internationalization use (just for safety in certain cases), I have nothing against the product. I noticed that on Linux there is no installer tool, but rather a instruction docs on web to follow to install the application and using it via shell (linux terminal). If you love quick installers, you might stay on windows or macOS to use it. Also, there are two types of connections ( udp and tcp). Udp does not have congestion control (meaning it does not have a max size of data sent), tcp has it (meaning sometimes it may be slower). Get used to the terminal I guess if you linux

Collapse
 
plaoo profile image
Paolo Monni • Edited

posteo.de is a valid alternative for email

Collapse
 
leomjaques profile image
leo 👨🏻‍💻

Thanks, man! I was only using Brave but I might as well try a bit the dev Firefox. Let's see how it compared to it :)