Privacy-focused email clients
Gmail and other popular email apps do not generally come with solid built-in encryption features, which means your messages can be intercepted and sold to third parties. If you prefer to keep your email communication private and anonymous, consider switching over to one of these two encryption-focused email clients:
- ProtonMail automatically encrypts and decrypts all of your inbound and outbound email messages. The sign-up process is a breeze and a testament to ProtonMail’s privacy ethos – they don’t even ask you to enter any personal data.
- Tutanota is the first app for iOS that automatically encrypts every email you send in its entirety. Encrypted emails to your friends who aren’t Tutanota users are secured with a password that you will need to share with them. Of course, you can also send normal emails without end-to-end encryption. Your contacts are stored encrypted on the Tutanota servers in Germany, which makes any profiling of your data impossible. Even Tutanota itself doesn’t have access to your encrypted data.
Privacy-focused messaging apps
Sure, these days everyone’s on Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, but those apps are known for their weak data privacy and sketchy security practices. A truly private messaging app should be open-source, enabling anyone to check for vulnerabilities in the source code. Much better if it comes with encryption that even the provider can’t read, as well as an ability to verify the identity of your contacts.
- Signal is arguably the most secure messaging app out there. It is, of course, open-source and encrypts your texts and calls to such a degree that even Signal (the company) can’t read them. You can sleep safe in the knowledge that your calls and messages aren’t stored on Signal’s servers.
- Telegram is also open-source and comes with an enhanced “secret chats” feature that uses end-to-end encryption. If you want to feel like a Mission Impossible character, you can set a “self-destruct” time interval to your messages, so that there’s zero trace of them left on Telegram’s servers.
- Threema is less popular than Signal or Telegram, but it offers total anonymity. This means that even your Threema ID is randomly generated and has no connection to your user data whatsoever. Even better, each user’s private key is stored on their own device, effectively preventing anyone other than the device owner to read the received messages. The fact that Threema is not a popular app gives it an extra layer of security, since hackers would rather concentrate on targeting users of more popular apps like Signal and Telegram.
Best privacy browsers for iPhone
If you are concerned about your privacy then using a privacy web browser is a no-brainer. Privacy browsers typically don’t save website cookies and are pretty good at blocking trackers and targeted ads. Most privacy browsers automatically delete all of your browsing history when you exit. Continue reading to find our top picks on browsers for iPhone here.
Best privacy search apps for iPhone
Every time you use a popular search engine, your search activity (including any search results you click on) is being collected based on the unique IP address of your iPhone device. Keep your web searches anonymous with these privacy-focused search engines. Continue reading to find our top picks on search apps for iPhone here.
