Privacy.com
Privacy.com is a service that generates valid credit cards that are attached to a funding source. Some banks offer a similar service, but, in the case of my bank, they want it tied to a credit card. I don't like that. It's too easy to run up the credit card, and then you're paying high interest on your purchases.
Privacy connects the generated card number directly to a bank account. This is how they make their money. They collect the transaction fee from the merchant and the payment comes straight from your checking account with no added transaction fee. They offer merchant locked and single use options, and they used to offer a free tier service that was quite generous. I'm not sure what the subscription tiers looks like now, but I've personally never run into their card generation limit on what was the free tier. You can also set transaction limits per card for single purchases, monthly, annually, or total spending limit. All of that means that if someone steals the number, in a security breach or whatever, that card number is only good for that merchant, or even for just that one thing you bought that one time, so they can't run your card up at Sirloin Stockade.
Another great feature of the service is the ability to change funding source on the fly. So, if you want to make several purchases from different accounts on eBay, something personal and something for business, you can use the same card number and change the funding source. The change is instant, so you can make the change the last moment during checkout.
I use Privacy.com for everything online. Paying bills (especially paying bills because those sites are often the least secure), eBay, Amazon, ordering food, pretty much anything online.
Privacy.com - Privacy and security built into your payments
Cape.co
Cape is the phone service that we'll be switching to soon. Currently, we're using Mint just because it is sooo cheap. It's hard to beat $30 per month per phone. But Cape.co can beat it. Plus it is privacy and security focused. They work directly with EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation - they fight for our digital privacy and rights), GrapheneOS (and alternative firmware for limited models of Android phones focused on privacy and security), and Proton (focused on private and secure digital services). They have some great features built right into their service to make your phone (and you) less trackable and generally safer, which I'll go into later.
A couple of features that I think will make this more attractive to more people are that there is no family plan or anything like that. You can refer family (it doesn't matter if you're at the same address), friends, people you meet at the coffee shop, whatever, and you each get $20 per month off while you're both subscribing. And yes, you can get your monthly bill down to $0 this way.
Another account feature that is a big privacy thing, is that they don't even keep your name on file. Your account is a number and your monthly payment is processed through Stripe (I think). And yes, you can use a Privacy.com card number with Stripe.
Cape - America's privacy-first mobile carrier
GrapheneOS (and how to de-Google)
Android is not particularly secure and it is definitely not private. It's controlled by Google, and they are tracking everything you do or say. I'm not joking. GrapheneOS works to minimize tracking. You can actually completely deGoogle your phone using GrapheneOS. It doesn't even come with the Google Play Store installed. They have their own basic apps in their app store, including their own version of Android Auto. You can also finely control app access per app. So if you don't want an app to have access to the camera or mic, you can block it. That\'s just one, simple example. GrapheneOS give you much tighter control over your apps and security.
So, if there\'s no Google Play Store, how do I get my apps? Well, there are several ways.
GrapheneOS: the private and secure mobile OS
F-Droid
Look here first. This app repository focuses largely on Free, Open-source applications and apps developed by independent developers. It manages updates automatically and is generally easy to install and use.
F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Obtainium
This one is a little bit more involved. You have to find the APKs to install and add them to Obtainium by a link. Then Obtainium will get the APK and install it and update it, but it is kind of a pain to manage if you have a lot of apps, and you may not always be able to find the most current version of an app. Still, it's good to know about.
Obtainium - Get Android app updates straight from the source.
Aurora
Aurora Store is magic. It allows you to download and install apps directly from the Google Play Store, but anonymously. You may wonder how this is an advantage. Well, first of all, it doesn't require a Google account at all, but you still get the latest version of apps available in the Play Store. And don't worry, GrapheneOS runs a lot of these apps in a sandbox, so they don't even have direct access to your firmware or hardware. Apps from the Google Play Store are not the same as Google.
Aurora Store - anonymously install apps from Google Play Store
Organic Maps
This isn't an app source but an app alternative for one of the most difficult to replace apps on modern phone; the navigation app. The 3 main navigation apps in use are Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze (owned by Google). I've seen recently that MapQuest is making a bit of a comeback since they refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario and added a surveillance layer to show Flock and other ALPR cameras, so they are probably a safe bet. But this section is about Organic Maps.
Organic Maps is build on OpenStreetMap and can be used completely offline. You have to download regional maps to use it, but once you have the maps, you can use it without cell service or Wi-Fi. Of course, if you want navigation, you'll still need GPS enabled. The maps are occasionally a little out of date and finding a location by address can be weird, but it's crowdsourced so you can submit updates yourself. This is a solid alternative to the other navigation apps that actually track you, not just show you where to go.
Organic Maps - Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation
Proton
Proton is a big one. I've been with them a long time and still have my early adopter discount. They offer free tier accounts that I think give you access to all of their service/apps, but just shell out a few bucks per month and you get a lot more. Just using Proton is probably the biggest step you can make toward online privacy and security.
Proton - A better internet starts with privacy and freedom
Protonmail
Works pretty much like you'd expect. It's email. BUT, if you are sending to another Proton user, you have E2EE (that's end-to-end encryption). You can also add a PGP public key for email addresses if you know someone who does email security the old school way and you have E2EE as well. All of your email is encrypted at rest on their servers and they don't have the keys. That means they can't sell your data and if they are subpoenaed, there is nothing to turn over. One big difference with Protonmail, because of the E2EE, which means email doesn't leave your device unencrypted, you have to use Proton Mail Bridge if you use a third party application to manage your email. If you just check your email in a browser, this isn't an issue. And really, it's not an issue either way, just something to be aware of.
Protonpass
Password management is probably the single biggest change you can make to your online security. A password is your digital key to all of your resources. Just think if you had a single key for entry into all of the physical places in your life that you want to keep secure. If a person gets a copy of that one key, they access everything. Your password is similar, but can be even easier to steal than an actual key. Especially when someone else has access to the same spaces but they decided that their universal key is just a screwdriver that they jam into the locks. One of the top, most used passwords in the world is still 'password'. That means that if someone guesses that person's username and password, they can get yours from within the secure space. That's how these huge breaches work.
Now imagine that you have a huge keyring of very complex keys that would be very difficult to guess and you have a different key for every place you visit. That's what a good password manager does. With Protonpass, you can have a 20 character (or longer) randomly generated string of characters, using any of the character sets, and have a different one for every website. Then, when you visit the site, Proton will prompt if you want to autofill your username and secure password and that\'s it. Protonpass can also do passkeys, which are even more secure than username and password, and it can manage TOTP 2FA codes.
ProtonVPN
"Why do I need a VPN? I don't have anything to hide. And HTTPS is already encrypted!"
It's true that most of the Internet, due to the LetsEncrypt initiative that started in 2014, is encrypted. However, DNS requests, public IP addresses, and other identifying metrics are still observable on the Internet, and the Internet is a war zone. A VPN, a good one, hides all of this. Furthermore, they can block ad and tracking sites. You can even use them to virtually change your location. If a site has location specific, legal restrictions, just connect to a Swiss VPN server and you're good. I highly recommend a good VPN and just always leave it on.
And if you believe that you don't have anything to hide, you're wrong. You have the right to privacy. If you don't believe that, then why don't you have public facing cameras in your bathroom?
Miscellaneous
Proton offers some other useful services, but they aren't really anything that I think requires further explanation. Just know that they are hosted on their servers and are encrypted at rest. And if you're concerned with having your data on their servers, take a look at their privacy policies and third party security audit results. I believe they are trustworthy.
Web Browsers
Now we get into some stuff that isn't a new account or some new service paradigm. A browser is pretty much just an application, but they are not all the same. A lot of people online will recommend Brave as a secure and private browser, but I believe they've lost the plot. They were one of the first that really pushed online privacy in a browser, but they use the Chromium engine (the underlying engine that Chrome is built on) and they've done some other stuff that seems questionable to me. So here is what I use.
Zen or LibreWolf for PC
I used LibreWolf for a long time and it is a solid browser. It comes pretty locked down by default and you harden it further. It blocks just about everything while still being functional. But, some sites don't like this. They want your data, so they just won't work with LibreWolf. Don't blame the browser, blame the site and a society that has normalized surveillance and data harvesting.
Now I use Zen Browser. It has a lot of the same feature set as LibreWolf but with some interface enhancements that I like.
IronFox for Android
You can get it from F-Droid, and it's pretty much LibreWolf for your phone. Not a lot more to say about it than that since I already covered LibreWolf.
Tor Browser
I made this its own category because the Tor network and Tor Browser take online security and anonymity to a whole new level. When you use Tor Browser, you connect to the Tor network which redirects your traffic through multiple nodes, all in an encrypted tunnel, and completely obfuscates your online presence. This is where the Dark Web that you're always hearing about lives.
Messaging
SMS/MMS, while offering some security, is still vulnerable. WhatsApp offers E2EE, but it's owned by Meta, so that's enough for me not to trust it. Telegram also offers E2EE, even though it's not enabled by default, but it's owned by Pavel Durov in Dubai who may have ties to Russia. There's also Jami which is a free and open-source, peer-to-peer, E2EE messaging application, built in video conferencing, that is very secure that no one I know uses. It would be great if more people used it, but it's just too niche.
The list goes on and on, but the one I use is Signal. It has E2EE by default, runs on iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, Linux, and probably even BSD. So far, it's been the app that I've been able to get other people to use that isn't owned by questionable people or corporations.
Linux or BSD
This is a HUGE topic, but the gist of it is fuck Microsoft and fuck Apple. I recommend Linux because it is free (as in beer and free as in freedom), open-source, much more secure than Windows, and is pretty easy to use nowadays. If you want a pretty painless experience, I would recommend Zorin Linux. They have done a lot of work to make Linux very user-friendly so there's not much of a learning curve. Also, Linux in general, has good hardware support and compatibility as adoption continues to grow.
If you'd like to go BSD, I'd recommend FreeBSD or GhostBSD (based on FreeBSD). It's even more secure than Linux, but I really think that's partially due to much lower adoption and smaller user base. Even though the OS on Playstation is based on BSD, BSD desktop usage is still not widespread. That said, BSD has excellent documentation and a helpful, if a little surly, community.
Self-hosting
Self-hosting is a more advanced topic and beyond the scope of this article. I will attempt to cover this in future articles. All the other stuff are things that can be done without additional infrastructure and changes that can be made just by signing up for an account, downloading an app, or buying a device.