Buying Guide
Running a VPN network costs real money every month. There are only three honest answers to who pays for a free one, and which answer an app gives you is the only thing worth ranking on.
9 min read · 7 apps covered · android
Buying Guide
Almost every browser now advertises privacy. The only question that separates them is what a fresh install blocks before you change a single setting, and whether the company behind it makes money from ads.
8 min read · 6 apps covered · windows
Troubleshooting
Play Protect shows almost the same dialog for an unknown developer and for detected malware. Telling those two apart is the whole skill, and the wording is the tell.
5 min read · 6 apps covered · android
Head-to-Head
One of these has a free tier that is genuinely usable and publishes its source code. The other has a larger network and charges for all of it. That is most of the decision.
6 min read · 2 apps covered · android
Buying Guide
Most privacy lists are a VPN advert with nine apps arranged around it. This one is ordered by leverage: what stops the most data for the least disruption, and what the VPN genuinely does and does not do.
8 min read · 10 apps covered · android
Troubleshooting
SmartScreen is a popularity contest, not a virus scan. It blocks brand-new builds from real companies for the same reason it blocks malware — nobody has run them yet. Here is how to tell those two cases apart before you click Run anyway.
7 min read · 8 apps covered · windows
Head-to-Head
Both are free, open source and audited. One is a file you own; the other is a service that syncs. Almost everything else people argue about follows from that.
6 min read · 2 apps covered · windows
Troubleshooting
One command tells you whether the file you downloaded is the file the developer released. Here is that command on every platform, the right way to compare the result, and the honest limits of what a match actually guarantees.
8 min read · 8 apps covered · both