You don’t need to spend money to protect your privacy online. Some of the best privacy tools are completely free and open source. Here’s our curated list.
Browser: Firefox + uBlock Origin
Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled and uBlock Origin installed blocks most trackers, ads, and fingerprinting scripts. It’s faster than Chrome with ad-blockers and respects your privacy by default.
Password Manager: Bitwarden
Bitwarden is open source, independently audited, and has a genuinely useful free tier. It generates strong passwords, stores them securely, and works across all your devices. No reason not to use it.
Email Aliases: SimpleLogin or Firefox Relay
Instead of giving your real email address to every site, use an alias that forwards to your inbox. If the alias starts getting spam, you can disable it. SimpleLogin has a generous free tier.
Secure Messaging: Signal
Signal is the gold standard for private messaging. It’s end-to-end encrypted, open source, and doesn’t collect metadata. It’s as easy to use as WhatsApp but far more private.
Two-Factor Authentication: Aegis (Android) or Raivo (iOS)
Both are free, open-source authenticator apps. They generate time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) for two-factor authentication. Better than Google Authenticator because they support encrypted backups.
VPN: ProtonVPN Free Tier
ProtonVPN’s free tier has no data limits, no ads, and a strict no-logs policy. It’s slower than paid options and has fewer server locations, but for basic privacy protection, it’s excellent and genuinely free.
IP Address Tools: Use BeaNel
Check your IP address, location, ISP, and more at Beanel.com. No tracking, no signup, no fuss. It’s the quickest way to see what information your device is sharing.
Search: DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your searches, filter bubbles, or build a profile of your interests. The results are good enough for most everyday searches, and the !bangs feature lets you search other sites directly.