All rankings
Best privacy tools, ranked by people who tell you who owns them
63 products across 7 categories, scored on one published formula. Every ranking opens with the owner and the jurisdiction, because a privacy tool asks you to move your trust somewhere, and where it goes is the only question that changes the outcome.
VPNs
Who owns each one, what it costs after renewal, and where it actually connects.
23 tracked · top pick Proton VPN
Password managers
The one privacy tool almost everyone should use. Who owns it matters more than the feature list.
7 tracked · top pick Bitwarden
Private browsers
What a browser leaks is what a VPN cannot hide. Ranked on defaults, not on settings you might find.
8 tracked · top pick Mullvad Browser
Encrypted email
Email is the account-recovery key to everything else. Who holds it, and where they are.
6 tracked · top pick Proton Mail
Private search engines
Most of them resell someone else's index. Which one, and who owns the reseller.
6 tracked · top pick Mojeek
Encrypted messengers
End-to-end encryption is the easy part. What the app knows about who you talk to is the hard part.
8 tracked · top pick Session
Data removal services
They send opt-out requests to data brokers on your behalf. Two of the biggest are owned by VPN companies.
5 tracked · top pick Optery
How the score works
Every product gets a 0–100 score in the same dimensions: privacy and ownership, price after renewal, features, app quality from App Store reviews, and support. Each category weighs them differently, and each page shows the weights it used. A dimension we cannot yet score is removed from the calculation rather than counted as zero, so nothing is penalised for our backlog. The formula is on the methodology page and in the code, and the build fails if it ever reads affiliate data.