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 […]
Mojeek has crawled the web on its own machines since 2004, from the UK. No account, no ad profile, no retargeting pixel. The results page looks plain because it is not trying to become a portal. An independent crawler is smaller. News, images, and very new pages are weaker than Google. That is the trade, […]
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 […]
Startpage fetches Google’s results and shows them to you, so Google does not get your IP address or a lasting search profile from that visit. The company is in the Netherlands. Anonymous View can open the result page through Startpage’s proxy, which also hides your address from the site you clicked. You are still looking […]
Tor Browser shields users’ identities from online surveillance by onion routing the data through a minimum of 3 volunteer-run servers called nodes or relays around the world before reaching it’s destination. While enhancing privacy, it will slow down internet speeds and face restrictions from most websites, making it inconvenient to use as a default browser.
Read this Brave browser review for everyday privacy: see what this free browser blocks by default, where your data goes, and who should use it.
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.
