The C4DT Factory team selected some Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) links for you. They are all related to digital trust: security, privacy, trust in general, we have you covered!
Privacy tools and resources
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) tips – the EFF is a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, founded in 1990
- Privacy topics – A list of selected topics around privacy
- Surveillance Self Defense – Tips, tools and how-tos for safer online communications
- Cover your tracks – See how trackers view your browser
- Short lists – redacted lists for the most important services, between 6 and 20 services
- A short guide on digital self-defense – a guide published jointly by WOZ, Digitalen Gesellschaft and Chaos Computer Club Schweiz covers best practices and open source alternatives.
- 12 simple tools to protect your privacy – short list for the most important tools to protect your privacy online
- Privacy guides – starts with a list of the most important tools, but allows to browse in much more details
- Privacy tools – encrypted software and apps – has ads!
- Github lists – these are long lists of services and apps with short descriptions. But they are regularly updated and mostly handled by a community of non-commercial people:
- Friends don’t spy (pluja) – 2024/05 – also indicates which services not to use – List of free, open source and privacy respecting services and alternatives to privative services
- Awesome privacy (Lissy93) – 2024/05 – Github-based list of security tools, for all platforms – A curated list of privacy & security-focused apps, software, and providers
- Awesome security (sbilly) – 2024/05 – Github-based list of security tools, geared towards Linux and Open Source – A collection of awesome software, libraries, documents, books, resources and cool stuff about security
Common Tools
Here is a C4DT curated list of some common tools that you can use instead of the big players. If they preserve your privacy better, they are sometimes not as well finished as their commercial counterparts.
- Google Drive -> Cryptpad allows to work on documents, spreadsheets, forms, and many more, without the server seeing any of the data. You can install it on your own server, like we did for C4DT.
- Twitter -> Mastodon is a federated network, meaning there is no central place which can decide which messages are being blocked or not. Instead it depends on the entry-point you choose what you’ll see.
- Slack -> Matrix offers also a federated mean to communicate between people. Like slack (or MS Teams) you can create rooms, chat 1-1, have video-chats, and many more. Our C4DT server is only open to @epfl.ch emails. But you can find other open servers here: Public matrix servers.
- GitHub.com -> Gitlab is an Open Source development platform offering project hosting, CI/CD support, and many more options.
- gmail.com -> Proton Mail is a Swiss email provider offers E2E encryption along with a strict no-logging policy (no tracking).
Use a password manager
There is a only a limited number of complex-enough passwords that a human can store in their brain. Find out if your password has been leaked: Have I been pwned?
Using a password manager is necessary to keep all those passwords stored safely.
There’s many SAAS solutions that offer safe password storage, but here we suggest two opensource ones:
keepass.info – keepassxc.org
If you prefer a cloud-based password manager, try 1password or Proton Pass by the company behind Proton Mail.
Caution: These cloud-based managers still face data breaches occasionally, so use one at your own risk.
Open Source is PET
One of the advantages of open source technologies is self-hosting, keeping your data stored in your own database servers. This definitely enhances privacy. This is why this section mentions some online directories of open source software:
- framalibre.org – not for profit French organization producing Open Source alternatives
- opensourcealternative.to – a huge directory of Open source alternatives
- The Wikipedia page on open source software