Most of the times when I talk about privacy, people think I’m talking about the reasons of being anonymous. However, what I talk about is the right of being anonymous. There’s a difference between being anonymous and having the right of it.

Let me give you an example real quick. The difference between between being anonymous completely and having the right of being anonymous is talking about free speech and having the right to speak freely.

Whenever a person asks me for a Riseup invitation, I ask them a simple question: “why?” If their answer is “privacy”, I’ll tell them that their privacy practices are more important than the service they use. It doesn’t mean that it’s good to use Gmail, it means that if they don’t meet the basic requirements of respect for their privacy, safe tools will not help them.

It’s not a long time that I’ve been using Nextcloud. Before that, I had to host everything locally on encrypted drives. Google Drive (and apps) were available all the time but I didn’t want to use them because not swimming at all is much better than swimming in pool full of shit.

The situation remained the same until I found out about Nextcloud. Nextcloud is a complete solution for people like me who are careful about the software they use and how their privacy is affected.

Almost all of our Android phones come with a modified Android OS that uses Google services. As you (probably) know, Google is not much of a privacy-respecting company to trust. I personally suggest deGoogled operating systems such as /e/ or LineageOS but if you can’t replace your Android phone OS with such operating systems, you can at least start using free software apps on your phone and get rid of Google.

F-Droid is a community-maintained software repository for Android, similar to the Google Play store. The main repository, hosted by the project, contains only free libre software apps. Applications can be browsed and installed from the F-Droid website or client app without the need to register for an account.

I believe the best app store for free software Android apps is F-Droid. You can download its APK file from their site. F-Droid supports many languages so if you want your app store in your language, you probably won’t have any problems.

You also don’t need to worry if the app you want isn’t on F-Droid. You can always find a free libre alternative app. For example, instead of GMail, you can use K-9 Mail (website – F-Droid) which are compatible with OpenKeychain (website – F-Droid) for encrypting your messages. Even if you don’t want K-9 Mail, you can have many other libre alternatives. There’s a libre software app for every need.

There’s even clients for Facebook Messenger if you still don’t want to leave it. i really suggest you to start using privacy-focused services but if you don’t want to, you still have libre clients to use with F-Droid.

I’ve been watching Solar Opposites series and the second episode (season 1) mentions privacy in funny ways. You should watch it.