Due to financial problems, throughout my privacy journey I have only used free tools to enhance my privacy. I was recently thinking about the question: If I had the money to give back to the services I've used, which ones would I donate to? Here is my personal list, which is still a WIP:

I will definitely donate to (15):

• Aegis Authenticator | Donation Link
• F-Droid | Donation Link
• GrapheneOS | Donation Link
• KeePassDX | Donation Link
• KeePassXC | Donation Link
• The Linux Foundation | Donation Link
• LUKS | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Mullvad | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• The Qubes OS Project | Donation Link
• SimpleX | Donation Link
• SearXNG | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Tails | Donation Link
• Tor Project | Donation Link
• uBlock Origin | See here
• Whonix | Donation Link

I am very likely to donate to (14):

• Briar | Donation Link
• coreboot | Donation Link
• Electronic Frontier Foundation | Donation Link
• FreeTube | Donation Link
• The Gnu Privacy Guard | See here
• Libreboot | Donation Link
• LibreOffice | Donation Link
• MySudo | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• NewPipe | Donation Link
• OpenStreetMap | Donation Link
• OpenPGP | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• OpenVPN | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Orbot | Donation Link
• WireGuard | Donation Link

I will most likely donate to (7):

• AnonAddy/addy.io | Donation Link
• GtkHash | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Joplin | Donation Link
• Lemmy | Donation Link
• LibreWolf | See here
• Monero | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Nitrokey | Donation Link (Help me find!)

I may donate to (11):

• DuckDuckGo | See here
• Fedora | See here
• GitLab | [email protected]
• GNOME | Donation Link
• Molly | Donation Link
• AdGuard | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Organic Maps | Donation Link
• privacy.sexy | Donation Link
• Proton | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Signal | Donation Link
• Standard Notes | Donation Link (Help me find!)

I may add more as I think of them. Please leave your ideas!

Note: I'm trying my best to avoid turning this into just a list of privacy tools, but that may end up being what it becomes.

Honorable Mentions (9):

There are some services that I support but either don't use or have not matured enough to donate to.

• 2FAS | Donation Link
• Free Software Foundation | Donation Link
• Mozilla (Firefox) | Donation Link
• GNU Image Manipulation Program | Donation Link
• Invidious | Donation Link
• OsmAnd | Donation Link (Help me find!)
• Piped | Donation Link
• Spotube | Donation Link
• Wine | Donation Link

Some math

I realized I never actually specified any amounts that I would donate to each service, so here is most likely how I will spread my money:

For the services I will definitely donate to, I will donate $50 to each services.

For the services I am very likely to donate to, I will donate $40 to each service.

For the services I will most likely donate to, I will donate $30 to each service, for the ones I decide to donate to.

For the services I may donate to, I will donate $20 to each service, for the ones I decide to donate to.

For the honorable mentions, if they ever become part of my official donation list, I will start with a $10 donation and increase it from there.

For those thinking those are small donations, note that if I were to donate those amounts to every service it would be a total donation of over $1,800. That is at least a start, and once I am able to donate I will likely donate the same amount every year.

By no means am I doing this for publicity or congratulations, I am just making my thoughts public and hopefully sparking others to donate to some privacy services. Lots of these services run off of donations, so please try not to take them for granted!

A note from me

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the purpose of this post. I am not posting this to receive criticism for my choices, although I am happy to learn about potential misconceptions I had about certain services (Organic Maps, Mozilla, etc.) This list contains my choices, and your choices may be different. Nor am I posting this to gain attention, media traction, congratulations, or publicity. The purpose of this post is to encourage you to make your own list based on your own criteria, and to potentially share it here. Very few people have actually commented with services that they would/do donate to. I have decided to include my choices as well as links to better help others find what they would donate to. For example, many people may forget to donate to services like GNOME that they use every day without thinking twice about the developers who have worked hard to create it. I'm aware that some of these services are for-profit, have poor business practices, or are based in privacy disrespecting countries, but in my opinion (and again, you should make your own list based on your own opinion) those services deserve my support. I thank everyone who has helped me better formulate my list, but this post isn't meant to be about me. I encourage you to take your time to make your own list of services you really would consider donating to. The draft for this list has taken me over a month. Thank you all for taking the time to read through this, and it is unlikely I will be interacting with this post for a while.

Recent update

I recently went back and changed a few things, adding some I missed. There is drama surrounding Libreboot, and some murky information about which companies provide the best security keys, as well as other stuff. I've decided to abandon this list and remake it elsewhere, maybe to share here. Cheers!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12692350

Anyone aware of a conversations fork with support for unified push notifications? Or a similar xmpp android app with omemo (just the same as conversations' support) and unified push notifications support, available through the official f-droid repor or a f-droid repo if not available from the official ones?

BTW, I noticed [email protected] community was locked. Any particular reason for that?

Also, Converstions requests to set unrestricted use of battery, to use battery under background without restrictions. So it seems unified push notifications would help, though this github issue sort of indicates unified push notifications wouldn't help, so it just tells me there's no intention to include support for it on Conversations, but not that it wouldn't help save battery.

2023 was a record-breaking year for cybersecurity in a bad way. Ransomware payments hit a record high of $1.1 billion, which is likely to...

What do you think of this solution?

So I had a verbal conversation with a coworker yesterday and now I'm getting fed very specific ads. No possible way it's accidental. I have most of the microphone access to apps limited, I have Google assistant turned off and no VPA setup in my home. I use a Oneplus 9 pro, does anyone have recommendations on how to further root cause this or just par for the course for using any standard android OS? Have other folks had similar experience after locking down their stock phones?

The company is "Freedom Internet" in St. Cruz, Tenerife.

I've posted a review calling them out but they are stating:

1. What they are doing is entirely legal <-- Source for pre-ticked checkboxes: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/top-european-court-rules-pre-checked-cookie-consent-boxes-invalid -- Source for not having a privacy policy that is referenced in contract: https://gdpr.eu/data-privacy/
2. That the contract states they only share information with installers so they can provide the service... <-- this is an outright lie as per the privacy policy.

Can anyone tell me if the above is true?

They agreed to remove clause #2 (promotional offers) but said 1 and 3 checkboxes must be kept.

Also, can anyone access their privacy policy? I reported it as being a faulty URL but they state it works..

Notes: Edits for clarity and typos.

The tips, ads, and recommendations you see will be more generic and may be less relevant to you.

And this is treated as a bad thing?!

The number of ads you see won't change, but they may be less relevant to you.

Send only info about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly.

In other words, even after turning off all the settings, your data still gets collected.

The rest of the installation process wasn't fun either. It was worded in this weird, condescending tone, like "Let's get everything set up for you", and "Let Cortana help you get things done!".

Thank goodness for FLOSS and GNU/Linux.

So I opened Google Lens for the first time in years to identify a logo, and got prompted by this. Thank you but no thank you

I haven't deletes my Facebook account yet because I need the messenger functionality. But I haven't used or accepted Facebook terms from November about targeted ads or paid subscription.

Now though, I don't need the Facebook account any more. Here are some long screen dumpsnof further information

I was also verybpleased to find an option in Facebook thatbleta you transference pictures fr your accounts to drop box (or other cloud storage services)

The article discusses the use of targeted advertising data by government agencies, particularly focusing on how a technology consultant demonstrated the security risks posed by Grindr's data to national security agencies. It highlights the widespread availability and potential surveillance applications of advertising data, as well as the government's interest in obtaining and utilizing such data for intelligence purposes.

Why is this worth the read? It goes into detail how these data exchanges work and the mechanisms of obtaining such data. We often hear about the result of these actions, but how these actions are performed are described within.

(clear your cookies to read the paywalled article)

I'll disable the 2nd one for sure. 3rd one, too... 1st one stays enabled.

This might also be an automatic response to prevent discussion. Although I'm not sure since it's MS' AI.

I use YouTube without being logged in and have some youtubers that I page manually from time to time to watch their new videos. Do you know of an extension for Firefox to privately add and manage those youtubers?

Title

So my LinkedIn mobile app probably has an issue with my VPN so they want to see some papers please before I can use their app. Fine, it's your service and I need to use it to influence my peers. So anyway they want ID, I give them my current student ID which has a nice picture, a sticker with the present semester and year, matching name to account, a barcode UUID, and legit looking layout. That is rejected as invalid form of identification! I can't access my LinkedIn.

Github dislikes email "aliases" so much that they will shadow ban your otherwise normal activities for months, and once flagged, support will request not only a "valid" email domain but also that you remove the "alias" email from the account completely.

I found one but after a limit you cannot use it anymore without making an account now i can surpass it by using different ip but the conversation wouldn't go in a flow and it will get tiresome fast so if anyone know one which meets these criteria do comment .

EDIT : I want a website not something to locally set up as i am not asking it anything that serious and isn't concerned about privacy that much.

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestion but the craze for using LLM's have worn off for me hope someone else finds this useful. Ciao.

I like the uses of true caller even though it isn't always correct it does come pretty close but having it in my phone is too big a price to pay .