I’m excited to join this community after lurking for a while. As someone who’s been slowly transitioning to a more privacy-focused lifestyle, I wanted to share a few tools that have been game-changers for me—and maybe get your recommendations too!
My Starter Kit:
Signal - Switched from WhatsApp, and never looked back. Love the disappearing messages feature!
Proton Mail - Finally ditched Gmail for sensitive emails. Bonus: The UI feels so clean.
Bitwarden - Migrated from LastPass last year. Self-hosting options? Still researching… any tips?
LibreWolf - My new favorite browser for when I need extra tracking protection.
Question for the group:
What’s ONE tool you wish you’d discovered earlier in your privacy journey? I’m especially curious about lesser-known gems.
For me, Mullvad’s VPN and browser was extremely helpful in addition to Tor, the absolute gold standard for privacy and anonymity.
There are also many tools/services such as full-disk encryption, email forwarding, password managers that may enhance your privacy and security in various aspects. In case you haven’t, go through the privacyguide’s recommendations and you might find something you didn’t even expect!
The one tool that I wish I found earlier (or really the one tool I wish existed earlier) is ente. When they started in 2020 it was a brand new company and you couldn’t really tell if they will gain enough traction and build up enough trust to make it as a private google photos alternative. Now 5 years later it’s one of the applications I don’t wanna miss ever again.
For me the 1 tool that I’m kicking myself for not discovering earlier is email aliasing. Nowadays theres simplelogin, addy.io, duck.com, firefox relay etc etc plenty of choices. Been using a pw manager since 2011 something but just discovered and started using email alias since last year. Wished i did it sooner.
And to add to that, email alias with custom domain. Domain aren’t that expensive just $10-15 per year for the tremendous benefit it gave me, being fully portable and fully independent of mail provider. Technically I’m less anon and less private with a custom domain since its only me alone using the domain and got to do kyc when registering it but for my threat model, it works great.
I have both Gmail and Proton accounts. I keep using Gmail because it is the one “modern” web app which can be operated 100% from the keyboard, no exceptions. Proton can’t. I also disagree that Proton is visually “cleaner”; in fact I think there’s animation on the landing page, absolute no-no for me.