If you don’t think Mozilla cares about your privacy anymore, yet you use Qwant, you’re probably not going to want to hear that the two partnered up last month.

I’ve been using Startpage with positive results.

There’s also hardened Firefox solutions.

I second Proton… I love 'em. I use them for email and VPN. I always have a hard time putting all my eggs in one basket though, and try to avoid using any one ecosystem for all my organization. For example, I use an offline app for my calendar, and a self-hosted home solution for file management.

Great to see another person giving the one finger salute to big tech. Not sure about your ideas on Apple respecting your privacy though - they haven’t given me that impression but maybe I’m misinformed.

You say you use ProtonPass with a free Proton account? Do you know if they have a limit for creating these new emails? I’ve seen ProtonPass advertised but I just assumed it was a premium feature. When I say its tedious, its because when I create new ProtonMail accounts you first have to verify it with another non-Proton account which I find a bit annoying as I dont use services like Gmail etc , but more importantly, Proton has been blocking signups on newly created emails (if you just created the email and then use it to verify a service sign up it gets blocked).

Perhaps I haven’t used it to its full capacity but, I have a free proton account and I still have access to simple login

Thanks for the info. You’ll have to forgive my ignorance as I’m not super well-versed but, I was of the impression that alias software like anon and simple login were more for avoiding spam and unwanted emails from sign ups. Is it also effective as a security tool?

I was referring more to ID required for the sim card set up but, you bring up a good point, there will always be video surveillance. I’m also looking at this more from a privacy perspective, and less from a secrecy or detection perspective so I have no real concerns that a government agency will be trying to track me down.

Where I am, its perfectly legal to purchase a one time sim card. You can walk into the corner store, purchase a prepaid visa (with cash), and buy a sim card (with cash) at the same store. You can then go online, enter the sim card number into the site, add your prepaid visa as payment and whatever details you want. I’ve done it before and there is no ID verification whatsoever - I literally put in John Smith and it worked… As long as they have payment up front, I guess they don’t care. If I’m just using it for one time account verification, I’m not really worried about keeping the sim card long term.

I’ve tried a few of the SMS services online now. They either don’t work or are paid. I don’t mind paying for the service but I find it tedious and cumbersome.

Wondering if perhaps a prepaid sim card paid for using a prepaid credit card would do the trick? I’ve used prepaid sim cards in the past and was able to get one without providing any real information on myself.

Possibly, but other than that there aren’t any real verification steps when entering info to create an account (you can just add bogus info).

If there is a phone number required, I have used burner numbers in the past which may work.

This argument (to me at least) assumes that the other 4 non-voters would have all voted for ice cream which, by just using basic logic, is false. If 3 out of 5 have already voted to drive off a cliff, one has to assume that at least 2 of the remaining 4 would also vote to drive off a cliff. Now this argument is back to square one… How do we find a solution which doesn’t give ‘driving off a cliff’ as an option in the first place?