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.
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