If you are considering to re-evaluate your privacy, find some motivation to migrate to safer services, find suggestions and ideas, or convince somebody to be more aware, then you have found the right place.
In case social media, LLMs and braindead content consuming, fried your brain and attention span, you can use TL;DR button in the Navigation bar at the top.
Frankly speaking, if a person doesn't care about their privacy, it's their choice, so we and you must not push or force a person to get out of the privacy nightmare. There is no point in arguing or imposing on changing their comfort life-style of a data giveaway.
Still, we think that everybody must know why their privacy matters and why it's important to consider privacy-focused alternatives.
[But I have nothing to hide!] That's a permanent statement of any ignorant person. Strangely, the same person has locks on the doors, has passwords for all accounts, they keep their sensitive information "secure", which means that they have at least something to hide, though they use services and software that is literally spying on them. The most interesting part is that it is considered that the sensitive data is always secure and protected, but in reality most of this information is already stored on various servers of a different companies, shared and sold.
[Surveillance] Imagine that each of your choice in life, each thought and every footstep would be written down, analyzed and then used against you? You don't really need to imagine that because it's already happening, while you doomscrool, interact with any website, do online shopping and do pretty much anything online.
[LLMs] This so-called "AI" has ruined the whole internet only within a year. Any artist that shared their art, anyone who shared their photos online, any programmers that decided to go open-source, anyone who posted some information online - all of their work and thoughts are already dumped into complex text-guesser machines that will twist and then spit out the mix of the disinformation. We think it is kinda disgusting that some model could potentially produce the image of a somebody with it's signature piss-filter becuase it was trained to use these images. Nothing even close could exist in a private environment. Never.
In case you want more control over your privacy and be assured that everything stays secure, we gathered a list of "friends & foes".
The best way to verify if the app is valuing your privacy is to check if the project is open-source. When the code is publicly available, mature programmers around the world will check the code from time to time, and if developers of the app will decide to switch to the dark side, it will be publicly known, even before the official announcment. Moreover, most of the open-source projects are made with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) in mind, which has unspoken rule of privacy focus.
End-to-End-Encryption is one of the best inventions of modern apps, that allow both clients to be the only ones that see the the information in plaintext. Developers, servers, third parties and anyone else will see only encrypted gibberish and never will be able to get the data you've shared.
First step after creating an account in any app is not to set profile picture - it is going to your settings and verifying that you opt-out anything that is related to personalization and data harvesting. There is no need for company to know what do you like, what are your interests, where do you live and how often do you use their app. Yes, this is used for algorithms that will show you relevant content, but most of the time all of the data will be analyzed, sold and dumped into text-processing neural networks.
Even when the era of the internet slowly began to rise, it was not safe to share your personal info. As of now, with era of bots, which are scraping all over the internet, and large companies actively dumping all user data to their slop machines, it is really dangerous to leave your real info in the internet. Never use your real identity - irl nicknames, name/surename, addresses, locations, photos, or any other piece of information, unless you want to your face being spit out by image-gen models and your data being processed by some shady companies.
The initial idea of cookies was really great - it allows secure storage of small pieces of information about the user account that could be used for a website functionality. It was used that way until it was discovered, that cookies could be also passed to third parties with exchange for money. Always decline/reject/withdraw your consent for all cookies. With that, the only cookies that will be used are 'good' cookies for website functionality.
So called AI is not your friend. It will never be. Do not be fooled - it is just complex mathematical algorithm that is guessing the right words based on context. It doesn't understand you at all, it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence.
You can skip every advice that we shared with you and never use them, but then the real evil for you is only yourself. Considering that you know all bad things that are happening, you prefer to ignore them and not to do anything.
Actually, yes! There are plenty of options to pick from. Mainly, when looking for alternatives, there are 2 ways of getting the app - either offered & hosted by a third party or self-host on your network. We tried to gather alts for both cases and for almost all popular software.
While our suggestion list has variety of alternative software and services, there are crucial services missing, like Youtube, Instagram and similar. For now there are no popular alts for them, due to the monopoly. If you know a good alternative for any mentioned or missing software and/or service, let us know!