It's just Mullvad and you have to pay 10€. If you buy Mullvad's VPN service directly from their website you only pay 5€ and you get much more with the client they offer. So if you ask me the better choice is obvious.

Look at this thread to find some inspiration of what you can do to increase your online privacy.

While it was obvious they'd do this at least they say it out loud now.

I thought of a similar thread but I think the results would be pretty much the same. It's great to have some mutual inspiration here.

Anyway, there's tons of stuff I can list here. I'm gonna list some stuff but will probably forget 70% of the other stuff because it's become so common in my daily life.

• Own NAS as private cloud
• Self-host on my NAS to not use internet services that spy on me (like Bitwarden, Joplin server, cryptgeon, Syncthing, Nextcloud)
• OPNsense as my router of choice
• W10Privacy (because I still can't switch to Linux because of circumstances)
• Firefox as my browser of choice with some extra settings to harden it (I tried something like LibreWolf in the past but I can't use Spotify without DRM)
• uBlock Origin of course (and some other browser addons like LibRedirect, ClearURLs, Decentraleyes and so on)
• Privacy respecting mail provider (mailbox.org)
• Signal (instead of WhatsApp)
• Thunderbird (instead of something like Outlook)
• Piped (instead of YouTube)
• Uninstalled/disabled all apps on my phone that I don't need (also saves battery)
• Been using custom ROMs on my phone (but I made some bad experiences with stability so I stick with the stock ROM for now)
• NextDNS (with encrypted DNS)
• Whoogle (instead of Google)
• Lemmy (instead of reddit, haha)
• Avoid accounts (and even links) to something like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on
• Libreddit, Nitter and all the other privacy friendly frontends for social media
• Never connected devices to my LAN/Wi-Fi that don't need an internet connection (like a stove lol) and never installed the apps on my phone to operate them

Gonna add some more to the list whenever something comes up in my mind. Like I said it's become so basic in my life that I don't always think about it anymore when I use it.

Btw things like 2FA only help with security, not privacy.

You don't need to do it with every version. I only patch a new version every 6 months. That's more than enough.

Thanks for that hint. It might be possible to route all traffic of a docker container through a vpn connection. This way you could make SearXNG (or any other self hosted search engine in Docker) use a remote VPN server and make it prompt the searches. See here.

Of course I did. The thing is that the reliability of the search engines per instance varies from time to time so there's not a single instance that will always work perfectly and never has timeouts.

I think you can even port forward with the free plan of ProtonVPN.

Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn't good. Sometimes the thing I've been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.

We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It's really frustrating. :(

That's weird, I never had memory leak problems.

I don't like Whoogle because of their UI for image searches. Imo it's really bad but that's just my opinion. The image search is also the reason why I don't use Brave Search because it redirects you to Google or Bing. What's the point in being "a privacy respecting search engine" when you get redirected to Google and Bing which are the worst search engines in terms of privacy?

Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it's top notch though.

Starpage was bought by an advertising company.