PARENT RESOURCES
Mobile Applications
Mobile browser that blocks trackers and ads by default
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Useful alternative to Safari and the stock Android browsers. Unable to add extensions on iOS
Android systemwide ad blocker
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According to the official website, AdGuard is not on the Google Play Store. Do not trust the version of the app that has been uploaded to the Google Play Store
Family-focused GPS tracker app
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Many parents use this app to monitor their kids' driving speed when they first get a vehicle. That feature, among others are behind a $10 a month subscription. The Life360 company also collects and shares all of your driving and location data with it's "partners" for advertising purposes.
Computer Applications
A reliable, open-source, privacy respecting browser.
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Tracking from websites that you visit can be reduced with browser extensions.
Google Chromium based browser with Google tracking stripped from the source
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To install web extensions, you have to manually install an extension that lets you install other extensions from the web store. Confusing innit.
Browser Extensions
uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin is an advert and tracker blocker that is easy on your memory yet outperforms most other ad blockers.
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There are other ad blockers on browser stores, one in particular has the very similar name of just "uBlock". This extension is not the same as uBlock Origin. The project is owned by the makers of Adblock, a company that is known to let ads and trackers through if clients pay them.
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HTTPS Everywhere
HTTPS Everywhere enables HTTPS encryption automatically on websites that support it.
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HTTPS encrypts your traffic so that malicious parties cannot snoop on sensitive data you are trying to send to websites. This extension only works if the websites you're trying to access support HTTPS in the first place. Websites that have HTTPS but isn't enabled by default are what this extension intends to fix.
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Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger intelligently learns to block invisible trackers in your browser.
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The extension sends a "Do Not Track" signal to any trackers that it detects, and if the tracker does not comply, the extension learns to block the tracker.
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Another project, called Privacy Possum, was created by one of the developers of Privacy Badger that thought its benefits were too limited. This extension works more substantially, but makes some websites less usable.
Decentraleyes
Decentraleyes stops requests to popular, centralized content delivery networks (CDNs) from companies like Google, Cloudflare, and Yandex
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Web developers have started to rely more heavily on CDNs to deliver stylesheets, libraries, and templates for their websites instead of having these served by their own website. It is a convenience for developers, but a privacy concern for the consumer. Decentraleyes intercepts the requests to these centralized CDNs and returns the request with files that it has saved locally, taking out the middleman AND making web speeds faster.
ClearURLs
ClearURLs removes tracking elements from your website urls.
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These tracking markers are what give Amazon links those notoriously long URLs. For example:
keywords=tea&pd_rd_i=exampleProduct&pd_rd_r=8d39e4cd-1e4f-43db-b6e7-72e969a84aa5&pd_rd_w=1pcKM&pd_rd_wg=hYrNl
All of this junk is useless to you, the consumer, but lets the company track your movements around the internet by showing what website the link came from, who's account the link was made from, affiliate referral codes, etc.
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Temporary Container
Temporary Containers is a Firefox extension that creates blank slate sessions of your browser.
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The containers it creates confine the data of a website you are visiting to that one container, and that one alone. The containers cannot access the cookies, cache, or other local data and identifiers stored on your browser. As soon as the container is closed, all data relating to that session is deleted.
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Facebook Container
Facebook Container tries to limit the widespread tracking by Facebook Inc.
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This extension is very similar to Temporary Containers, but it is dedicated to Facebook and therefore has a more comprehensive approach to containing trackers. It's also automatic!
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Useful Websites
Privacy conscious search engine. Uses its own indexer.
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Prefix 'duckduckgo' with 'start.' to use their advertisement free page. start.duckduckgo.com
Privacy conscious search engine. Uses search results from various other search engines (Google, Bing, YouTube, etc.) without giving those companies any unique, identifying data.
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Searx is a self hosted project, there is no main instance. Searx.ninja is just one of the highly rated instances on the officially maintained public instance list on searx.space
Collection of online privacy resources and one of the main sources for the information on this page.
Crowdsourced software recommendations. Useful for finding open source alternatives to closed source, untrustworthy software.
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On a page for a piece of software, in the header
Alternatives to ___ for all platforms with any license
Clicking on 'any license' will give you the option to see only open source alternatives.
Layman summaries of various websites' terms of services.
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Their browser extension can let you know what the terms of a website are when you are signing up for a service. Get it here:
Directory of links and instructions on how to delete internet accounts, as well as ratings showing if your data is actually being deleted or not.
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Their Chrome extension gives you a visual indication on wether the website you are signing up for makes it easy and effective to delete your account.
Check if your information has been compromised in a data breach
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Inputing your email into this website is not logged. All you are accessing is a database of email/usernames with a list of breaches that they appear on, not the actual information exposed in the breach.
A secure password manager that helps you keep track of your logins across the web.
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Using a password manager allows you to use secure passwords on sites around the web without the security risk of using the same password on every website.
This is a collection of lists of malicious domains you can set your computer to block
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These lists take a bit of computer knowledge to be able to take advantage of. Many of these lists are built into uBlock Origin (listed in the extensions section) and others can be imported into that extension as well. However, they are made to be used in the "hosts" system file that is found in your operating system's system directories. Here is a tutorial on how to find and edit the hosts file on Windows 10.