WhatsApp Messenger new terms: Best privacy-focussed apps and services

The recent update to WhatsApp's terms, which forces users to share private data with Facebook, has been the center of discussions on the internet. The news has also opened the eyes of a large set of smartphone users regarding privacy. Most users don't realise that the commonly-used apps and services are a privacy risk. Thankfully, privacy-focused alternative apps and services are available that you can use instead of the widely used ones.

Chat and communications: WhatsApp, with over 2 billion users, has been the most popular service for conversation and voice/video calls. While it encrypts your chats, the recent update to terms makes it a privacy nightmare for users. The alternative app that you should try instead of WhatsApp is Telegram and Signal. Both of them are ranked highly for user privacy and do not share any user data making them safe to use.

Social Networks: Facebook is the most used social networks across the world. However, as Facebook has grown in terms of users, it has also come under fire for privacy issues. With WhatsApp sharing its user data to Facebook directly now, Facebook now has access to two user data streams, which is a significant privacy issue. The good thing is that you have alternative social networks available that are focused on your privacy. If you prefer a Twitter-like interface, you can check out Mastodon, which is ad-free, easy to use and does not collect any information. Other alternatives for social networks you should check out include Diaspora or Social.

Browser: Your browser works as your gateway to connect to the Internet. The trouble is that almost all of the commonly used browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari etc.) track the usage and share user data with their parent company. If you are concerned about your privacy, then it would be best to switch to a focussed privacy browser across your devices. Our recommended alternative is Brave browser, which is available across desktop and mobile operating systems. The browser does not track user activity and also comes with a built-in adblocker. The other option to consider is the Tor Browser, which masks your activity and encrypts your usage data so that no one can track it.

Email: Your email is a significant source of your personal information. This is why almost all of the commonly used email services by users are a privacy risk. Your emails are not encrypted, and the data from your email account is used to show you personalized ads across the various products offered by the parent's company. The only way out is to use a secure email service. ProtonMail is the top choice as an alternative in this scenario. It offers end to end encryption for email and provides the option to self destruct email for additional privacy to the user.

Search engine: While Google is the most used search engine across smartphones and computers, it is not recommended to be used if you value privacy. Google tracks your usage and then uses that information to show personalized ads across products, which is a privacy breach. If you are concerned about your privacy and do not want to be tracked by your search history, then it's time to switch to a privacy focussed alternative such as DuckDuckGo. To avoid this, we recommend changing to a search engine focused on user privacy. DuckDuckGo does not store any user information as it does not track the user – this way, it shows the same search results to different users.

Video Consumption: For videos, YouTube is the go-to option for most of us today. However, like most other Google products, YouTube also creates a profile for you and then tracks your usage to show you relevant ads during video playback. While the other platforms do not match up to the vast library size of YouTube, they focus on privacy and can work as a suitable replacement for watching videos. We would recommend checking out Vimeo, Metacafe or DTube.