Due to financial problems, throughout my privacy journey I have only used free tools to enhance my privacy. I was recently thinking about the question: If I had the money to give back to the services I’ve used, which ones would I donate to? Here is my personal list, which is still a WIP:
I will definitely donate to (15):
- Aegis Authenticator | Donation Link
- F-Droid | Donation Link
- GrapheneOS | Donation Link
- KeePassDX | Donation Link
- KeePassXC | Donation Link
- The Linux Foundation | Donation Link
- LUKS | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Mullvad | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- The Qubes OS Project | Donation Link
- SimpleX | Donation Link
- SearXNG | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Tails | Donation Link
- Tor Project | Donation Link
- uBlock Origin | See here
- Whonix | Donation Link
I am very likely to donate to (14):
- Briar | Donation Link
- coreboot | Donation Link
- Electronic Frontier Foundation | Donation Link
- FreeTube | Donation Link
- The Gnu Privacy Guard | See here
- Libreboot | Donation Link
- LibreOffice | Donation Link
- MySudo | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- NewPipe | Donation Link
- OpenStreetMap | Donation Link
- OpenPGP | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- OpenVPN | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Orbot | Donation Link
- WireGuard | Donation Link
I will most likely donate to (7):
- AnonAddy/addy.io | Donation Link
- GtkHash | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Joplin | Donation Link
- Lemmy | Donation Link
- LibreWolf | See here
- Monero | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Nitrokey | Donation Link (Help me find!)
I may donate to (11):
- DuckDuckGo | See here
- Fedora | See here
- GitLab | donations@gitlab.com
- GNOME | Donation Link
- Molly | Donation Link
- AdGuard | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Organic Maps | Donation Link
- privacy.sexy | Donation Link
- Proton | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Signal | Donation Link
- Standard Notes | Donation Link (Help me find!)
I may add more as I think of them. Please leave your ideas!
Note: I’m trying my best to avoid turning this into just a list of privacy tools, but that may end up being what it becomes.
Honorable Mentions (9):
There are some services that I support but either don’t use or have not matured enough to donate to.
- 2FAS | Donation Link
- Free Software Foundation | Donation Link
- Mozilla (Firefox) | Donation Link
- GNU Image Manipulation Program | Donation Link
- Invidious | Donation Link
- OsmAnd | Donation Link (Help me find!)
- Piped | Donation Link
- Spotube | Donation Link
- Wine | Donation Link
Some math
I realized I never actually specified any amounts that I would donate to each service, so here is most likely how I will spread my money:
For the services I will definitely donate to, I will donate $50 to each services.
For the services I am very likely to donate to, I will donate $40 to each service.
For the services I will most likely donate to, I will donate $30 to each service, for the ones I decide to donate to.
For the services I may donate to, I will donate $20 to each service, for the ones I decide to donate to.
For the honorable mentions, if they ever become part of my official donation list, I will start with a $10 donation and increase it from there.
For those thinking those are small donations, note that if I were to donate those amounts to every service it would be a total donation of over $1,800. That is at least a start, and once I am able to donate I will likely donate the same amount every year.
By no means am I doing this for publicity or congratulations, I am just making my thoughts public and hopefully sparking others to donate to some privacy services. Lots of these services run off of donations, so please try not to take them for granted!
A note from me
There seems to be a misunderstanding about the purpose of this post. I am not posting this to receive criticism for my choices, although I am happy to learn about potential misconceptions I had about certain services (Organic Maps, Mozilla, etc.) This list contains my choices, and your choices may be different. Nor am I posting this to gain attention, media traction, congratulations, or publicity. The purpose of this post is to encourage you to make your own list based on your own criteria, and to potentially share it here. Very few people have actually commented with services that they would/do donate to. I have decided to include my choices as well as links to better help others find what they would donate to. For example, many people may forget to donate to services like GNOME that they use every day without thinking twice about the developers who have worked hard to create it. I’m aware that some of these services are for-profit, have poor business practices, or are based in privacy disrespecting countries, but in my opinion (and again, you should make your own list based on your own opinion) those services deserve my support. I thank everyone who has helped me better formulate my list, but this post isn’t meant to be about me. I encourage you to take your time to make your own list of services you really would consider donating to. The draft for this list has taken me over a month. Thank you all for taking the time to read through this, and it is unlikely I will be interacting with this post for a while.
Recent update
I recently went back and changed a few things, adding some I missed. There is drama surrounding Libreboot, and some murky information about which companies provide the best security keys, as well as other stuff. I’ve decided to abandon this list and remake it elsewhere, maybe to share here. Cheers!
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I have monthly donations setup for
pi-hole & photoprism
Its cool to see people thinking about how to donate when they can. I think about it as well, and when I have donated I think most if not all fall into your list.
Can you think of any that may not be on my list? It’s always good to try making your own, even if they’re on my list!
Thanks for compiling most of my list.
I’ve never heard of whonix. What’s the use case for it?
Whonix is a unique operating system focused on privacy, security, and anonymity. Rather than being a standalone operating system, Whonix is unique in that it needs a “host” operating system to run Whonix as a virtual machine within the operating system. That means that if Whonix got compromised, the rest of your system stays untouched. Whonix isn’t like a standard VM, however, but I don’t know the specifics on how to properly explain that. Anyways, one cool feature of Whonix is that, like Tails, it routes all traffic through Tor.
Thanks! That helped get an idea of what it’s for
Not seen one of my favourite projects listed yet, so Jellyfin!!
Edit, forgot this was about privacy. Wopsi. But they do have better privacy than say plex… If that counts 😅
I included Lemmy, so I think it counts ;)
DivestOS
I donate monthly to the EFF.
Which of these are tax deductible in the EU? In the US? Making the surveillance states lose out on some tax that funds their schemes, to pay developers trying to make our privacy more attainable is great.
Discriminating services based on location would be a flaw. For example, the Tor Project is based in Winchester, New Hampshire (United States of America), which is a location not regarded highly in terms of privacy.
I think my first donation would be to GrapheneOS.
It really is a great choice! :)
You included for profit companies…
Donating to for-profit companies isn’t inherently bad. While there is more value in donating to non-profit companies, I support all causes equally and want to show my support accordingly.
Why don’t you just by there products?
By donating I am wanting to support specific projects within the company that align with my privacy values, and a donation would directly target that. By donating, I can help more than simply buying a product, especially if there is a low profit margin for products. For example, if a company sold a product that cost them $45 to manufacture for $50, buying that product would only give the company $5 in profit, compared to if I had donated all $50. That maximizes the impact of my donation. Furthermore, I may support a certain initiative but not personally have the need to buy their products. For example, I support Nitrokey’s implementation of the Nitrokey, but I already have a Yubikey, and so I wouldn’t have a need to buy a Nitrokey. Not to mention, donations are taxed less heavily on the company than sales are in some places. Donations also help raise awareness for a company, and helps me push my personal beliefs about privacy.
DivestOS is the same guy managing the Mull browser. Maybe in future Signal or LibreTube. I tried to donate for Thunderbird but they don’t want money due to required mail and blocking specific mail services. I bought FairEmail and Netguard.
Other possibilities: Tor related services and PersonalDNSFilter
The DivestOS creator has so many great projects. Like memory efficient hardened malloc, hardened OpenWRT images, an rpm repo, Brace (auto privacy and security config of supported Linux systems, arkenfox and chromium config management), multiple DNS and content blocker lists, and XMPP conversations server, the list goes on. They are amazing.
Betterbird takes donations.
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Yah, let’s make sure to shit on the company making the only browser that even tries to preserve user privacy because the company does 1% of the shitty things Google does.
If we try hard enough, they might succumb to the constant attacks from Microsoft, Google and Apple and we’ll be left with the browser engine we deserve.
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Plus donations to Mozilla cannot even be used for Firefox development due to the structure of the foundation and corporation.
Thanks for the info! A lot of the services on my list offer paid services that are used as a source of income, but I want to support those just the same. Mozilla has been an iffy choice to add to my donation list. They are the developers of Firefox, which has been forked to create the most private browsers (Tor, Mullvad, etc.), but on the other hand their business practices (Google as a default search engine, Firefox Pocket, etc.) are not very good. As such, I will move them to the honorable mentions section (since I don’t actively use stock Firefox) until further notice.
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A good chunk of that money is google ad money… I personally would like to see a Firefox that has no Google money in it at all.
Edit: Typo
If Firefox no longer got maintained, it would be very difficult for downstream projects (Librewolf, etc.) to keep up, because they would be doing the work of hardening the browser AND fixing bugs that are upstream (that Mozilla would otherwise fix). This is one of the reasons GrapheneOS is as good as it is, Google does the heavy lifting of developing AOSP, and GrapheneOS hardens it and makes it as private as they can.
These are worth supporting:
https://www.wireguard.com/donations/
https://matrix.org/support/
BTW, uBlock Origin is not seeking donations, as stated here:
Thanks, I will be sure to redirect my donations! :)
What is privacy.sexy?
Here is the GitHub page! privacy.sexy is a service that lets you customize and automatically generate a script that will harden the privacy of your computer operating system. i.e. it makes a script that disables telemetry, clears cache, etc. automatically.
Lol Lemmy is not a privacy service
While Lemmy is not a dedicated service for privacy protection, it has certain features that respect user privacy more than mainstream social media platforms.