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:
- The Qubes OS Project
- Whonix
- Tails
- GrapheneOS
- Tor Project
- Mullvad
- SearXNG
- uBlock Origin
- KeePassXC
- SimpleX
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
I will most likely donate to:
I may donate to:
I may add more as I think of them. Please leave your ideas!
I would encourage people to withhold donations from Mozilla. They have plenty of money rolling in, and in the past year they used it to overpay their CEO disproportionately, and to buy an AdTech company with private data that they sell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-performance_correlation
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy (search “personal information is sold”)
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.
I want Mozilla to make a browser that preserves privacy. They keep making it worse. And I don’t see how giving them money is helping them improve.
And my comment won’t cost them any money either, as @Matt@lemdro.id pointed out:
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.
I don’t think Mozilla should be deprived of money, and Firefox (or a lightly modified fork like Librewolf) is and probably always will be my default browser… But they’re getting plenty of money from elsewhere, so they probably don’t need ours.
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.
A good chuck of that money is google ad money… i personally would like to see a Firefox that has no Google money in it at all.
Plus donations to Mozilla cannot even be used for Firefox development due to the structure of the foundation and corporation.