Android

I decided to try switching over to an iPhone, as I mentioned in a previous post. The main reason is that it’s the final step in de-Googling myself, which is an achievement that I’ve been wanting to unlock for a while. I don’t really know if it’s any better for privacy than Android, but it should at least not be worse when configured properly. My phone of choice is an iPhone 7, which I got a good deal on from Carousell a while back, for the sole purpose of setting up an Apple Watch. Although it’s a few years old now (2016), it’s still a very decent phone - good screen, responsive, and the form factor is just right for me. Sadly it’s been dropped from the latest version of iOS, which kind of limits its long-term usefulness, but I figured it would be long enough to decide whether I want to stick with iOS long enough to get an upgrade. ...

I recently discovered alternative frontends - websites that let you use the ‘real’ version of Twitter, Reddit etc. through an alternate website. The advantage of this is that it stops those big sites like Twitter from tracking you, because they don’t see the connection from your web browser. Anyway, one of the most convenient ways to take advantage of this is through a browser extension like LibRedirect, which will automatically filter links and redirect you to the alternate versions of popular sites. You can even set it as your default search engine, so it can redirect to an instance of SearXNG, a privacy-respecting search engine. ...