Prism Break

Very nice. Didn't think we'd be seriously discussing alternatives to the Internet in 2013 =) (https://projectmeshnet.org/) ... maybe this will spur innovation! Cheers.

Needs more emphasis that the left column is the one to avoid.

Several of these suggestions seem somewhat disingenuous - e.g. many of them to be about free software more than actual concerns about tracking, as reflected in the labels "Proprietary" and "Free alternatives". In particular:

- None of the proprietary browsers will track you - well, beyond what's specified in the privacy policy. Two of the alternatives are Tor applications, but the other two are Firefox (which provides no additional protection) and GNUzilla IceCat (which has little reason to exist other than free software politics).

- Most of the browser add-ons are mostly about third-party tracking; these could be subject to PRISM, but the notes suggest that the concern is more about the third-party tracking itself and non-free software (in the case of Ghostery).

- Ditto with the notes in cloud storage, which discount three storage systems with client-side encryption (i.e. equal protection) because they are proprietary.

- The media publishing section promotes third-party blog publishing services for "privacy and security", even though most blogs are public and thus have no need for either.

- Ditto above with Icedove vs. Thunderbird in the email desktop clients section.

- iOS is advised against with a misleading claim that "iOS devices contain hardware tracking" due to an long-patched bug. The claim about it being impossible to verify whether an iOS app was compiled from the original source is disingenuous, as this is rarely done on any platform, but would certainly be possible to do on iOS if the developer cared.

- OS X and Windows won't track you. (Chrome OS won't either, but it strongly encourages using cloud services which will, so I'll concede that.)

In the claims that proprietary software won't track you, I am assuming that the NSA will not compel (or has not compelled) these companies to modify their software to include secret tracking. This claim is made explicitly under the operating system section: "Apple, Google, and Microsoft are a part of PRISM. Their proprietary operating systems cannot be trusted to safeguard your personal information from the NSA." But even considering all that we have heard about the NSA, this seems absurd, far beyond what they are willing to do, and even if it were true, using free software would not necessarily prevent the US-based host of the download from being similarly compelled. Moreover, someone would probably notice (unless it were an intentionally introduced but otherwise unremarkable security bug, but it's sure easy enough to find real zero-days in software, free or not, without having to resort to that! - not that that should necessarily make you feel better.)

Google will track your IP and probably store the searches you made alongside it. These can easily be linked back to your google accounts.

Duckduckgo claim not to log your searches.