We built a simple browser extension to help you discover new, more ethical tools focused on privacy.
If you don’t want to read the story of why we built this, you can simply add the extension to your browser:
Why we built the Ethical Product Alternatives browser extension?
Will and I are fascinated by ethical tools that focus on privacy. We use loads of them and are intrigued every time we learn about a new one.
We came across a few great curated lists of tools and occasionally visit them to have a little browse; Some of the most notable ones are Ethical.net, PrivacyTools and deGoogle. They are great reminders but, the problem is, we get caught up in our lives/work and weeks, if not months, pass by between the visits.
We wanted constant reminders about the products, so we built a Browser extension that shows us one of these great tools, every time we open a new tab. It’s quite simple. We used some of the code we used on other extensions we built previously (BrainyTab, UX Principles and MyCognitiveBias), but made a few changes: most notably we kept the Search bar built in defauld light/dark mode.
Why? Well, some less advanced users asked for the Search Bar (even though you can type your query in the taskbar), and we quite like not having to manually switch between light and dark mode.
What browsers is this available on?
This is primarily a Firefox extension, but we also made a Chrome version. In case you’re wondering why we develop an ethical/privacy extension for a browser that is notorious for collecting user data, there are a couple of reasons why we felt that makes sense:
- We hope that raising awareness of the privacy will help a few users switch to a more secure browser.
- If you use Brave, Edge or any other Chromium browser, you’ll be able to install the Chrome extension.
- There’s more to privacy than using a private browser, and we recognise that there are people out there who use Chrome for various reasons but still
- Also, we cannot ignore that Chrome seems to have about 10x more users on Desktop.
We spoke about this with a few friends and they had some questions. In case you’re wondering the same things, here are some answers:
So how can you get it?
You can add it to Firefox by following this link or to Chrome by following this link.
How much will it cost?
It is free. We don’t have any plans to monetise the extension, but we might develop other paid tools/extensions in the future.
But wait, ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’. How is this free?
Valid point. Well, as I said, we used some code we already had. In addition to this, once the extensions are published, they require little maintenance and there’s no cost to run them.
So what’s in it for you?
The honest answer is that I don’t know. I might meet some interesting people who might want to pay me to do some work for them. That would be nice but that’s not the main goal.
What products can I expect to see recommended?
Glad you asked. There are almost 400 products at the moment and we plan to grow the list as the community makes recommendations. Here are a few examples of products:
- Nextcloud – Community-driven, free & Open Source Content Collaboration Platform!
- Qwant – The search engine that respects your privacy.
- Startpage – Another great privacy-focused search engine, with results from Google.
- StartMail – Trusted & reliable encrypted email provider developed by the creators of Startpage
- PostmarketOS – a free, Linux-based mobile device OS focused on privacy and security.
Contribute new products by opening an issue on our Github repo.
You can add the add-on to Firefox or add the extension to Chrome.
That’s it. Let us know if you have any questions we didn’t answer for you.
