The ultimate privacy tools
Here is my opinionated list of the best digital privacy tools. They are the ones to use to fit your threat model.
Worst case scenario
You have to protect yourself from threats by government agencies, national and/or transnational ones.
- Tails as the operating system for your computer
- GrapheneOS as the operating system for your smartphone
- Tor Browser for browsing the web
- Signal for communications
- Text messaging
- Videoconferencing
- Multimedia sharing (images, videos, audio recordings)
- CryptPad for real time documents collaboration with teams & drives support, history, snapshots, chat...
- Rich Text
- Kanboard
- Form
- Whiteboard
- Spreadsheet
- Diagrams
- Calendars
- mat2 to remove metadata from the files you want to share
Every software previously listed is open source, you won't find any proprietary ones here as those can't be properly audited for security issues.
More common scenario
You have to protect yourself from threats by surveillance capitalism, advertizing and profiling companies who wants to make a profit out of your data and metadata.
- macOS as the operating system for your computer
- iOS as the operating system for your smartphone
- Safari for browsing the web
- Wipr 2 as a trackers and ad-block extension
- Signal for communications
- Text messaging
- Videoconferencing
- Multimedia sharing (images, videos, audio recordings)
- iCloud+ for real time documents collaboration and multimedia storage
- Photos
- Pages
- Numbers
- Keynote
- Freeform
- Contacts
- Calendars
- LocalSend to share files with people who don't own Apple devices
Proprietary software is acceptable here as it often provides a much easier experience of use than open source. Recommending Apple products make sense as their business is providing quality hardware and services to their customers (you have to pay for it). Which is quite different from Google for example, which is first and foremost an advertizing company. Their business model rely on spying on and selling their users data and metadata.
Summary
There is no magic solution for preserving your privacy, only pros, cons and compromises. These lists are only meant as a starting point to find what will suits your needs best. You will still have to navigate a universe full of bad faith providers, bad actors, and manage to avoid them.
Some common misconception still remains very popular, even in the privacy world. No, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) won't grant you any anonimity. No, email cannot be trusted as a communication mean to protect your correspondences. No, Switzerland doesn't have strong privacy laws that will magically protect you.
Be curious, maintain reasonable doubt, stay alert and don't hesitate to ask for advice or help on these important topics.