Proton VPN and Mullvad VPN are both open source, meaning their code can be publicly audited to make sure they’re upholding their standards of privacy and security. Furthermore, Proton VPN offers a free tier. These are the main 2 reasons. NordVPN only protects your privacy against other websites, not NordVPN themselves. Hope this helps! Let me know if you want more details.

Edit: Mullvad VPN can also be paid for in cash/Monero, and they don’t ask for any personal information to use it (not even a username!)

Security isn’t the size of the app

This could have two meanings, one of which I figure I should address:

1. If you mean “size of the userbase for an app,” then yes, even projects that fly under the radar are much more secure than “mainstream” options. That’s the main purpose of this infographic.
2. If you mean “physical size of the app on the infographic,” the reason they’re different sizes is simply because they were hard to fit on one page, and this made it look nice ;)

Good question! There are hundreds of good resources, some of which include Privacy Guides and my friends at Punching Up Press (they have a lot of other good infographics). Naomi Brockwell TV is a YouTuber with some great beginner friendly videos to guide you step by step. Let me know if you’re interested in others!

I don’t understand how this is possible if this is a private, account free service.

It’s likely there in case (for example) you, in court, testified to using Duck.ai for illegal purposes. DuckDuckGo themselves would not be the ones dragging you to court, but they could get caught in the crossfire, so they want to avoid liability.

Overall, I don’t get what ddg gets out of this very expensive to offer service. Which means I don’t teust its a way to privately use LLMs.

These are the possible motives for each side:

DuckDuckGo gets to add AI to their service, which attracts users. DuckDuckGo is paid in sponsored results at the top of searches, so more users means more money.

The AI providers are willing to provide free/cheap service as a sort of sponsorship to attract users of their own. If you are using GPT on Duck.ai and decide you like it, you may be incentivized to use OpenAI’s own service to chat with the better model, since the models on Duck.ai are not top of the line. It’s the same thought process behind free tiers in services.

Both sides win in this arrangement.

You can add &kbe=0 to the end of the URL when you search to disable it. If you know how to add custom search engines this is the easiest way.

Otherwise, you can add "kbe":"0" as a value inside the duckduckgo_settings parameter in the bookmarklet, like this:

		'duckduckgo_settings': '{"description":"Each key is a setting documented in https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params/","kdcm":"6","kdcs":"0","kbe":"0"}',

Cheers!

There are plenty of options:

• You can carry around a spare burner phone that is powered off. These are relatively cheap ($30 + the cost of your cell plan), and has the benefit of working even when your main phone dies. You can leave it charging in your car.
• You can carry around a cellular hotspot, such as one from the Calyx Institute. This also helps fund a pro-privacy organization, and this hotspot can be used to provide internet for multiple devices. See this video for more information.
• You can still call emergency services even without a SIM card.
• If there are public Wi-Fi networks nearby, you can connect to those in order to get in touch with people you need.
• You can ask anyone nearby for help. Whether it be borrowing their phone to make a phone call, using their phone as a hotspot, or having them help you directly.
• Hike to the nearest civilization for help.
• Wait for a bus to pass by, if they are in your area.
• Some smart cars have the option to call for help built-in.
• Use GrapheneOS with a carrier. It will still be much more private than using iOS, and you can disable the cellular radios when they are not in use by enabling Airplane Mode.

Even without any of those, the chances that you will be completely stranded with no one to help and no way to call emergency services are very, very slim. Privacy protects you from more likely scenarios, such as data breaches or identity theft.

Will the official PeerTube app for Android ever adopt Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Material 3 Expressive?

Looks good! Thank you!

I’d be happy to collaborate in the future if you ever want to :)

Having tried Feeder and Read You, I currently use Capy Reader. It needs a few tune-ups before having a UX as good as the others, but it has features that the others lack (search capabilities, filtering, etc.).

Both of which also appear (looking at this on mobile) to require compiling by the user.

Vanadium comes preinstalled on GrapheneOS, and Trivalent comes preinstalled on Trivalent. Compatible Linux distros can add the Trivalent repo to install it without building.

Show me something Windows based that can be as secure as LibreWolf along with the appropriate extensions for blocking ads, fingerprinting, CDNs, and other spyware-like content.

LibreWolf is far from secure, as it is based on Firefox and so comes with the same security issues. If you meant to say privacy and not security, the reason nobody makes high threat model browsers for Windows is because Windows itself is not private and it would be a losing battle.

Both. It’s open source and privacy respecting. Though, email is fundamentally insecure anyways.

How did you find these yourself?

I’ve been learning about privacy for the better part of 6 years. At first, most of my information came from lurking on Reddit and Lemmy, but then I started getting first-hand experience and doing my own research.

I have my inbox hooked up to my RSS reader, too, which means I get a notification on my phone every single time someone comments…

Who can I credit for the infographic and links?

Simply leaving a link to this post is fine. Thank you!

I use Vanadium. It does have an ad blocker.

Settings > Site settings > Ads > Blocked

People still not getting the meme portion of this?

64 people and counting :P

I was actually expecting you to comment.

May I share on my blog and with my newsletter subscribers at Punching Up Press?

Absolutely! Giving credit is appreciated, as well.

An issue arises with that. Linux is fundamentally insecure, as you are likely well aware if you use secureblue. secureblue is designed to be as secure as possible while still being Linux, and so is still bound by the same constraints. Qubes OS is not a distro, so it (should be) more secure, but it is an absolute pain to use. Furthermore, Qubes OS emulates Linux distros, so the question becomes “Why not just emulate the most secure Linux distro?” which is either Whonix or secureblue depending on who you ask. Is that more secure than running secureblue on bare metal? What about GrapheneOS used in desktop mode? And what about emulating Linux inside of GrapheneOS using the Linux terminal? There are plans to use multiple distros inside of the terminal, so what about secureblue inside of GrapheneOS?

The whole situation spirals out of control. I know this iceberg chart isn’t ranking security, it’s ranking what software people generally use for each experience level, but neither secureblue nor Qubes OS would fit nicely in any category. You can read this post for more of my thoughts about this mess.

A beginner will choose what seems private, regardless of whether or not it actually is.

How the heck is TOR less secure than any of the vpns?

This isn’t a ranking of security. It is ranked based on the experience level at which people generally begin to start using certain software. They build on top of each other.