nikivdev/privacy-respecting: a curated list that pairs each big service with an alternative

What problem the privacy-respecting list actually solves

The README states the problem directly: it covers "various 'free' services whose business models are to collect as much personal data about you as possible" and lists "alternatives you can use to them if you care about not losing control of your data and your privacy." That is the whole scope. It is aimed at someone who already suspects that free search, free social and free messaging are paid for with data, and who now needs names to type into a search box.

The audience is narrow in a useful way. This is not for a security team writing a threat model, and it is not for someone who wants a checklist with scoring. It is for a reader who wants to be told, per category, which products are the ones to leave and which are the ones to try. The README also links an article by the maintainer for the underlying argument, so the list itself stays mostly as a directory.

The structure carries an editorial position. Each category has a section marked "You are the product" followed by a section marked with a key emoji for alternatives. That split is the product. You can read one category in a minute and come away with three or four candidate replacements.

How the list is organised and what each entry contains

The README opens with a table of contents linking to Search Engines, Social Networks, Messengers, Cloud Storage, VPN, Hosting, Email, Operating Systems, Browsers, Video Sharing, AI Assistants, Maps & Navigation, and a Related section. Each of those is a flat bullet list.

Entries follow a consistent shape: a link to the project, a short phrase describing it, and often a second link to the project's own privacy policy or explainer. The search engines section, for example, lists DuckDuckGo with a link to its privacy policy, StartPage with a "How we protect you" link, Brave Search with "What is Brave Search?", Searx and its fork SearXNG with documentation links, Librengine, and Mojeek with its privacy policy. The pattern matters because the list does not attempt to summarise the policy itself. It hands you the primary source.

The "you are the product" entries are thinner and more opinionated. Bing is dismissed with "Owned by Microsoft." Instagram with "Owned by Facebook." Yandex with "Russia's version of Google." Only some entries get an external article, such as the Google entry linking a futurism.com piece. That asymmetry is the list's main weakness as a reference: the accusations are asserted, not argued, in most cases.

There is also a third tier. Messengers has a "Questionable" group holding Keybase and Telegram, with reasons attached: Keybase because its backend is not open source and it merged with Zoom, Telegram because group channels cannot be end-to-end encrypted. That middle category is the most informative part of the README, because it admits that the choice is not binary.

Installing nothing: how to use the list in a first pass

There is no install. The repository contains contributing.md and readme.md, and the README gives no package, no binary and no service to run. To use it, clone the repository or open the README on the default master branch and read it in a browser.

If you want a local copy to grep through while you work through a category, the standard clone works:

git clone https://github.com/nikivdev/privacy-respecting
cd privacy-respecting

After that, readme.md is the file you open. There is nothing to build and no dependency to install; the README's only setup instruction is to read contributing.md before contributing.

A practical first pass is to pick one category and follow the links rather than reading the whole file. Search engines is the shortest useful one: the README lists DuckDuckGo, StartPage, Brave Search, Searx, SearXNG, Librengine and Mojeek, each with a link, so you can open three or four in tabs and compare their own documentation. Expect to leave the README quickly. Its job is to route you to the projects, and the projects' own privacy pages are where the actual detail lives.

Where the curated format breaks down

The list has no dates. An entry that was accurate when written can point at a project that has since changed ownership, changed its business model, or stopped being maintained, and nothing in the README flags that. The Keybase entry shows the maintainer does notice ownership changes, since it records the Zoom merger, but the format has no mechanism to keep every entry current.

There is no stated inclusion criteria beyond the category split. The README does not say what makes a project qualify as privacy respecting, whether self-hosting is required, whether open source is required, or how the maintainer weighs a project that is open source but centralised against one that is decentralised but closed. Two entries in the same category can differ on both axes, and the reader is left to infer the reasoning.

Coverage is uneven by design. Some categories get a long list, such as Messengers with Signal, Silence, Session, Element, Threema, Jami, Ricochet, Briar, Tox, Wire, Conversations, Prosody, Wickr, Semaphor and Vector. Others are much shorter. The Related section at the end is a pointer to other curated lists rather than a category of its own, so the list does not attempt to be exhaustive.

Finally, the list is a list. It does not help you migrate. Nothing in the README explains how to move an address book, export a mailbox, or redirect a domain. For a reader who is convinced but not yet moved, the hard part starts after the README ends.

What a curated list gives you that a comparison site does not

The closest alternative is a search engine query, or a comparison site that scores products on criteria. Those give you numbers and categories you did not choose. This repository gives you one person's shortlist with a reason attached to each name, and the reason is often a single clause. The difference in approach is that a comparison site tries to be neutral across many products, while a curated list commits to a position and shows its work only sometimes.

A second alternative is the projects' own documentation, which is where this list sends you anyway. Reading SearXNG's docs directly tells you more about SearXNG than the README's one-line entry does. The list's contribution is that it tells you SearXNG exists and that it is a fork of Searx, which is the part you cannot get from the project's own pages.

A third alternative is a general awesome-style list. The README links to a curated-lists badge at the top, which points at the same family of repositories. Those cover different subjects, not the same one with more depth, so they complement rather than replace this list.

The honest framing is that this repository is an index with opinions. If you want the opinions argued at length, the README's own link to the maintainer's article is the place to go. If you want criteria you can audit, this list will not give them to you.

Maintenance, contributions and the licence question

The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-07-02. That is recent enough that the list is being touched, but the README gives no release history, no changelog and no versioning, so there is no way to tell from the repository alone whether that push changed one line or twenty. Treat the list as a living document whose edit history you would have to read in git to understand.

The contribution path is explicit. The README says to read contributing.md before contributing, and that file sits at the top level of the repository. Anyone planning to add or correct an entry should start there rather than opening a pull request against readme.md directly.

The licence is not stated in the repository's top-level entries, which are contributing.md and readme.md. That matters more than it would for a code project, because a curated list is text, and text is what gets copied into blog posts and other lists. If you intend to reuse the list wholesale, check the repository for a licence file before you do. This is not legal advice, and the absence of a stated licence is a fact about the repository, not a conclusion about what you may do with it.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this list if you want a single page that names the usual suspects and points at replacements across search, messaging, email, browsers and hosting, and you are willing to check each linked project yourself before switching. Do not adopt it if you need a runtime component, an installable package, or an audited comparison with criteria and dates: the repository contains contributing.md and readme.md and nothing else. Before relying on any entry, open the linked project's own documentation, since the list only gives a one-line reason and a link, and check whether that project is still maintained.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. nikivdev/privacy-respecting on GitHub
3. README