this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Privacy

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In order to protect your privacy even more efficiently, you need to do something very simple whenever using an online service or a software. Something that most people fail to do is reading the terms of service, also known as a TOS, from companies or developers' software. This usually will tell you straight up whether they're spying on you, selling your data, or using it to sell ads. This will solve a lot of problems with people not realizing that some software is actually the opposite of privacy, but they keep using it thinking it enhances their privacy.

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[–] PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Can you give an example of stuff people use because they think it will enhance their privacy but don't?
Because software and services people use because they think it enhances their privacy usually are:

Proton (mail, VPN, docs, storage)
Mullvad (browser, VPN, DNS, search engine)
Tuta, DuckDuckMail, SimpleLogin, addy.io, Mailvelope, Thunderbird
StartPage, DuckDuckGo, Duck.ai, SearXNG
LibreWolf, Tor, IronFox, Vanadium
uBlockOrigin, AdGuard DNS, ControlD, Technitium, Pi-Hole, simplewall, Portmaster
Debian, Fedora, Arch, GrapheneOS
Qubes, Whoonix, Tails
Fediverse instances that explicitly say no tracking/analytics, telemetry/data selling, ads, AI training

Reading the ToS of any of these revealed they in fact don't enhance privacy?

[–] lunatique@lemmy.ml -3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

This list is terrible and not even true for some of the things listed. Funny how hard you all are defending not reading. Reading the TOS of some of these would in most cases always inform you of something they practice that they want you to agree to that you may or may not like. So yes a high majority of the time.

There is also a difference between being private and trying to prevent you from being spied on. Duckduckgo doesn't use trackers but that doesn't mean they won't give your IP address and search results to an Alphabet Agency (for one example)

[–] PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

"they keep using it thinking it enhances their privacy."
Can you give an example of stuff people use because they think it will enhance their privacy but don’t?

about DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
"We don’t save your IP address or any unique identifiers alongside your searches or visits to our websites. We also never log IP addresses or any unique identifiers to disk."

Sure, you can't trust American companies for shit, same goes for Brave and its ecossystem, so if you can't trust the ToS content, what's the point of reading it, duh :P

If a company doesn't advertise itself for not saving logs, having no trackers, not using you to train AI, not selling your data, etc, etc, it's because they are doing all of that, so it's also pointless to read the ToS... if they say they don't save logs, etc, then sure, there may be a point reading to see if there are any caveats, but I trust more third party audits (like Proton and Mullvad regularly have) and the code being open source and reviewed independently.

[–] lunatique@lemmy.ml -2 points 8 hours ago