I don’t have anything to hide, but I don’t have anything to show you either.
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In my free time, I like to keep an eye on the world of online privacy. The social dilemma describes my reasoning quite well. I’ve been migrating towards privacy-centric apps, and I’m happy with what I’ve found. I’m sharing the following list so you can see how easy it is to switch these days.
Table of Contents
Personal considerations
- I have a strong preference for open-source software (OSS). I prefer to see the code than to trust someone’s word.
- I prefer apps that have good support for Windows, Apple OSes and Linux.
- I prefer a service that clearly specifies how data is encrypted.
- Data migration is a big thing, so I’m going to grade it from 1 (horrible) to 5 (excellent).
The apps
| Popular app | Privacy-centric alternative | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Goodreads (Amazon) | BookWyrm (federated, OSS) or OpenLibrary (OSS) | Migration score: 3 (not all books from GoodReads existed, I had to add them manually) |
| Lastpass | Bitwarden (OSS) | Migration score: 5 |
| Evernote | Joplin (OSS) | Migration score: 5 |
| LinkedIn (Microsoft) | nothing | I keep an updated version of my resume on Google Drive |
| Whatsapp (Facebook/Meta), Telegram, etc. | Signal (OSS) | Quite a lot of people are on Signal these days |
| Mastodon (federated, OSS) | You can find me here | |
| Microsoft Office | OnlyOffice (OSS) | |
In the end, this migration was just too painful and I was missing features, so I went back to Apple Photos | ||
| Google Drive | Synology Drive (closed source) | Migration score: 5 |
Still no reasonable alternative
- Imdb (Amazon) -> Still looking for a replacement.
What do you use?
Do you have some better alternatives that you use? I’d enjoy hearing from you. My transition to privacy-centric required a decent amount of research and trying out options. I want to skip that, if possible.
References
- DeGoogle
- Privacytools
- Privacysec github repository