It’s just Mullvad and you have to pay 10€. If you buy Mullvad’s VPN service directly from their website you only pay 5€ and you get much more with the client they offer. So if you ask me the better choice is obvious.

Look at this thread to find some inspiration of what you can do to increase your online privacy.

While it was obvious they’d do this at least they say it out loud now.

I thought of a similar thread but I think the results would be pretty much the same. It’s great to have some mutual inspiration here.

Anyway, there’s tons of stuff I can list here. I’m gonna list some stuff but will probably forget 70% of the other stuff because it’s become so common in my daily life.

• Own NAS as private cloud
• Self-host on my NAS to not use internet services that spy on me (like Bitwarden, Joplin server, cryptgeon, Syncthing, Nextcloud)
• OPNsense as my router of choice
• W10Privacy (because I still can’t switch to Linux because of circumstances)
• Firefox as my browser of choice with some extra settings to harden it (I tried something like LibreWolf in the past but I can’t use Spotify without DRM)
• uBlock Origin of course (and some other browser addons like LibRedirect, ClearURLs, Decentraleyes and so on)
• Privacy respecting mail provider (mailbox.org)
• Signal (instead of WhatsApp)
• Thunderbird (instead of something like Outlook)
• Piped (instead of YouTube)
• Uninstalled/disabled all apps on my phone that I don’t need (also saves battery)
• Been using custom ROMs on my phone (but I made some bad experiences with stability so I stick with the stock ROM for now)
• NextDNS (with encrypted DNS)
• Whoogle (instead of Google)
• Lemmy (instead of reddit, haha)
• Avoid accounts (and even links) to something like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on
• Libreddit, Nitter and all the other privacy friendly frontends for social media
• Never connected devices to my LAN/Wi-Fi that don’t need an internet connection (like a stove lol) and never installed the apps on my phone to operate them

Gonna add some more to the list whenever something comes up in my mind. Like I said it’s become so basic in my life that I don’t always think about it anymore when I use it.

Btw things like 2FA only help with security, not privacy.

Thanks for that hint. It might be possible to route all traffic of a docker container through a vpn connection. This way you could make SearXNG (or any other self hosted search engine in Docker) use a remote VPN server and make it prompt the searches. See here.

Of course I did. The thing is that the reliability of the search engines per instance varies from time to time so there’s not a single instance that will always work perfectly and never has timeouts.

I think you can even port forward with the free plan of ProtonVPN.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter which instance I use. I tried multiple instances, even self-hosted one myself. Sooner or later I always had the problem with timeouts (even with my self-hosted local instance) and it’s so damn annoying. Even refreshing the page doesn’t always help. I really don’t feel like hopping from instance to instance just because my preferred instance has timeouts again. Reliability is crucial to me.

You can find many public hosted instances here but some of them use Cloudflare because they fear DDoS attacks. So keep that in mind when choosing your instance. Best is to host your own instance.

Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn’t good. Sometimes the thing I’ve been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.

We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It’s really frustrating. :(

Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it’s top notch though.

Starpage was bought by an advertising company.

I’m not familiar with bangs (things like the !g you mentioned) but if you get redirected to Google doesn’t that kill your privacy because you use Google instead of DDG? Or am I just misunderstanding the whole concept of bangs?

Hmm, I don’t remember clearly. But I think it started when I first found out about adblockers. That was before uBO existed. From there I learned about trackers and was disgusted how all these websites spy on me. And since it’s gotten worse and worse with tracking I fought back harder and harder.

Hehe, nice. Luckily I have my own NAS with WebDAV which I use to transfer/access files anywhere. And MiXplorer supports WebDAV, so that’s a win. :)

Edit: This might be an option too to share files with this app.

I downloaded MiXplorer today. It’s really great. Thanks for the tip!

Interesting. Never heard of Beeper. Looks like they even have a client for desktops. Does it also cover (video) calls and screen sharing for Discord and/or Signal?

It’s fine but I wouldn’t judge if I had never tested it for a while. But whether you wanna give that search engine a chance or not is completely up to you ofc. :)

If you wanna know how it respects its user’s privacy you need to do some research as it’s a little complex. I don’t see where you get scammed just by using the search engine. It’s like you’re saying you got scammed by a car seller once so you’ll never make any other attempt to buy a car ever again.

In the meantime I got to understand why Kagi needs an account: It’s their business model. You have to pay to make searches that exceed the free 100 searches. So of course you need an account.

Why? You can completely ignore that. Just use the search engine and ignore the rest. I’m really happy with the search results.

Mmh, looks like you need an account to use this search engine. Always not a good sign in terms of privacy but I might be wrong here. I’m currently using Presearch. It’s decentralized (like Lemmy) and anonymizes your search queries. Most of it is Open Source but they announced to make everything Open Source in the future.