Look at this thread to find some inspiration of what you can do to increase your online privacy.

While it was obvious they'd do this at least they say it out loud now.

I thought of a similar thread but I think the results would be pretty much the same. It's great to have some mutual inspiration here.

Anyway, there's tons of stuff I can list here. I'm gonna list some stuff but will probably forget 70% of the other stuff because it's become so common in my daily life.

• Own NAS as private cloud
• Self-host on my NAS to not use internet services that spy on me (like Bitwarden, Joplin server, cryptgeon, Syncthing, Nextcloud)
• OPNsense as my router of choice
• W10Privacy (because I still can't switch to Linux because of circumstances)
• Firefox as my browser of choice with some extra settings to harden it (I tried something like LibreWolf in the past but I can't use Spotify without DRM)
• uBlock Origin of course (and some other browser addons like LibRedirect, ClearURLs, Decentraleyes and so on)
• Privacy respecting mail provider (mailbox.org)
• Signal (instead of WhatsApp)
• Thunderbird (instead of something like Outlook)
• Piped (instead of YouTube)
• Uninstalled/disabled all apps on my phone that I don't need (also saves battery)
• Been using custom ROMs on my phone (but I made some bad experiences with stability so I stick with the stock ROM for now)
• NextDNS (with encrypted DNS)
• Whoogle (instead of Google)
• Lemmy (instead of reddit, haha)

Gonna add some more to the list whenever something comes up in my mind. Like I said it's become so basic in my life that I don't always think about it anymore when I use it.

Btw things like 2FA only help with security, not privacy.

That's weird, I never had memory leak problems.

I don't like Whoogle because of their UI for image searches. Imo it's really bad but that's just my opinion. The image search is also the reason why I don't use Brave Search because it redirects you to Google or Bing. What's the point in being "a privacy respecting search engine" when you get redirected to Google and Bing which are the worst search engines in terms of privacy?

Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it's top notch though.

Starpage was bought by an advertising company.

I'm not familiar with bangs (things like the !g you mentioned) but if you get redirected to Google doesn't that kill your privacy because you use Google instead of DDG? Or am I just misunderstanding the whole concept of bangs?

I'm not really understanding what you wanna tell me with "you are the customer". They display ads at the top of your search results and that's how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don't track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don't even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don't need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you're helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.

Anyway I'm really satisfied with the search results. Didn't even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I've started using it a few months ago.

Why? You can completely ignore that. Just use the search engine and ignore the rest. I'm really happy with the search results.

Mmh, looks like you need an account to use this search engine. Always not a good sign in terms of privacy but I might be wrong here. I'm currently using Presearch. It's decentralized (like Lemmy) and anonymizes your search queries. Most of it is Open Source but they announced to make everything Open Source in the future.

Apple is a big tech company and no big tech company should be trusted (too much). While I think in terms of their user's privacy they are better than Google, Google at least is pretty vocal about them spying on their users with their actions.

On an iPhone you'll never get completely rid of trackers and stuff even with a jailbreaked device. Imo the best option you have (if you want a phone that respects your privacy) is an Android phone with a degoogled custom ROM that focuses on privacy. Something like Graphene OS, Calyx OS and /e/OS.

While I use DNS over TLS with my OPNsense in terms of privacy encrypted DNS helps just a bit.