---
title: 'Privacy Focused Apps'
url: 'https://www.nick-hayward.co.uk/privacy-focused-apps'
markdown: 'https://www.nick-hayward.co.uk/privacy-focused-apps.md'
date: '2021-01-19'
description: 'Here are some alternatives to common privacy invading apps and services, and references as to why switching is a good idea.'
taxonomy:
  category:
    - Privacy
---

[Home](https://www.nick-hayward.co.uk/) » Privacy Focused Apps

 ![privacy-respecting-apps-services-scaled-e1733231007871.jpg](https://www.nick-hayward.co.uk/images/7/d/f/0/6/7df0681ed30f6b3083c2e0166e97d579ce9eb156-privacy-respecting-apps-services-scaled-e1733231007871.jpg) 

 January 19th, 2021 Posted in [Privacy](https://www.nick-hayward.co.uk/taxonomy?name=category&value=Privacy)

# Privacy Focused Apps

Here are some alternatives to common privacy invading apps and services, and references as to why switching is a good idea. More ideas at

If you still need to use any of these services for whatever reason, using it in a browser is better than giving Meta/X/Google apps free access to your phone location/contacts/etc.

## Facebook

[MeWe](https://mewe.com/)

[Minds](https://www.minds.com/)

Why? [Delete Facebook](https://deletefacebook.com/)

## WhatsApp

[Signal](https://signal.org/en/)

[Telegram](https://telegram.org/)

Why? [Delete WhatsApp](https://deletewhatsapp.com/)

## Twitter/X

[Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/)

[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/)

Why? Because it’s turned into racist trollfest used to undermine democracy and let right wingers run riot

## Google Services

Google Drive/Dropbox > [Tresorit](https://tresorit.com/individuals) or [Proton Drive](https://proton.me/drive/free)

Google Analytics > [Plausible.io](https://plausible.io/) or [Matomo](https://matomo.org/)

Gmail > [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/mail)

Google search – [Duckduckgo](https://duckduckgo.com/) or [Ecosia](https://www.ecosia.org/)

## Web Browser

Google Chrome has a monopoly but not because it’s better, just because of Google’s huge ad budget. Switching to [Firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/new/) or [Brave](https://brave.com/) is really easy and stops Google hoovering up so much of your data and browsing habits.

## Windows

Depending on what you use Windows for, there are options;

Many **games** work fine on [Ubuntu Linux](https://ubuntu.com/download), so you could dual boot your PC with Windows and Ubuntu and use Linux for at least some of your gaming. It’s not difficult to download, burn to a USB stick and install on a computer. I’ve got Ubuntu on my PC and found I can play a lot of my games on it.

If you really need to use Windows, like I do for **testing** websites, apps like [Shutup](https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10) can turn off annoying apps and data grabbing ‘features’ for you. Use a different browser to Edge no matter how much it cries and begs to be your default.

---

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