A Day in the Life of Your Data by Apple. It’s a great illustration!

While the conclusion of that story is Apple-centric, with recommendation being to use their products to protect one’s privacy, the content is very true. We all must give it a read, possibly with our parents or children, to bring awareness on what’s truly happening.

Majority of these companies’ focus is on mining user data, for profit.

Choosing privacy-respecting alternatives do not have to come with a compromise.

Most think that by choosing Signal over WhatsApp, they will have to give up on connections with their friends. It’s true to some extent — I understand that network effect can be a friction, I can only hope that we consider privacy-feature-set tradeoff to make the jump. Signal is growing fast and already has basic features to get your communication going.

That’s one example.

NextDNS, ProtonMail, Tutanota, SimpleLogin are a few other privacy-respecting products that I use every day.

If you are looking for privacy-respecting choices in other categories, Privacy Tools has a great list here.

In particular, I want to note NextDNS.

There is nothing to lose by NextDNS. You will only see benefits by using such a DNS resolver, in that, your ISP (Internet Service Provider, like Airtel, Jio, Comcast) will not be able to monitor your DNS queries anymore. You will also get a great level of flexibility, like blocking ads/trackers from these data mining corporations, and like preventing unwanted content from appearing on your children’s devices.

Pi-hole is an alternative to NextDNS. It is a free, open-source software as well that you can further extend to devices on the go.