Most privacy tools from the PlayStore are light versions “decaffeinated” by Google. Google hate all apps which avoid his control. Recommended app for Android is InviZible Pro (FOSS)
That isn’t avoidable if you don’t use an VPN. ProtonVPN (OpenSource) is fine, even the free one (no logs, encrypted military level, no data limits in the free version, made by cientifics of the CERN)
Tracking? I think that the Fediverse isn’t Facebook, no tracking conecting or linking from one to another, tracking from the Onion, but not from Mastodon. Look for yourself who is tracking you themarkup.org/blacklight (nice in your Bookmarks)
Yes, but I did not want to take credit for this discovery, especially on a federated site, which is why I have shared the toot of the person who found it
As a European company, it is obliged to comply with existing privacy laws (GDPR) in order to operate. The necessary income is obtained through the Ghostery Enterprise. Similar to what Proton does, although Proton is OpenSource, they require revenue for the servers for the mail service and the VPN, but they offer these for free without ads or tracking in a reduced form, in mail with the storage limit and the VPN with a reduced number of servers (21 in 3 countries), financed with premium accounts.
There are many methods of creating income on the Internet and they are normally US companies that use the method of surveillance advertising, trafficking in user data, these practices are not used in the EU due to existing privacy regulations and even large corporations have to take care of them. An example is comparing Microsoft’s privacy in the US and the EU (where it is not perfect either but light years better)
With own Index Andisearch (using AI) and SSuite Groot Search, you can also use a meta search like E-Tools, it use several search engines which you can select.
I don’t use ad ons from Ghostery, nor the browser, the search engine is in my list good for analyze certain pages, as daily search I use Andisearch, Mojeek, Getpage and Groot, sometimes also LibreY, all these 100% “clean”. Addons I use are CanvasBlocker, SiteBleacher and a userscript to show the middlefinger to YT anti adblock. Ad and trackerblocker the inbuild.
Yes, but the same as with Startpage. Despite the company, it’s privacy features are already valid (GDPR), better as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and other privacy search engines, the only seach engines without any tracker and/or ads are Andisearch. MetaGer, Mojeek, GetPage, Groot Search and few more, but it’s depend of which data is collected to put in risk the privacy, tecnical data are not the same as personal data. Ads and trackers are anyway blocked with the adblockers everybody use, the risk is only the logging of the user activity and this none of the privcy search engines do.