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(Proprietary) Web Services

On this page you'll see an overview of many popular web services like search engines and social networks. Many of them are proprietary, and you can read why they can harm your freedoms and privacy. But for each problematic service you'll find at least one suitable alternative.

Attention: This page is far from perfect and it needs your help to improve it. Furthermore, the lists of alternatives are incomplete probably.

Please also see the following resources as they will give you further links and background information on free and proprietary services:

• For other free web services, check our CloudComputing Wiki page and Libre Projects.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more info on telecommunication safety.

• The Terms of Service; Didn't Read projects analyses the ToS of several popular web services.

• Debian's FreedomBox list lists several self-hostable applications, especially focussed on the FreedomBox project

Google

• Is an advertising company

• Can keep your searches and personal info, track you on other pages, and share your data with other parties, according to their Terms of Services

Alternatives

• Search: Seeks uses Google & Bing indexes but prevents them from tracking you. YaCy is a decentralized web of peers. DuckDuckGo and Startpage are privacy-friendly services, too. Another option is the meta-search engine searx.

• Docs: EtherPad makes it much easier to collaborate and has a lighter interface. There're many EtherPad instances to use.

• Maps: OpenStreetMap is a very popular mapping service and power various other specialised maps.

• Reader: NewsBlur, read the original page

• Plus: Diaspora, see below

• Mail: Kolab, Mailbox.org, or Posteo.de have a good standing inside the Free Software and privacy-aware communities.

Facebook

• Prompts you to put in your email address & password, harvests your contacts.

• No pseudonym allowed.
• Uses your face for advertising.

• Can shares your data, track you, record audio and video without your consent etc., according to their ToS.

Alternatives

• Diaspora, other pods at Diasp.eu or Geraspora.

  • federation with several pods

  • not primarily a replacement for Facebook but to consolidate services.

  • can be connected to Facebook & Twitter for crossposting.

• Friendica

Twitter

• Some parts of their ToS are problematic.

Alternatives

• GNU Social is a federated Microblogging service and can be connected with Twitter and other social networks.

• Identi.ca is distributed and can be connected to Twitter for crossposting.

• pump.io is the inofficial successor of identi.ca.

• Mastodon is an alternative implementation of GNU Social.

Reddit

Reddit seems to be Free Software friendly and respects your privacy.

Flattr

• May track your visits with third-party cookies, according to their ToS.

• Has been acquired by Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, in April 2017.

Dropbox

• Will remove own encryption for government and might give away your personal info (see 3.)

• Yes, it has to comply with the law. And that ''is the problem''

• Killed off an open source project that reveals a security flaw

Alternatives

• ownCloud, and its fork Nextcloud can be set up on own server, computer or used from a provider, it only requires PHP and MySQL (or SQLite).

• Seafile is another self-hosted remote storage service. Unlike ownCloud/Nextcloud it focusses on file sync. It contains encryption, too, but is more complicated to set up than ownCloud/Nextcloud.

Hacker News

Hacker News seems to be Free Software friendly and respects your privacy.