The Best Online Privacy Tools in 2022

Best Online Privacy Tool For Messaging: Signal

Without any doubt, 2022’s finest messaging app for privacy is Signal. From its inception, it was designed to give privacy and full end-to-end encryption to some of the most vulnerable people among us: Protestors, activists, reporters, whistleblowers, and security professionals.

Those groups of people suffer the most government scrutiny on the planet. But you don’t have to be a member of one of those groups to use it… Signal is available to everyone.

This single quote sums up our thoughts on why Signal is critically important to modern privacy:

‘I trust Signal because it’s well built, but more importantly, because of how it’s built: open-source, peer-reviewed, and funded entirely by grants and donations. A refreshing model for how critical services should be built.’ - Jack Dorsey - CEO of Twitter and Square

That means no ads, no trackers, and Signal remains 100% free to everyone. Though you can donate if you want to.

To have a way to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, while using end-to-end encryption is a game-changer. Of course, hacked phones are still an issue for various reasons, so everyone should remain vigilant against malware and spyware. And hardware backdoors on some models of phones are simply a reality. But on a clean phone, Signal makes message interception virtually impossible for most potential attackers.

Best Online Privacy Tool For Search: DuckDuckGo

For maximum privacy and utility, the only search engine to consider in 2022 is DuckDuckGo.

They don’t introduce any personalized trackers to your browsing experience. Their results are unfiltered, and any ads displayed are based entirely on that single search result, having nothing to do with browsing or search engine history.

That’s because they don’t keep a history. They don’t use cookies. They don’t use your device or browser fingerprint. Their privacy policy spells out how it works in detail.

In fact, they incorporate private search, tracker blocking, and site encryption right into their app or Chrome add-on. None of which is 100% bulletproof, but it is a better effort than any of the other common search engines.

So if privacy is a concern to you, always search with DuckDuckGo.

Best Networked Privacy OS: Qubes OS

Messing around with non-Windows and non-iOS systems isn’t for everyone. But for those seeking that extra level of privacy and security or those who love a good Linux distribution, Qubes OS takes the prize for 2022’s Best Networked Privacy Operating System.

It should be noted that: Competition for this category is incredibly close. There are three or four genuinely great contenders for this title! Qubes managed to edge them out because it combines functionality with rock-solid security and privacy theory.

And that theory is based on virtualization. This is a theme that will come up again later and for good reason. When every operation is isolated and streamed back to the user through an abstraction layer, everything is much safer. This technique blunts tracking methods such as device and browser fingerprinting, and various tagging and malware methods as well.

But Qubes has an important ace up their sleeve as far as privacy goes: Full Whonix integration. There’s a learning curve as far as how private browsing works in these completely isolated instances. But it’s nothing that an adventurer such as yourself can’t handle!

As for an endorsement, let’s talk about the perspective of one of the most highly targeted groups in the world: Journalists.

‘SecureDrop depends on Qubes OS for best-in-class isolation of sensitive workloads on journalist workstations. Providing journalists with a sane way to handle untrusted content from unknown sources is part of our job, and Qubes gives us the tools we need to do that job well.’ - Freedom of the Press Foundation

There are other privacy and security-oriented Linux distros, and the best of them have a ton of great features. But the core way that Qubes OS functions can serve as a model for future operating systems, and that’s just enough to tip it over the edge.

Best Online Privacy Tool For Browsing: Hoody

Prior to 2022, pickings in this category were slim. The problem was: Nobody could keep up with advances in device and web browser fingerprinting. VPNs were universally a joke, and even the most scrappy open source projects rapidly fell behind. Frankly: The bad guys were winning.

The best we had prior to this year was Tor. And as wonderful as it used to be, it’s no match for modern device and browser fingerprinting - even on the Dark Web.

Then Hoody entered the picture, and everything changed. The Hoody App uses a similar privacy theory as Qubes… virtualize everything, and stream the results back using clever memory insertion tricks that make any web app or browser tab think that it’s happening natively.

But it isn’t. In fact, every app and tab that the Hoody app manages is run through their private, encrypted network on a small virtual machine in the Cloud. Unless specifically correlated by the user, each tab is 100% independent. You could browse GMail in one tab and YouTube in the other, but Google would have no idea you were the same person unless you willingly logged into both.

That’s because virtual browsers can tell the server whatever parameters they like: Any OS and patch level, massive screen sizes, random results on draw tests, microsecond input randomization… the works. It doesn’t matter, because the results are streamed back to the user seamlessly.

Hoody calls this ‘Phantom Browsing’. It even works on the Dark Web and with Torrenting. As an added bonus, the Hoody network obscures your IP address, acts as an anti-censorship tool, and dramatically accelerates browsing speeds.

Those last two things are linked: By firing off multiple initial requests to various mirror sites, Hoody finds the fastest source of any given piece of information. It also looks for data that has been changed from the original and serves the uncensored data as the top choice.

The Hoody App works in all major browsers, making adoption relatively painless. After a brief learning curve (if the user wants to manually correlate tabs), everything is ready to rock and roll.

That’s The Best For 2022!

Congratulations to Signal, DuckDuckGo, Qubes, and Hoody: Four tools that will enhance your privacy in 2022, and hopefully for many years to come.