आप Google और Facebook अब secure नहीं लगता? ये नए tools के बारे में जानिए।
"We agree to give our lives to these businesses and they are cashing in," says Edward Armstrong, a freelance copywriter, and trainer originally from Durham, England, but now living in London.
He has avoided the use of Internet giants, such as Google and Facebook, and prefers smaller competitors that offer greater protection.
"I'm frustrated with the influence of major service companies like Google and Facebook. They believe it's all safe, but the expense is our data and privacy," he says.
If Google knows all you've ever been looking for, it's got a thorough catalog of your desires, hopes, and fears. Facebook knows who your friends are, what you like, and what you're talking about online.
Online data scandals raised concerns about the control exercised by the information. Facebook faces a $5bn fine for its role in political consultant Cambridge Analytica's infamous data abuse.
The anxiety is mounting. For example, a survey conducted last year by the Washington-based marketing agency Rad Campaign and analytics company Lincoln Park Strategies showed three out of five respondents in the US are distrustful of social media when it comes to protecting their privacy.
But some see opportunity in the midst of that distrust. Is there a search engine requirement that does not store data?
Gabriel Weinberg, who wanted to build a new search engine with better results and less spam, created DuckDuckGo in 2008.
The search engine, which conducts about 50 million searches a day, uses hundreds of sources for its results, including Yandex from Russia. The company says it does have a strict privacy policy not to store or share personal information.
We share our most intimate information with search engines - financial, medical, etc - and that information needs to be private and not used for profiling or targeting data," says communications manager Daniel Davis of the company.
"People deserve a private alternative to the programs they use. They deserve simple tools that allow them, without any tradeoffs, to take back their privacy.
"DuckDuckGo Search gets its results from different sources, so we can deliver relevant results without storing the history of the search or the user profiles."
The technology in the company's app and browser extension goes one step further, protecting users wherever they go on the web by secretly blocking third-party trackers in the background, using secure connections to websites automatically, and showing a privacy score for each website visited.
DuckDuckGo is free and uses commercials to make money, but the advertising it displays is not based on your history or behavior. If you're looking for a "car" on DuckDuckGo, you might see a car-related commercial but it won't be inspired by anything you've been searching for or browsing in the past.
"We agree the Internet shouldn't be so weird and it should be as easy to get the privacy you deserve online as closing the blinds," says Mr. Davis. "We set an example hopefully others will follow."
And others obey. ProtonMail has become the biggest encrypted email provider in the world, with 20 million subscribers.
Emails between ProtonMail accounts are automatically protected with end-to-end encryption, meaning only the sender and the receiver can access the messages.
"The messages are encrypted until they hit our servers which means we can't even read them!" says founder Andy Yen of ProtonMail.
"This also means user data is safe even in a situation where the servers of ProtonMail are infringed, as there would be no user data to steal."
ProtonMail is also free to use by paying for updates and additional storage, making its money."We've had more and more members of the general public and small businesses join us over the last couple of years, most of whom have become more conscious of how companies and governments collect and use their data-and often lose it-," Mr. Yen says.
The app has proved to be successful enough to have spun out another service, ProtonVPN, allowing users to browse the internet anonymously and in private.
Brave, a similar free, protected browsing app, blocks user monitoring, and profiling, preserves privacy, and allows surfing easier, it says.
It makes money by advertisements, but consumers will funnel some of these funds back to their favorite sites.
Brave says it has 8.7 million active monthly users and chief executive officer David Temkin claims that this figure will only rise as the world wakes up to what he terms the "negative consequences of the surveillance economy"
"There's a growing sense that something has to be done and Brave is now providing a concrete solution," says Mr. Temkin.
Despite the alternatives, Facebook is rising at an ever-increasing rate, reaching 2.45 billion monthly users in the third quarter of 2019, although the likes of Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Google are still continuing to expand their user base.
Leaving these programs behind is not easy and Mr. Armstrong says that most of his peer groups are happy to continue using them.
"I use ProtonMail instead of Gmail; DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search; Firefox instead of Chrome for my browser; and then Signal to WhatsApp instead," he states.
"It's not because of lack of education, as the Facebook scandals have prompted quite a few to get rid of it, so I guess it's only going to take people more time to start moving away."