I’m a real estate attorney, not a privacy consultant, and this page isn’t going to help you disappear off the internet. But I’ve spent enough time lately writing about what AI companies and big tech are doing with everyone’s data that it felt hypocritical not to hand you a few tools to push back with. These aren’t exotic. They’re not going to make you invisible. They’re just a handful of products built by people whose business model isn’t you. Start here.
- DuckDuckGo
- A search engine that doesn’t track what you search for, build a profile on you, or sell your habits to advertisers. It works. Use it like you’d use Google, minus the surveillance.
- Duck.ai
- DuckDuckGo’s answer to the AI chatbot boom, built with the same premise: you can use the tool without the tool cataloging you. If you want to try generative AI without your prompts becoming someone else’s training data or marketing profile, this is a solid place to start.
- Cloudflare 1.1.1.1
- A free, fast DNS resolver that Cloudflare has committed to not selling your browsing data to advertisers, with independent audits to back it up. It’s a small, mostly invisible switch that closes off one more way your internet activity gets logged and sold.
- Signal
- End-to-end encrypted messaging and calls, run by a nonprofit with no ad business and no interest in reading your texts. If you’re still texting anything sensitive over SMS, this is the upgrade.
- Mozilla Firefox
- A browser built by a nonprofit-backed company, not an ad company. It doesn’t need to know everything about you to make money, which is more than you can say for the browser most people are using without thinking about it.
- Proton Mail
- End-to-end encrypted email out of Switzerland, built by a company whose business model is charging you for the product instead of selling you as the product. If you want an inbox that isn’t also a data mine, this is worth a look
- Proton VPN
- A VPN (stands for “virtual private network”) from the same people, with a free tier and a genuinely independently audited no-logs policy — which matters, because plenty of “private” VPNs quietly log everything and just say otherwise. This hides your browsing from your ISP and anyone else sitting on the connection.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Not a product — a nonprofit that’s been litigating and lobbying for digital privacy rights since long before “big tech” was a household phrase. Their site is a good resource if you want to understand what’s actually at stake, not just what tools to install.
I’ll add to this list as I come across other tools worth your time. If you’ve got a favorite that belongs here, let me know.