Our Personal Privacy Stack
Personal Privacy Stack: the set of tools, technologies or practices used by an individual to protect his or her online privacy and data security.
If you’re looking to de-Google your digital life, or seeking general alternatives to Big Tech products and services, reviewing our personal privacy stack is a great place to start.
Personal Privacy Stack is a term we popularized to help support a privacy first mindset. Creating a personal privacy stack is helpful for building an easy-to-maintain and scalable solution to your unique privacy concerns and goals. Each component of your stack plays an important part. Together, they create a formidable defense of your privacy and security, both online and offline.
Everyone’s personal privacy stack will be different and adapted to fit their unique situation. Our goal in publishing our personal privacy stack is two fold:
Transparency. You’ll know exactly what tools and services we use in our personal life. These are not necessarily recommendations, merely what we opted to use, for what could be a variety of factors.
Replication. Some readers may want to create a completely unique personal privacy stack. Others may want to just copy what we’ve done. It’s completely up to you! Either way, our stack will help you ditch Big Tech services like Gmail, Chrome and others.
A few notes:
We will update this list on a regular basis.
We may receive referral fees/bonuses when you sign up for one of these services through our links (including via the Amazon Associates program). This helps support the site without any cost to you.
Last Updated March 21, 2025
Table of Contents
Email | VPN | Browser | Search | Online Data Removal | Artificial Intelligence | Messaging App | Secondary Postal Address | Disposable Email | Office Suite | Photo Storage | Mobile Phone OS | Authenticator App | Document Storage | Home Security Cameras
Email
Proton Mail (primary)
Unibox (secondary)
VPN
Browser
Brave (primary)
DuckDuckGo and Mullvad (each has a particular use case to compartmentalize matters)
Search
Brave (primary)
DuckDuckGo (secondary)
Mojeek (third)
Online Data Removal
Artificial Intelligence
Perplexity AI (primary)
DuckDuckgo AI chat (secondary)
Messaging App
Signal Private Messenger
Secondary Postal Address
Disposable Email
SimpleLogin (included for free with a paid Proton Mail account)
Office Suite
OnlyOffice
Photo Storage/Backup
Self-hosted Synology NAS, via their photo app DS Photo
Mobile Phone OS
Google Pixel 7 running CalyxOS, purchased from Private Phone Shop.
Authenticator App
General Document Storage
Home Security Cameras
Reolink, self hosted (i.e. no cloud storage).
Simplisafe for indoors (camera has a physical shutter that is closed by default)
Ready to go deeper and become a harder target for AI scams, data harvesters and doxxers?
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