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 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.