Proton Mail is encrypted email that normal people finish setting up. Swiss company, apps on every platform, end-to-end encryption when both sides are on Proton, and OpenPGP if you want to write to someone who is not. You can open an account without a phone number. Mail that leaves Proton for Gmail is ordinary mail […]
Posteo is a paid mailbox in Germany, about one euro a month, on electricity they buy as green power. You can pay anonymously. They strip technical headers that would show your IP, they encrypt stored mail, and they will encrypt inbound mail from other providers when they can. There is no Posteo app. You use […]
IVPN is a small VPN run from Gibraltar. No referral leaderboard, no countdown timers, payment by card, cash, or Monero. The apps include a firewall that blocks traffic if the tunnel drops, and they offer anti-tracking DNS. Independent audits of the no-logs claim are published. The server list is short on purpose. You are not […]
Proton VPN is the VPN from the same Swiss group as Proton Mail. The apps are open source. The free tier uses the same no-logs rule as the paid one, which is rare and also slow and limited to a few countries. Paid plans add Secure Core hops and more locations. They publish audits. Swiss […]
Windscribe is a Canadian VPN with a free tier that is large enough to be useful, plus split tunneling and a firewall in the app. They publish transparency reports. The tone of the marketing is jokes. The settings screen is not a joke. There are a lot of switches. Free locations are a subset, and […]
Mullvad gives you a numbered account and nothing else. No name, no email, no password. You can mail them cash. The apps are open source. They have been audited, they publish when police show up, and in a 2023 search of their office there was no traffic log to hand over because they do not […]
SearXNG is metasearch software. A server you run, or a public instance someone else runs, asks Google, Bing, and other sources, then shows you a combined page. Those upstream engines see the instance’s address, not yours, if the instance is doing its job. The operator of that instance still sees your queries. A random public […]
Kagi charges a subscription and does not sell ads against your queries. Lenses let you tilt results toward sites you trust and away from farms. The company is in the United States. You are the customer, which is the actual privacy claim: they do not need a dossier to sell to someone else. Paying does […]
Brave Search keeps its own web index. It is one of the few engines that does not rent Google or Bing for the main results. There is no account and no ad profile built from your queries. Goggles are rule files that re-rank what you see, so you can demote content farms or lift sites […]
DuckDuckGo is the private search box most people already know. It does not build a search profile, and the browser and extension block a lot of third-party trackers on the pages you open. Bang shortcuts, such as !w for Wikipedia, send one query straight to another site. The honest limit: the results are still mostly […]
BellCrier breach check
Most people are, and never hear about it. BellCrier checks your email against known data breaches for free, then alerts you when it turns up in a new one, with exactly what leaked and how to fix it.
