this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
7 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

38930 readers
584 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I created an infographic of privacy-forward alternatives to Google products...and would love your feedback.

Is it easy to use? Enough white space? Intuitive? Sharable? Is there anything I'm missing?

The infographic image in this post is NOT clickable. The link above will give you a downloadable PDF with working hyperlinks.

Re: the legend, "easy set-up/use" means either that this is a big part of the alternative product's branding, or I've used it myself and found it easy.

top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Now make a EU version.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Open source licensing, offline-only usability, and self-hostable are the only important criteria to me, and they are not listed here.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Y'all should probably stop mentioning proton

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As someone who wants to drop Proton VPN and has stopped using their mail in favor of mailbox.org, I think we should still mention them, just with an asterisk. People deserve to make their own choice about if they wish to support him or not. At least it's non-profit now.

I really wanna stop using the VPN and go to Mullvad (since they've proved they have no logs), but they don't offer port forwarding anymore, and the only other option is AirVPN, which had a server seizure in 2015 that they didn't want to disclose until like 2023... (gag order?)

I don't torrent often, but I do occasionally...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How is mailbox? I just recently got proton set up with my custom domain and I kind of like it to be honest and their app is nice too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I don't do anything fancy, just use the light version with the email I made, and use anonaddy to alias for free. I use Thunderbird as a client.

It works, although the web app is kinda slow. If you enable MFA Tokens, instead of the password you made, you now type a PIN + TOTP code to login, which is dumb (They might be changing it soon). I know some have pointed out a security issue about flags or smth, specifically about how people can spoof your email and send messages as you. This comment specifically shows what tests failed and passed.

It's cheap (Light plan is ~1€ per month) and allows easy one click enabling of PGP for webmail and encrypted sending (to mailbox.org users) but if you're a pro you can do expert/customizable settings for those instead.

I just wanted something that was relatively private and secure, and will work with Thunderbird.

Maybe consider Posteo too, which has another lengthy post of Privacy.guides forums about whether it's good or not.

Honestly, maybe I would move to Posteo due to the DMARC policy and MFA being iffy on Mailbox, but we'll see. I use aliases to avoid too much spam anyway.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

mullvad browser was discontinued but ironfox is an up to date fork

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Are you sure it was discontinued? Mullvad is not Mull.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Organic Maps and OpenStreetMap should be listed as map alternatives. Mullvad Leta is a recently popular private search engine.

Google isn't inherently bad; they are bad for privacy but good for security. For that reason, Chromium-based browsers such as Vanadium, Trivalent, or Brave Browser are still good alternatives to Google Chrome even though Chromium (which is the open source base for Chromium-based browsers) is developed by Google.

Also: the "T" in PeerTube should be capitalized.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thank you, thank you, thank you! If there was one browser from my list you'd replace with Vanadium, which would it be?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Epic, only because I've never heard of it so it probably isn't recommended often. I should note that Vanadium is only available on Android and is very difficult to install if you don't use GrapheneOS. Trivalent is only available for a small subset of Linux distros (and comes preinstalled on secureblue). Brave Browser is cross-platform and recommended by GrapheneOS as an alternative to Vanadium if you want specific features Vanadium lacks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Thanks! Oh yes, I knew that...I use GrapheneOS myself. I'll check these others out.