One of the biggest sticking points commonly brought up in the Privacy community is the price of privacy.

As it generally goes, especially on the internet as a whole, free is not free – however, there are some privacy tools available out there that require little technical know-how and in their most essential functions, are free without substantially hidden costs.

Some privacy tools listed here include “freemium” tools, but the tools listed here provide generous benefits and features. In most cases, this is made possible because the free versions are subsidized by the paying users.

Private Search Engines

Startpage

Started circa 2006, Startpage proxies Google results. In other words, you send your search query through Startpage, Startpage strips the query of identifying metadata and forwards the query to Google.

The results are ultimately served by Startpage so there is no redirecting involved. Startpage also has an Anonymous View feature, that can allow you to “preview” websites found in the results prior to your browser establishing a connection with the website.

Mojeek

Mojeek is a private search engine with its own independent index and crawlers. Mojeek operates in the UK.

One of the beautiful things about Mojeek is how unique the results are in comparison to those fetched by Bing or Google or any of the search engines that proxy/query these indexes.

If you are looking for more search engine suggestions, then check out avoidthehack's recommended Private Search Engines.

Privacy-Oriented Browsers

Firefox

Firefox has been around for a long time. Users will find it a common recommendation in the privacy community as it’s open source and has many built-in privacy features like cookie containers and by default is resistant to some trackers.

It has also spawned tons of forks from its Gecko-based source code, such as Librewolf and Waterfox, that have a default privacy-friendly focus.

To get the most privacy and security protection from Firefox, it’s highly recommended to “harden” it. Feel free to follow the avoidthehack guide for configuring Firefox for privacy.

Brave

The Brave browser aims to be a drop-in privacy-friendly replacement for Google Chrome. The biggest draw to Brave it’s considered easy privacy out-of-the-box.

Brave is a fork of the Chromium project. Many of the back-end requests Chromium makes to Google are instead replaced by “Brave services” or proxied through Brave’s servers. It has a built-in adblocker that works pretty well; it’s been reviewed here on avoidthehack in another post. It can also handle most extensions found in the Chrome Web Store.

Tor

Tor, The Onion Router, is a hardened version of Firefox configured to run on the Tor network. Tor sends your browsing traffic through a worldwide relay so that your traffic isn’t traceable back to you. .onion addresses can only be accessed via the Tor browser.

Tor is an excellent choice for those seeking anonymity or circumventing censorship.

If you are looking for more privacy-oriented browser suggestions for all platforms, then check out avoidthehack's recommended privacy browsers.

Adblockers

uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is the gold standard for blocking ads and trackers in the browser. In most cases, uBlock Origin is the only adblocking add-on/extension needed for comprehensive adblocking.

uBlock Origin can be...