For M$ no clue, for browsing,
AdNauseam comes to mind.

It’s a fork of uBlock Origin,
which instead of blocking all the ads,
hides all the ads + clicks on them all in the background, which:

• Costs advertisers a lot of money
• Poisens your data profile, since they can’t make up your actual interests anymore

It’s more protest-ware then privacy-ware though,
since you’ll be overflooding them with bs data,
instead of minimizing the data collected.

You can install ClassyShark3xodus,
which can de-compile apps and scan them for trackers on the fly to figure it out yourself.

Do let us know the results :)

You should, privacy is a human right which is being stripped away from us.

You’re basically saying I don’t really care about my human rights.

Without privacy, you’re one step closer to an authoritan regime, where mass surveillance helps prevent an uprising of the people against it.

E.g. Russia, where you “accidentally slit your throat while shaving” when you go against Putin.

Huh, if your parents are the blocking factor,
how about trying to educate them a bit about F-Droid and data privacy?

Software from F-Droid really is much more privacy/battery/storage friendly. Just open source software, no spyware services bloating up the apps.

Perhaps after some convincing, they’ll at least allow you to use F-Droid and Aurora Store! :)

3xodus can help with convincing them:

• https://f-droid.org/packages/com.oF2pks.classyshark3xodus/
• https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/

It shows known trackers (= spyware) in applications.

ClassyShark does it by de-compiling the apps and scanning them on the fly.
Their website shows reports by other users that scanned applications.

Nearly everything from the PlayStore contains trackers, while nearly nothing from F-Droid does.

Ufff sad to hear.

What you could do:

• Not recommened: Search on XDA for an un-official build of a custom rom for your device (stability may vary)
• Recommended: Be patient, until it’s time to buy a new phone, then first look for the OS you want, then choose a device from the list that the OS supports, that’s how I do it nowadays :)

Also interesting, but annoying that you can’t install apks from outside the PlayStore :/ No way to circumvent it?

Not really imo,
however doing good taking small steps OP! :)

Suggestions I’d make:

• Aim to use nothing/as little as possible from the Play Store (proprietary, often filled with trackers)
• Aim to use everything/as much as possible from F-Droid (open source, no or nearly no trackers)
• Switch GApps for MicroG (The open source implementation of the Google system apps to make things like notifications work, which removes spyware)
• Switch your Xiaomi OS (also spyware filled) for a more privacy friendly OS like LineageOS

I’d suggest LineageOS4MicroG:
https://lineage.microg.org/

It’s vanilla LineageOS,
with MicroG + F-Droid pre-included.

You’re very welcome! ^^

Afaik no alternatives yet,
but I can offer some de-googling friendly additions which I developed/contributed to :)

https://github.com/Rikj000/Android-Auto-XLauncher-Unlocked
^ Allows to use 3th party apps on Android Auto

https://github.com/sn-00-x/aa4mg
^ Allows to use Android Auto with MicroG (open source implementation of the GApps)

Check the changes,
they’re quite funny :P

I’ve noticed this too.

My assumption is that it might be mostly Chinese instances being hosted, configured to return such results, but it’s just a hunch.

How do you use SearXNG btw?

I use instance randomizers,
so each query goes through a random SearXNG instance, e.g:

• https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx
• https://searloc.org/
• https://searx.neocities.org/

GimmeASearX could help here,
since you can white/blacklist instances you want to use, but that can become tedious.

Searloc + Neocities are great for mobile devices and other places where you can’t self host GimmeASearX.

“bUt wE nEEdeD iT tO pRoTeCt tHe cHiLdrEn”

No you lying politicians, you needed it for surveillance reasons and now you harmed everyone instead… -.-"

Same for the chat control which keeps getting put on the table in Europe, there aint no thing like a backdoor “only for the good guys”, bad actors will find and abuse it eventually.

Hit up your politicians, tell them to start actually caring for your best interests instead of speedrunning towards a surveillance state.

IronFox is closer to LibreWolf on mobile then IceRaven.

• LibreWolf: Focuses on privacy + security
• IronFox: Focuses on privacy + security
• IceRaven: Focuses on customizability

Both IronFox and IceRaven have extension support :)

How about:

• uBlock Origin: To block parts of a web-page
• GreaseMonkey / TamperMonkey / ViolentMonkey: To alter request/responses through JavaScript

Perhaps one of those can suite your needs

If you’re talking about a wallet,
what’s wrong with Monerujo?
https://www.monerujo.app/

Been using it for a while, open source,
scanned for trackers, contains none.

You do need to add their own repo to F-Droid to download it from there though:
https://f-droid.monerujo.io/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=a82c68e14af0aa6a2ec20e6b272eff25e5a038f3f65884316e0f5e0d91e7b713

Booo, I gladly paid,
now I’m forced into becoming the product,
through data collection…

Best mod ever! <3

Vibe Coding: To generate AI slop code without understanding, nor manually reviewing/altering said generated slop.

It literally means, produce low-quality work.

I get the sentiment,
however when the user base of a FOSS alternative grows beyond the closed source alternative, a switch can happen.

So it would be a good thing to have a FOSS alternative out there, which can accumulate a user base over time.

Without any alternatives being developed,
a switch can never happen.

After a brief scroll through their source repo, I think it’s a set of patches which gets applied by a script while compiling the browser from source.

So it’s unlikely that it will be susceptible,
unless they forget to patch some telemetry out during a release, which is unlikely, since the projects goal is data privacy + security.

Fork of FireFox,
with a focus on data privacy + security:
https://librewolf.net/

I’d also like to add IronFox,
similar to LibreWolf, but for mobile:
https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/