My Process in privacy(open for suggestions)
(midwest.social)
PrivacyNote: This setup is both for my android and pc Edit: For those recommending paid services and selfhosting, I don't have the money nor resources for either. Also it seams some people are confusing my android setup with my PC setup so I'll write it down. Android: Brave(movies) + Ironfox, Search: Brave + DDG, VPN: Proton ( not always on), GPay = Cash, Auth= Aegis Auth, Pass: KeepassDX, PC: Firefox= Librewolf, VPN = No VPN (VERY slow internet), Search: Searxng + DDG, Pass: KeepassXC,
Don’t use brave. Brave is a cult at this point.
Jumping on the bandwagon here.
Would switch Organic Maps to its fork CoMaps. (See: this open letter)
And I would never recommend Brave as the first choice; it's run by a shady corporation and reinforces Chromium's hegemony.
I think it'd also be reasonable to add ProtonMail to email and Mullvad to VPN since you can have multiple.
How about OsmAnd? Is that still a decent project without world domination plans? I actually have CoMaps as well, but have sort of stuck to using OsmAnd.
Yeah, OsmAnd is really good; it's what I use as my daily driver. CoMaps/Organic to me feel too limited, but some people may like that.
(I use Vespucci for editing on Android.)
Except OsmAnd hiding functionality behind a cloud with paywall.
Try the OsmAnd open-source version, which has all the OsmAnd+ features unlocked for free: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.osmand.plus/
Its installed in my android head unit in my car, and it just works, and there's a lot (and I mean a lot) of stuff it can do, so I really enjoy it as my daily driver (ha! Get it?) in my car.
I think OsmAnd is great, but I personally prefer the cleaner feel of CoMaps. Just preference.
Something I'd suggest if OsmAnd feels too cluttered for you is to change the settings; OsmAnd lets you change a lot, but one of the ones I do is to change "Map Style" to Osm-Carto.
Carto, for context, is the vector map that you'd find by going to the OSM website. Much cleaner color scheme, imo.
Tried it out, but since I was so used to the standard OsmAnd style it just felt wrong some way.
It really like how OsmAnd allows for so much customization e.g. in map styles
I don't see much love for Futo apps in here or Reddit (new here from Reddit). Why is that?
They are source available instead of FOSS which puts a bad taste in many of the FOSS advocates on here. I believe they also have backing from Curtis Yarvin. I hate that Grayjay is one of the only consistently working youtube front ends.
Here's what I read that laid out this issues.
https://drewdevault.com/2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html
Why would I trust a commercial venture
At least with hosting or VPN services there's the excuse of you have to pay for a finite resource that costs money.
Oh. I had no idea it was a commercial venture. I thought it was just another FOSS team. Just found the keyboard the other day and it's been far better than Fossify.
Try heliBoard, making sure to add swipe library. Futo for voice transcription doesn't have a match yet.
Futa apps
You're right, "Futo" kind of sounds like that slur. What a good joke.
Ty, comedy is my passion.
Oh, that's so cool to hear, I love comedians. Tell me a similar joke about a dance-tracking app called "Jigger." I'm sure you'll come up with something that is funny and consistent with the joke above.
TIL a racial slur with over a hundred years of use to demean and insult billions of people is the same as the word used to describe big titty dragons having penetrative sex with automobiles.
Please post the updated slurs.txt so I can call you them.
Oh, so slurs aren't funny if you have empathy for the people whose suffering they reference? Interesting, I wonder what that says about your perception of trans women. I have a hard time believing you give a shit about African Americans or any African diaspora at all either, you just know that there'd be more consequences for making fun of that slur and its violent history.
Good joke, chud. Now go eat shit somewhere else.
Hey since you know a lot about this stuff, can you settle the balls/no balls debate?
Try Aves Library, from fdroid, it's really nice and has a metadata viewer built in
My one complaint with Aves is how mind-bogglingly terrible its library management is. It uses a blacklist approach with no whitelist (most other galleries use a whitelist with blacklists on top to narrow down where they search) so it scans your entire device by default, and unlike every other implementation I've ever seen, blacklisting a folder isn't recursive.
That means if you use a different app for video and want to exclude your Movies folder in Aves, you need to manually add Movies as well as every single folder inside of it, plus their subfolders etc, to the list of hidden directories. It also means if you ever add or rename a folder anywhere on your device and it contains media files, it'll appear in Aves regardless of your previous settings.
And you can't pick exclusions to add to this blacklist using a file browser interface. No, that would be too easy. You need to go to the Aves tab that lists every single folder with media on your entire device (displayed/sorted by folder name without their path, naturally, so two folders in the same directory might be dozens of entries apart) and manually find all the folders you want to exclude. The blacklist is also displayed in settings showing only the folder names without the path, so good luck checking if that img folder in JoiPlay is blocked when there are twenty other identical entries labeled 'img'!
I know this sounds minor (and it is), but it's such a headache dealing with what should be a basic feature of any gallery app. Fossify Gallery may be slower at detecting new media, but at least using it on my gaming tablet doesn't make me homicidal.
dont use brave
Thoughts on Vivaldi?
Still a proprietary black box you shouldn't trust and chromium based so you reinforce the chromium monopoly
Agreed, but occasionally I have to use a site that doesn't work properly on Firefox-based browsers. I mostly use Cromite to deal with that, but want a backup in case Cromite dies like its predecessor Bromite did.
Firefox is my daily drive and I use Ungoogled Chromium for the rare times Firefox doesn't work
If Firefox doesn't work I just click away
Ty - I'll give UC a try.
Can you tell me why? I found out ddg was just repackage bing results so I've been trying brave for now.
Here's a good summary of some of the shady practices that they've done by way of @cannedtuna@lemmy.world. It's a summary of this article: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as "blatantly illegal".
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- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google's crawler.
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2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to "Forget the Fox". When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
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- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
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- Brendan Eich's feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be "independent".
2026 - "pay $60 to REMOVE our bloat features"
Oh? I haven't used their browser since ~2018, good to know that I continue to have made the right decision. I now use librewolf on my desktop and IronFox on my phone
It includes a lot of crypto bullshit, and I believe the founder is a right wing weirdo, but don’t quote me on that.
To also point out the good stuff: their browser has some pretty good anti-fingerprinting and privacy measures build in.
2026 - "pay $60 to REMOVE our bloat features"
https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
I use LibreOffice BTW
It is getting to that point tbh. If you work with people who have to use office suites often, there is a growing presence of the LibreOffice guy.
Arch BTW.... 😎
I don't trust any listical with brave browser in it claiming it's for privacy.
I know the focus here is privacy, but how is Arch Linux compared to Bazzite or Cachy OS in terms of gaming?
Don’t know about Bazzite but performance wise, there isn’t a huge difference between Arch and Cachy.
If I recall, CachyOS comes preconfigured with a few things, including Steam. Most of it is quite simple to setup on Arch. You can also use Cachy’s kernel in Arch to test for any performance gains if you want to.
I would say if you already have CachyOS installed, there’s no point replacing it with Arch. CachyOS is Arch underneath anyway.
Exactly
Close to what I normally use. I prefer CoMaps instead of Organic, Mullvad VPN instead of Proton & Artix instead of Arch.
Why Artix instead of the real Arch btw?
Artix doesn't use systemd, iirc
My recommendations:
Organic Maps -> CoMaps (they got forked because of some bad decisions.)
Brave -> Helium (has full uBlock Origin and Ungoogled Chromium patches, and no crypto bloat)
LibreTube -> PipePipe (has some nice features like live chat, and less buggy in my experience)
LibreOffice -> OnlyOffice (has better Microsoft Office compatibility, and easier to use in my experience)
Disable your third-party DNS, that only works to make you more identifiable as you're already using a VPN. You can also use Syncthing to sync your password vault etc. between your devices. I'd also recommend using Posteo instead of Tuta because it is cheaper and its privacy policy is kinda better.
Onlyoffice is a little bit shady tho, it might be worth considering staying with libreoffice. But the eu wanted to switch away from ms office and made their own fork of onlyoffice, because of said shadyness, so that might also be worth looking at.
Brave -> Helium (has full uBlock Origin and Ungoogled Chromium patches, and no crypto bloat)
Does it have a way to sync between devices? This is one of the things Brave does fairly well that the recommended alternatives tend to lack.
Good choices. Congrats
open source software ≠ privacy
though it is preferable. 3rd party verification of closed source can be accepted in some cases.
Brave nor duck duck go can be trusted.
Brave has been known to inject their own referral links in people urls.
Duck duck go serves bing results and has to give Microsoft special acces to do so.
The actual alternatives are:
Firefox based browsers (waterfox, librefox)
Self hosted searxng for search-engine. This one will get results from all possible configurable engine and allow zero trackers.
Notable mention: self hosting isn’t for everyone, startpage.net is to google what ddg is to bing, but it hasn’t had any scandals proving that they give special acces to google yet. Still self hosting is not that hard with docker, i do recommend a local searxng.
I’ve been using Vivaldi for browsing on desktop and mobile. Seems pretty nice. Any concerns people have with them as an app or org? I’m staying away from Brave, the consensus seems to lean toward bad acting org and bloated app.
Since I recently setup a yunohost server, I use Nextcloud instead of google Drive pr Filen, Vaultwarden/Bitwarden for passwords, and searxng as a search engine; all self-hosted. My internet service provider makes self-hosting for emails complicated, if not impossible, so for that I currently use Disroot (which offers other services as well btw, like git and xmpp, good to check out).
For youtube, on my phone it's mostly through Newpipe, but I also use peertube for the content that exists there. Otherwise, I just access youtubw through the web... Which leads me to browsers. I avoid chromium-based ones, but I also disapprove of Firefox's turn towards AI, so I use waterfox on desktop and fennec on mobile.
As for Arch Linux... I was with you a few days ago, but I just switched to Artix. I'm not a huge fan of Systemd, and Dinit makes it boot a bit faster.
For DNS I use Pi-hole with Unbound which is used to contact the DNS root servers directly and recursively find IP-addresses. The first lookup becomes a little bit slower than through say Google but the IP is then cached locally and then it actually becomes faster. This is also more private since it doesn't require a third-party DNS resolver.
This was fun:
I am still using Samsung's own gallery and contacts app, but their network connection and internal trackers are blocked and they don't show up on packet inspections.
Also, "Plex -> NewPipe" is not true. It's "YouTube/Bandcamp -> NewPipe" and "any streaming service -> torrenting + sshfs + mpv into the torrenting server" in my case.
If you press on them you could choose the service, for example instead of plex you could've chosen youtube, Netflix and others.
🍳on my face
I would go with SimpleX instead of Signal since it is very secure and you can self-host the server. There are no user IDs. Here is the official website: https://simplex.chat/
For normal usage and actually using a messaging app for what it's intended (contacting people in your life), it's far too obscure and non-streamlined tbh. Signal is more than good enough for the thread model of chatting with friends and family, and ppl you got to know online
Harder to get people to switch the more obscure the app is. Other than that, I agree.
the onboarding for family & friends on simplex is too much - Ive had much better luck with deltachat
That is true. I have only managed to convince my wife to use it but I had to set it up for her. Now we can chat about what to eat for dinner securely though 😄
What privacy concerns are there with using your ISP DNS? (honest question, not judging)
ISPs not only have a monopoly on connectivity and bandwidth prices - which they severely abuse by the way, considering the actual operational costs - but they also have everything to gain on analyzing your traffic, DNS queries being one of them. They already have a bunch of personally identifiable information (PII) on you (full name, date of birth, banking information and, in some countries, even social security number). Linking that PII to your DNS requests (read: what websites you visit) and selling that to data brokers is a pretty low effort sweet deal. Long are the days gone when ISPs only provided Internet service.
Texts on the topic:
- https://mullvad.net/en/help/all-about-dns-servers-and-privacy
- https://labs.ripe.net/author/babak_farrokhi/is-your-isp-hijacking-your-dns-traffic/
- https://www.howtogeek.com/why-dns-betrays-your-privacy-and-how-dnscrypt-stops-it/
Videos on the topic:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAo61IaXun8
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2RjbvMES-0
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pURzvhYQ2FQ
In my country they implemented national wide surveillance in the network infrastructure and they keep track of everything Edit: that's why internet is very slow
Well ain't that some shit 🙁
Depends where you are, and what laws your ISP is required to follow with regards to blocking/tracking. Personally I like Quad9.
Your ISP can see what websites you visit. But even if you change DNS server it can still see that if you don't use either a VPN or DoH/DoT.
So it's a good idea to use DoH or DoT. It's an improvement but it's far from perfect because the DNS server you'll pick will see what site you visit, you have to trust them. And your ISP still has other ways to see which site you visit.
They can still see what sites you visit even with Secure DNS though. That only blocks your ISP from seeing what domain names you're connecting to, but they can still see the IP addresses. It's useless, unless you're using a VPN in which case it is worse for your privacy as it makes you more identifiable than just using your VPN's DNS.
Yes, that's why I ended with:
And your ISP still has other ways to see which site you visit.
Even with secure DNS they can still see the domain name with the SNI, which is probably more reliable than an IP address. Last I checked very few websites used ECH. I would still argue that it's better to have encrypted DNS requests than non-encrypted ones.
dns requests flowing through your ISP means they know where you (want to) go and 3rd parties can potentially determine identity based on certain aspects (date time of request, how many, etc) can matter to law enforcement, surveillance/state efforts, hackers and beyond) because ISP may not govern well or, hell, wven sell those requests or just 3rs party manages it without your knowledge etc )
it's better to have a known good dns provider that can offer a little trust but realistically nothing is 100%...
this is not good. stuff like google calendar and photos are cloud service, a local app isn't a replacement and there's so many good ones. brave stuff just injects their affiliates and ads and has paid models, plus is led by someone with very questionable views. arch linux as windows replacement is objectively a bad choice as first linux distro. keepass is great but again offline.
yeah, if you want privacy, de-cloud. even google photos is private if you never connect to the internet. we should recommend less bad alternatives with comparable features, talk about compromises and use cases, and generally avoid making such eye catchy "privacy packs" which don't work for most and are honestly a circle jerk for who already solved their privacy needs
also there's no private AI. your local model is built on stolen data, so if you care about our privacy and not just your own stop using ai crap or kindly fuck off back to your favorite techbro
Who hurt you? I mean.. all of your points are totally valid, and you seem to have profound IT knowledge. Great! But OP just wants to have his built evaluated, probably bc he wants to further improve... and you're non-chalantly bombing him with strong words and more negativity than all of my toxic exes combined. Jeez xD
- If you object then recommend something or help.
- I only use Brave for movies because its faster and my internet is slow.
- Its not my first time using Linux, I've tried Ubuntu, CachyOS, and Arch and with them KDE, Hyprland, Gnome and many others.
- That's what I'm trying to do, reduce cloud storage usage.
- I used this "eye catchy privacy packs" because its easy to make. (And its powered by ente)
- I know there is no private AI, I don't use them often but i try and use ones with good privacy policy and I don't have money to buy a powerful PC, hell even my phone is stronger
- Lastly If your this angry go and take a walk instead of crashing out at people and wasting their time. Edit: typo
Any chance you found a way to encrypt local app caches?
Self-hosting Immich as an alternative to Google Photos is amazing, I love it!
Check out ente as an alternative to Google Photos. I've been using them since 2023 when Google announced they own your photos and they were going to be ~~instead~~ ingested into AI.
Edit: typo. Looks great BTW. Good progress.
I'm not using ente because they have a cloud storage, the only safe storage is the one you have
How about Immich then?
Fair! I could be held hostage in that way, but as a paying user, I (so far) trust them to use my subscription fees to pay for servers. I really like that all the ML processing happens locally, and they have no insight into any of my photos. I did look into Immich, but at the time, self-hosting was not an option as I was living in a developing country.
Edit: I was mostly looking at how a gallery app (which is also the one I use) isn't a replacement for gPhotos.
Pretty solid. Too solid in fact. How long ago did you start the process?
What alternative did you find for gmap?
2-3 months ago. Gmap has a lot of alternatives
