Free Apps VS Open Source |You’re Better Off -With Google

Do you acknowledge the fact that we’re suffering and most of these Tech Giants are just thinking about their pockets, hundred dollar bills, bank accounts and maybe a little more about their pockets? I said the same thing trice didn’t I?

I get lost in the moment, sometimes that happens. You either have money, skills or time. We cannot just have everything right?

Money

If you have money you have what it takes to get yourself a premium VPN plan, a paid browser and much much more. You don’t get to do the hard work besides paying for it all. But, then again if you have money that isn’t really a problem is it?

Skills, Time and Money

I’d like to believe that most people don’t get to have all of this at the same time. See, with skills you do it all yourself. With money you can buy better equipment or whatever you think of to better help your purpose. Time will help in your progress and get better in whatever it is that you’re doing.

Pay for a VPN plan it’s only $5 bucks for the basic features you need for daily use a month, or you can use Tor. Maybe you’d like to try free Proxies and open up the terminal every time you wish to update your status on Facebook?

But, hey nobody said life would be easy right? The Open Source route isn’t for everyone it’s hard, it requires things that not all of us have and on top of all that let’s face it, the not so free apps are better and easier to deal with.

Who doesn’t like YouTube? We all watch videos on YouTube, we also know this is another one of Google’s products which means tracking and everything you could think about is definitely there. When we subscribe to a channel and choose to receive notifications we get updates right? We also get to comment on videos and let people know what we think every time we feel like it.

To avoid tracking we have NewPipe. An Open Source project that doesn’t really allow us to do any of that.

No tracking, no ads… And, no real subscriptions, no likes and no comments. better or worse?

No tracking isn’t this great?

Most definitely, new pipe is lightweight videos load pretty quick but it just isn’t YouTube. Don’t you still use Whatsapp, even after their privacy issues not so long ago?

The unfortunate fact here is that the majority stays, or better yet will always stay, thanks to the facilitation of the so called FREE apps. The are no real subscriptions on NewPipe though you get to subscribe which is just like adding a certain channel to your list of favorites your subscription doesn’t count because it isn’t really a subscription in the first place.

You don’t get to like the videos you actually like :)

But, of course you get to watch ad free videos. In no way will you be supporting the creators but hey security first right?

Just Google it! Google chrome is simple to use, not exactly lightweight but doesn’t require much from your system either. The set back of course includes tracking, your IP is like an open book for everyone to read. But, it does provide… No it doesn’t, it doesn’t provide security, it provides the best searches instead. Doesn’t that make up for the rest?

Google chrome may be what you’re using to read this if not the medium app but, don’t forget that you have a few options like the Tor browser.

We’re not going to cover anything that isn’t related to the Tor browser, not the Tor network or the Tor services just the Tor browser (although this is more or less the same), in comparison with Google Chrome of course.

The Tor Browser is nothing more than Firefox reinforced with interesting security focused features to help us browse the internet safely. With Firefox, I mean Tor we get to learn that going full screen on your browser may help websites detect how big your screen size is and eventually the device you’re using.

We also get a new IP for every session, with the option of requesting a new identity as many times as we need with a click of a button.What we don’t get is fast downloads, the primary focus is not speed when we use Tor but security. That’s unfortunately how the Tor network works.

As a result watching YouTube videos on Tor is not the best thing in the world. Loading web-pages may be slow too and because not every website is a fan of the Tor network you may appear malicious, bad IP address, gets stuck on capture validations and not load websites protected by cloud-fare … etc.

YouTube is not the enemy here or Chrome. I used these two specifically because they are very well known with the hopes that you can relate. As someone who goes for Open Source on almost everything I’ve come to the conclusion that Open Source apps and services require more from us.

This article was previously published on Medium https://medium.com/secure-words/free-apps-vs-open-source-youre-better-off-with-google-bdb0ccf0eb23

Make everyday a Cyber Security awareness day.