Privacy, Security and Searches

Hardware and Platforms

Before I start, here is a list of privacy tools online, and at the Internet Archive you may find content that has been disappeared by the cancel culture censors.

Purism sells laptops and cellphones that protect your privacy, even to the point that the laptops disable the backdoor spyware built into their Intel core processors.

The Grid

celltowerlocation.com

GIS services have a cellphone coverage layer.

Internet Anonymity

Free VPN Services

Paid VPN Services

• https://nordvpn.com (trial & paid)
• https://www.expressvpn.com/ (trial & paid)
• https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/
• https://protonvpn.com/ (free, trial & paid)
• https://www.cyberghost.com/ (used to be free now paid)
• Hide my Ass
• Hide my Ass Online

These will help your devices connections going inwards and outwards be secured into a tunnel.

Doing Research

Privacy, and Freedom from Censorship:

• Presearch will find stuff others often don’t find.
• Searx and YaCy. Searx avoids big bills by aggregating the results of other search engines, and YaCy does it by being peer-to-peer.”
• SwissCows uses A.I. to improve results for you the more you use it, and it respects your privacy.
• DuckDuckGo does not collect or store any of your information, but it may give you the same politcally corrected results as Google.
• The Wayback Machine archives sites and things. If something has disappeared, you might check there.

Specialty Searches

• The Wayback Machine finds archived material.
• Wiki.Com pulls results from the thousands of wikis on the net.
• BoardReader pulls results from forums and message boards.
• Find copyright free material at: Creative Commons Search
• Research Tools for Digital Sleuths – This is largely focused on researching the “Deep State” and it looks like it has some good tools. And check out the “Partner Sites” at the left.
• Slideshare finds slide shows, PDFs, and eBooks.

Most of the above are from the article, 17 Great Search Engines.

Google – if you must use it:

Go to Google Settings > Google. Inside here you have Ads. Inside Ads click opt-out and reset advertising ID. You should reset the advertising ID after each android device update. Go back to Google. Then go to Google Account and click on data personalisation. Inside this menu, you can switch off and delete any logs and logging. Do this for all google accounts on the android. Then click the tab people & sharing and ensure nothing is syncing of sharing. Once finished come out of the Google Account by pressing back until you see the list showing Ads again. Once in this list, work your way through each section and each part bit by bit ensuring sharing, syncing and tracking are all turned off in all menus.

Or just use StartPage, which uses the Google search engine but just doesn’t track you.

DuckDuckGo (Duck Duck Go) is only partly open source as of mid-2018 and has partnerships and uses technology from Google maps and so forth.

Please note duckduckgo has been caught censoring the yellow vest uk movement by searching those exact words and selecting last week or 30 days. There is mass censoring happening via duckduckgo, google and other search engines. Because of this, we recommend http://www.startpage.com which brought up a huge range of results the same search.

Groot doesn’t censor, doesn’t track you.

Swisscows

Phone Apps

App permissions: Head to Settings > Apps > App permissions One thing to note with apps and permissions. If you allow it once, that permission actually stays on forever. In this permissions menu, you can turn off permissions from things such as storage, microphone, camera, sms etc. This ensures less tracking. * note: make sure you show system apps.

Background Apps: We use the application Greenify (paid) to do this. Greenify will act as a ‘batch force close’ tool for android and when the screen goes off or on a custom icon command can ‘force close’ the required range of apps. This does not mean they will stay closed as some apps are programmed to keep themselves alive. Download Greenify and give it a shot.

Usage Access: The easiest way to secure apps that access Usage access is, turn them all off in the Settings > Apps > Advanced > Special App Access > turn off here. If an app needs access it will ask you inside or when opening then app * note: make sure you show system apps

App Cloner (Cloner/Spoofer) & Lucky Patcher (Ad remover / In App Purchase Hack): This method combined allows you to use app cloner to clone apps and mask the details e.g. Android ID, IMEI, IMSI, Mac Address, and way more as a first step then followed with luckypatcher which can remove adverts and crack apps into premium. Luckypatcher: http://www.luckypatchers.com App Cloner: https://appcloner.app/ This method combined allows users to drop apps darker.

Firefox Addons

So once you install firefox, ensure you edit the settings and make as private as possible. Change search engine to duckduckgo and remove all tracking/sync/data sending. Once this has been done through options, you then type the web address about:config and search in that, geo.enabled This should show true, which needs to be changed to false. Next is a list of addons to install, set these up each one at a time after you install them: – Adblock Plus – Decentraleyes – Disable WebRTC – Adstop Enforcer – Ghostery – HTTPS Everywhere – Privacy Badger – Self-Destructing Cookies – uBlock – uMatrix – User-Agent Switcher and Manager – Video Background Play Fix Those addons will help secure your browser. You can clone the install of firefox with app cloner.