This time, I decided to write on tools/services/software etc. that have been designed and created to care about your privacy on the internet. I will present some tools that I use and/or can recommend and much more tools on which I made research on.
I've dedicated a huge amount of time, therefore at the very beginning, I request you to share ⤵️ this article with your fellows or someone that you think, that it would be useful to share this article with :D
Thank you in advance !
Introduction
I didn't want to make this just another brief article, that will list you down the tools to use, brief info on them and that's all, download, put your trust into a thing and fingers crossed. This article delved a bit deeper into internals of each tool presented.
While writing the article I quickly realized that, writing a one long article with all of those tools/services is pointless, because I lost often my minds while checking the cohesion. Secondly, noone would like to direct through one hour+ long article, that could actually be a book (lol).
I decided, I will split this into an article series posted one per week. The split will be looking as following:
First Post
Introduction
Online Privacy:
-- Dekstop OS
-- Mobile OS
Second Post:
Third Post:
Fourth Post (In this one there will be a special announcement with surprise for you all):
Fifth Post:
Sixth Post:
Seventh Post:
Eight Post:
Offline Privacy:
BUT before I go into the main details, I want to start with an introduction on privacy and why it matters to everyone, regardless of who you are.
Why actually bother with privacy ?
A lot of people, when they hear term privacy, in front of their eyes emerges a chap in anonymous-mask, who likely commits cybercrimes and lives in a basement or some other shady place.... Probably something like this is the match for what they see:
Candidly speaking, I do not wonder why people have such imagination about people who "obsessively" care about their privacy. On the other hand, for me as an crypto-anarchist, it's really harmful, because it generalizes every privacy-focused dude is like the guy on the image above.
I guess it will never disappear as human-species likes very much to over-facilitate things instead of understanding the more complex puzzles behind one's decision.
Moreover, the image of privacy preserving people in press or (social) media is rather prone to shift towards calling them some party's extremists or try to assign them to political fraction of the politics' scene, whereas it's not always the case when it comes to individuals.
Important thing to understand on the very beginning is:
Not everyone will need the same level of privacy !
And that should be the nr. 1 thing, you should take out from this article.
There will be a different need of software-developer, who is politically repressed and hounded, and completely different need will be of an regular woman out there who just doesn't want the companies to know about her to many details.
Having said that, I can move straightly into examples of why privacy matters.
Number 1. Advertisement and personal-data trade
Have you ever wondered, where tha heck is your money gone ?
Well...... Ads of some flashy product you talked about and decided to buy it without a real need could be the answer
I will tell you a story, recently I was by a family-gathering and one person had a talk about bike-roads, and what did they saw first ? You guessed it ! The add of bike-road. I checked their permissions for facebook and everything was set to allowed. And this is a case where big techs ambush a lot of people, who are not aware enough.
I like to recall words said in some video by ThePrimeagen (shout out to you, Micheal :D). Those words were something like:
If you want to be a head of leading silicon-valley company, you have to sell either ads or hardware.
And it's actually true, at least at some point, look at some of the big-techs and their revenue model:
Facebook - Ads
Nvidia - Hardware
Tiktok - Ads
Google - Well they do everything, lol (Ads, hardware, software services etc.)
Microsoft - software services + ads
And in order to specifically profile you, the data is needed, Huge amount of data. Which often is used by unethical methods e.g. wiretapping (as in my story).
Thus, given you have issues that you lack money on some essentials, it might be that you purchase things that you actually don't need and only talked about with friend and under impulse, you bought those things. If you see you have issue with it, guess what privacy is for you !
There is not always about rigid self-control, but also a tooling to it. Sure you can pound a metal-bolt in a wall with your hand, but using hammer makes more sense though, especially as it would be less painful (Lol).
Having said that, I hope I managed to keep you engaged.
Number 2. Banking and Financial Operations
This case pertains a lot of people, not only those who are repressed or alleged of some crime.
I had almost every f*cking time I made a transaction online not even for big amount of money, it were transactions like 5$ or 100$, my account got temporarily frozen, because bank accessed it as suspicious activity, meanwhile it were just regular purchases like Copilot or Brilliant Subscription or even purchase of something from services like Temu or Ebay.
And you really would not like to listen to words I spit out to the consultant and to the bank in emails
And in the times of growing surveillance (especially in sucky europe), I think it's real threat to most of us, than you think.
Therefore, you might want to have more privacy when it comes to your financial affairs, but also not like to relinquish digital payments.
Number 3. Location Tracking and Stalking
People who experience stalking or being bewilderingly frequently followed by some track while they go outside from somewhere, they also might want to have more privacy, when it comes to their actual location. Regardless if stalking pertains their kids or themselves.
Number 4. Password/Data-leaks
It's very common that in big/middle-sized companies occur breaches, and all of the sudden details about your life, might actually not be the same as the breach might have released a lot of sensitive private messages or data.
Number 5. Remote work setups
Companies very often while video calls, require candidates to perform some task live or to perform some task at all e.g. Make some coding recruitment-task. I have again a perfect example of why you might want to prevent your PC's content private.
To give you more context from December 2025 until Mid January 2026, I was actively looking for a job in IT, especially blockchain industry given my background. And all of the sudden I got a message. Here I will reveal some screen shots from the conversation and there is some pattern I noticed (likely they used AI for it) the account seemed to be legit (thus I hate linkedin , imo they should pivot their name to TornApart, describes perfectly the faith in not being scammed there)
Here step 1, the message arrives to potential prey/victim:
Here, I honestly answered that this position is beyond my skills and expertise, but they kept insisting
I got offered that I can actually for practice purposes, I can try solving the task so I agreed.
Note, that the messages were poem-long to convince me to run their code on my machine, but when I agreed and wanted to chat a bit more and expected a bit longer answer, I just was ghosted with one word response. Meaning they achieved their goal, so I can piss off now.
Then I was required to solve the task, which I did but I haven't run it purely on my machine, I used DOCKER !, about which fact I informed the employer. Surprisingly the recruitment task was super easy, it was about to build a WETH-like token with accruing value for depositors and test it in hardhat (whereas my setup is foundry and never used it). It turned out that although my code was correct, the test was specially written wrongly in some places especially when it come to rounding-math for the values given as output.
In the end I got no response back from the company, but from the service where the job offer was hoisted.
I cannot say what was their irregular behaviour, but I can assume that there was indeed some malicious code to be run and potentially I could loose my all crypto-assets I have purchased for my money and I could get robbed from my PRIVATE information on my PC.
Thus people like this, could are also highly welcome to read this article.
Number 6. State Oppression
There are a lot of people, who are targeted by the state. You would not even have to commit a crime, being regular chap is enough for the state to have interest in you. But the most frequent targets are people with anti-government attitude (e.g. like me). There were a lot of journalists or other activists that were victims of state oppression and not even activists. But if being an journalist or activist is not enough for you, Nigel Farage could not open a bank account in England and was separated from his money !. All because the government decided to seperate him from the financial system.
Summary of the section
Privacy is not just for weirdos from basements, but considers every single person, because we never know, how the our data is used or how we ourselves are viewed by the company, government or other institution. If you're interested on what's more, let's finally go into the details !
Online Privacy
As I emphasized in the introduction, in this section, I will do my best to present you the privacy tools I use on a daily basis, explain nuances related to each element from the list I mention. And why I recommend them specifically.
I will start with the with the very core of our internet usage, namely Operating Systems !
Summarry
Due to the length limits I decided to split my one dev.to the articles in couple of them. So I hope I convinced you in some way to why privacy is essential for all of us people. So stay tuned for the OS part of the article :D