Simple Privacy Fix #1
Stop Being Tracked While You Browse
The Issue
Every website you visit, every article you read, every link you click — it is all being recorded. Not just by the site you are on, but by hundreds of invisible trackers embedded across almost every corner of the web. Most people would never hand their browsing history to their boss, their partner, or their government. Yet that same information is being collected, analysed, and profited from by companies most of us have never heard of — without our meaningful consent.
This is not an accident or a side effect. It is the deliberate business model of the modern internet. Big tech companies have built trillion-dollar empires on the back of your attention and your data. The more they know about what you read, watch, and search for, the more valuable you become to advertisers. Your browsing history is not a byproduct of using the web. It is the product.
The Privacy Risk
When you open almost any webpage, tracking cookies are placed on your device — small files that follow you from site to site, recording what you read, what you buy, and what you search for. Even if you clear your cookies or use private browsing mode, browser fingerprinting can still identify you — combining your screen size, installed fonts, browser settings, and timezone into a unique signature that is extremely difficult to hide.
This data does not stay with one company. It flows through a vast ecosystem of advertising networks and data brokers who aggregate, package, and sell detailed profiles about you — to marketers, insurers, employers, and sometimes governments. The average European has their personal data broadcast to hundreds of companies every single day, in real time, without ever knowing it. You are not being served the web. You are being mined.
Simple Fixes
These are the tools we personally use and recommend. All meet our listing criteria: source-available or open source, no advertising business model, no data selling.
Source-available
Our primary recommendation. Brave is built on the same engine as Chrome, so switching feels immediately familiar — but with ads and trackers blocked by default, including on YouTube. No setup required. Brave is source-available, not fully open source, and is based on Google’s Chromium engine.
macOS
Linux
Android
iOS
Firefox + uBlock OriginOpen source
For those who want to go further. Firefox is a fully open source browser run by Mozilla, a non-profit, and uses its own independent engine — meaning it does not depend on Google’s browser infrastructure at all. Paired with the uBlock Origin extension, it becomes one of the most powerful and customisable privacy setups available, letting you block ads, trackers, and individual page elements with precision.
uBlock Origin is not available on iOS.
macOS
Linux
Android
From the Blog
Further reading from the Pretty Simple Privacy blog.
Quote