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.
Personal Privacy Stack is a term we coined 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, 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!
A few notes:
We will update this list on a regular basis.
This page will eventually be made available only to paid subscribers.
We’ll add links to our discussion of the service or topic once available. Links may not always be available in the early days.
We may receive referral fees/bonuses when you sign up for one of these services through our links. This helps support the site without any cost to you.
Last Updated August 4, 2024 (new privacy phone and OS)
Email
Proton Mail (primary)
Unibox (secondary)
VPN
Browser
Brave (primary)
Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo and Mullvad (each has a particular use case to compartmentalize matters)
Search
Brave (primary)
DuckDuckGo (secondary)
Mojeek (third)
Removing Personal Info Online
Privacy Bee (primary)
DeleteMe (secondary)
Artificial Intelligence
Perplexity AI (primary)
DuckDuckgo AI chat (secondary)
Messaging App
Signal Private Messenger
Secondary Address
Anonymous Email Service
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
Google Pixel 7 running CalyxOS, purchased from Private Phone Shop.
General Document Storage
Self-hosted Synology NAS
Home Security Cameras
Reolink, self hosted (i.e. no cloud storage).