I encourage anyone with a brain to try for themselves instead of letting others make decisions for them.

May I ask how do one try the trustworthiness of a VPN?

I mean, if the question is to decide if it works or not, well, chances are it does work but that’s not saying much. As much as I appreciate your suggestion to make up our own mind, well, in such a situation we can hardly decide by ourselves and we need independent audits. So, my question would be: are there any for that VPN you mentioned (I don’t know anything about it myself, never heard about it, never used it, which means I have nothing against or for it).

Thx for sharing. I do (happily) use Kagi as already stated in my other comment but I’m always willing to be more informed.

I’ve been using it for more than a year and it’s worth every cent. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s already so good. Useful results (no SEO crap) no ads, no tracking, great filtering tools (those alone, to me at least, are already worth paying for) and real cool features. If you have not done so already, get their 100 search trial account and you will see how you like it. I did that and I switched to a paid sub less than 3 days later.

When my first year ended I thought to myself, well, I could try to save me some money here and did not renew kinda yeah, Kagi’s cool and all but why pay when there are free options? I ran back to Kagi in the same month I decided to not renew ;)

I if I had to use a free search, it probably would be Brave Search, FYI

It’s hard to make the full switch towards a more private life, but switching your mail already fixes a big underlying issue: that being, Google or other companies having access to all your emails. So, I’ll cover the basics of making your online mailing more private.

The issue is that the moment you send a mail to someone or receive an email from someone that is using Gmail (or whatever provider that don’t care about privacy), your own email is not private anymore: it’s read by that other company. So, unless everyone was to start using encrypted emails and I should say compatible encrypted emails, real email privacy will be little more than a wish.

It’s a good move to ditch companies like Google, obviously, but one should not let potential switcher believe that it’s a magical wand that will make their emails private. It is not.

As a side note, I would also suggest for a much better privacy: use emails aliases so you never share your real email with any company or service provider.