These alternatives to popular apps can help reclaim your online life from billionaires and surveillance
25 November 2024
32 6 minutes read
There is immense power in being in control of your own data. As ownership and governance of apps and online services consolidate, it’s understandable if you want to consider your options when it comes to where you store your private data and records of your everyday activities.
Fortunately, not every service out there is trying to monetize your personal data, and many offerings are just as good (if not often better) as their commercial or ad-supported rivals.
Take a minute to think about what you’d want to leave behind. Big Tech giants that hoard your data? Subscription services? Invasive ad tracking? Government surveillance? Your needs and risks are unique to you, but hopefully a few of these recommendations help to hit the spot.
If you ever wanted to read something later, like a news story, feature article, or anything else with a web address, save it to your Wallabag. This read-later web-archiving service may not have the same ring to it as its main commercial rival Pocket, but Wallabag is a strong competitor with article-saving tools and features as good as what Pocket offers. You can save your must-reads for later on a Wallabag server you can run for free on a network attached storage (NAS) server that you host somewhere in a closet at home, or hosted in the cloud for a low-cost subscription.
A story from The Guardian saved in Wallabag, a Pocket alternative.Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
Why does this matter? Other read-later apps track usage in order to find trends and recommend content (often sponsored) to you. Some want this, and that’s cool! But some don’t.
Signal is one of the most revered secure messaging apps for the simple reason that, by design, it knows nothing about you. On occasion, Signal will make this point by publishing the search warrants it sometimes receives, knowing that it can’t provide to the authorities data that it doesn’t keep. Signal’s security has been called the “gold standard” of messaging apps by cryptography experts. Signal is free to download and use but relies on donations as a nonprofit.
Why you should care: It’s not just your private messages and calls that Signal keeps encrypted from prying eyes and ears, but Signal also crucially scrambles who you contact and communicate with, and when, which can also be incredibly revealing about a person’s life.
Nextcloud is built with security in mind and provides you end-to-end encrypted access to your files from your phone or any other device you have. Or, if simply having a self-hosted Dropbox-like alternative as a storage backup for your most sensitive and personal files sounds like something you’d want, Nextcloud is a great place to start.
A screenshot of Nextcloud, a self-hosted Dropbox alternative.Image Credits:NextCloud
Why does this matter? Cloud storage is often secure and private in some ways, but the companies that run them are beholden to law enforcement and may also invisibly scan your files (for good reason, but still) that can get you suddenly and permanently banned from your online accounts. Hosting your own doesn’t mean you are free from police showing up at your house with a warrant, but at least you’d be aware of it.
Password managers are a great investment in your personal security; these apps securely store your passwords, passkeys, credit cards, and other secrets, so you don’t have to remember them. Bitwarden is a popular open source password manager that helps you log in quickly to your favorite sites and auto-fills your credit card details when you want to pay for something, and more. You can access your Bitwarden password manager anywhere, including from your phone. Bitwarden is free for anyone to use, but low-cost for additional features.
Why does this matter? When it comes to security of password managers, the more eyeballs inspecting the source code to ensure its reliability and integrity, the better. And while other password managers are also good, open source systems like Bitwarden are more readily auditable and open about their software development process.
For those who want to leave Google Docs or Microsoft 365 behind, there are plenty of note-taking apps that keep all of your notes, thoughts, and scribbles in one place that you can access anytime. Joplin is a popular document and productivity app that keeps your files organized, encrypted, and in open formats (like Markdown) so you can take them with you anywhere else. Notesnook is another note-taking app that lets you export your notes to use with other apps and is end-to-end encrypted so that nobody can read your files. The same cannot be said for Google Docs!
Joplin is a note-taking app that lets you sync your notes across devices.Image Credits:Joplin
Why does this matter? Big companies like Google and Microsoft are increasingly unifying their services, which today means exposing your notes, emails, and files to their AI systems. This can be useful for sure, but if you’d rather just have a simple, cross-platform text syncing app, there are plenty of options that don’t do any kind of invasive analysis at all.
If you want to leave behind Apple Photos, Flickr, Google Photos, YouTube, and the like, Ente.io bills itself as a privacy-focused photo storage app designed simply to securely back up all of your photos and videos to the cloud. Ente scrambles your data with a password only you know, protecting your memories from anyone else, and backs up your data in multiple locations around the world for safekeeping. Plus, Ente offers all of the photo management and sharing features you need from a photo app. Ente is free for basic accounts and reasonably priced for more storage options.
Why does this matter? Much like notes and documents, images are a huge target for AI systems. Auto-tagging your friends might sound helpful, but it requires consent. You should have to opt in before a machine learning model scans every face you’ve ever taken a picture of. That alone is a good reason to look at an independent service that gives you a little more choice.
Document scanning doesn’t have to be a complicated or convoluted process. Open Scanner is an incredibly simple point-and-click document-scanning app for iPhones and Android. That’s it. Sometimes that’s the true beauty of disconnecting from profit-driven corporations that bloat their apps with AI junk and features nobody really needs. Open Scanner can snap receipts, notes, textbooks, or anything else you can point your phone at.
Why does this matter? Unless you really need a professional scanner, your phone is more than good enough and probably better than a lot of cheaper scanners out there. Skip the need for any printer-brand hardware gear and use something simple and free.
RSS is an amazing web technology that lets you subscribe to feeds of information from your favorite sites, blogs, news sources, and more. Most news sites offer RSS feeds (TechCrunch does!) that deliver the headlines to RSS-compatible apps, known as RSS readers. There are loads of RSS readers to choose from. For more than a decade, FreshRSS has been one of the most feature-packed RSS readers for its overall simplicity. You can self-host an instance, or deploy a private server to a specializing cloud host. Once you get your favorite feeds subscribed, the end result is like having your very own self-updating digital newspaper.
FreshRSS lets you collect all of your news headlines in one place.Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
Why does this matter? You’d be surprised how different the news feels when you see it this way. And having your own RSS setup skips the kind of sponsored posts and tracking that you see on hosted services, much like the read-it-later ones.
For those who broadcast their own shows, gameplay, or anything in between, Owncast is a self-hosted streaming system for setting up and hosting livestreams. Owncast is wildly popular, as it’s free, fairly easy to use, and works with your existing livestreaming gear. You might not have thought about livestreaming before, but this is a good way to wade into unfamiliar but friendly waters.
Why does this matter? Sites like Twitch are certainly popular, but you may not want to rely entirely on the tools of a giant corporation for every step of a creative process (in this case, Amazon). Owncast and other open streaming apps are a great way to hedge your bets while maybe opening up a new audience.
Handling and editing PDF documents has never been consistently easy. For those who don’t want to pony up for Adobe’s software or upload their files to sketchy-looking file conversion websites, Stirling PDF is the Swiss Army knife for PDF documents. Convert, edit, merge, split, sign, and more, without having to hand over your personal or sensitive files to a cloud giant. Stirling PDF also lets you self-host if you prefer to handle documents with particular sensitivity.
StirlingPDF is a self-hosted PDF editor.Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
Why does this matter? Frankly, any time there’s a realistic alternative to Adobe, take it.
