How I keep on improving my Data Privacy in 2020

Data privacy has been a hot subject even before GDPR (25 May 2018) and CCPA (1st January 2020) became officially applicable.

I actually discussed this very subject early 2017, discussing the various open source tools I opted for at the time.

Anyway, 2 years on, let’s make a quick assessment of what was succesful and kept as well as look into the other tools I am currently using to ensure my data pricacy is in great shape.

My Data Privacy stack

• Search engine: Duckduckgo is (still) my preferred and only search engine. It’s being used on both my desktop and mobile for a number of years.
• Mail: Same applies to Protonmail, my favourite (open-source secured) email provider.
• VPN: Since we’re talking about the Proton team, let’s give them another thumbs up with ProtonVPN offering security, privacy for all, and freedom for journalists and activists.
• SMS and calls: Signal. Although I’m experiencing a few issues as I have started using dual-sim phone , Signal has always been my preferred choice as its messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted. Switch to safe communications, people.
• Browser: I use a mix of Firefox, Brave, and Tor
• File hosting service: none. At the time I had pushed Spideroak as a great alternative to dropbox & co. I am not using this service since I actually have removed most of my problems by acquiring my own Synology NAS. Having your own home server is a game changer.
• Note taking: Boostnote, great app and open source project, soon to be coming as a mobile app (allegedely).
• File synchronization: I currently use Syncthing as my tool of choice for synching my day-to-day files between my mac and my mobile.
• To do app: I ditched asana for todo.txt. It has everything I need from tagging my tasks, give them a due date, and priority in the most simplistic way, and I use it with TodoTxtMac on my macbookpro, and Todo.txt for Android by Aditya Bhaskar. And obviously, I get my tasks synched via syncthing as mentioned above.
• Video Streaming: I’d love not to be using Youtube but since there are so much great content in there, I use Newpipe on my Android (NewPipe only parses the YouTube website in order to gain the information it needs) and Freetube, a YouTube client for Windows, Mac, and Linux built around using YouTube more privately.
• 2FA: I ditched google authenticator to use Freeotp.
• Navigation: I ditched google maps and waze to use OsmAnd. It’s great for Map Viewing and Navigation for both Online and Offline. I like the vintage look and feel and amount of details in there.
• RSS: The good ol’ days of leveraging RSS technology should never have disappeared. But it (stangely) is what occurred in my case. I’m back at it, and I use Vienna RSS for this. Great native macOS Open Source project, that gets the info to me, as opposed to go get it and get tracked.
• Office softwares: I’ve moved away from google docs/sheets/slides to Libre Office.
• Other softwares: I make the most of the Framalibre software alternatives by the great Framasoft, and use as a few examples: Jitsi instead of Hangouts/Skype, Framadate instead of doodle.

Yet to test (mytodo)

• Password manager: Bitwarden which I would like to test self-hosted. I’m on another password manager app at the moment, but switching to an open-source solution would be nice.