These alternatives to popular apps can help reclaim your online life from billionaires and surveillance | TechCrunch

As ownership and governance of apps and online services consolidate, it’s understandable if you want to consider your options when it comes to where you store your private data.

Not every service out there is trying to monetize your personal data, and many offerings are just as good (if not often better) as their commercial or ad-supported rivals.

Signal is the encrypted messaging app to use Signal for the simple reason that, by design, it knows nothing about you.

LibreOffice is private by design and free to use and works with all the common file and document formats you regularly use.

Ente scrambles your data with a password only you know, protecting your memories from anyone else.

A Pi-hole is an ad blocker for your entire network, including smart devices, televisions, and more.

Home Assistant is the hub that connects all of your smart home devices and lets you control them all from one place.

Open Scanner is an incredibly simple point-and-click document-scanning app for iPhones .

Owncast is a self-hosted streaming system for setting up and hosting livestreams.

FreshRSS RSS is an amazing web technology that lets you subscribe to feeds of information from your favorite sites, blogs, news sources.