As news continues to pour out, we keep learning that the websites we frequently use are not playing fair and are manipulating their results to help push biased agendas. We’re just lowly consumers so there’s not much we can do… except rally together and find alternatives that follow honest and transparent business practices.

I’m compiling a list of sites you should heavily consider removing from your life as well as potential alternatives to fill the void. Maybe we can inflict change as consumers but if not, at least we won’t be as swayed by their agenda as we’re out of their system.

Reasons why you might want to do this:

• Hits their bottom line. Even if it's only a miniscule amount. They're using your aggregated data to track things, in turn shaping how much they charge for ads. You're a part of their bottom line, as small as that part may be.
• These companies have proven they're untrustworthy with your data multiple times, the less they have of yours the better.
• Maybe, just maybe, we can prop up enough companies doing things right that the big dogs will change their ways. (Hopelessly optimistic, I know)

Facebook: Ideally you'll completely delete your facebook. Some of you might not be willing to completely detach from social media because you'd like to keep in touch with relatives/friends/whomever. Understandable. If that's too much at the moment, I'd highly recommend completely scrubbing your facebook of content, opting to just use the messenger option. (Delete the facebook app from your phone too)

Facebook Post Manager will help you clear your entire timeline:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae

For Firefox Users:

http://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/show/151426 (Greasemonkey Script)

Twitter Don’t have any alternatives to recommend for Twitter, but you should definitely delete your account(s) and abstain from giving them any more views than necessary. If anyone has a solid alternative I’ll throw it up here.

Alternatives:

Gab.ai - It's small, but growing.

Thanks /u/DownTheRabbitHole

Google: This is a beast and most of you won't be able to completely detach yourselves, as with this entire list, every little bit helps. Do what you're willing / want to do.

Google Search Engine: This is probably the easiest one to remove yourself from, just switch your default search engine on your browsers and phone.

Alternatives:

DuckDuckGo - https://duckduckgo.com

Pros: emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search

Chrome: Definitely ditch chrome or any chromium based browser as the tracking is essentially the same for either.

Alternatives:

Firefox - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Pros: open-source, pro-privacy, community-made, easy transition from chrome (Most of you used this before chrome anyways)

Gmail & Youtube: If you haven’t already, go through all your security and privacy settings, disable all the tracking features and Adsense tailored ad features on both.

Alternatives: Open to recommendations as I don’t have any solid suggestions here.

Reddit: It’s become clear that we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket, relying on reddit is no longer a good strategy. No one site should have all that power.

Alternatives:

Voat - https://voat.co/

Pros: It’s not reddit.

Online News Sources: The list of compromised sources is endless, it’s best to err on the side of caution and assume everything is compromised unless you have evidence otherwise. That said, here’s a list of sites that aren’t as bad as the majority:

The Intercept - https://theintercept.com/

Wikileaks (Potentially Compromised?) - Wikileaks.org

Cut The Cord: Self explanatory really. You're either willing to cut your cable package or you're not. There’s plenty of alternatives and I’m sure most of you know and already use them.

This list is definitely incomplete and if you have any better recommendations or if you have websites that should be cut off, please let me know in the comments and I’ll try to update the list. I’m trying to keep this to consumer products that we should boycott as opposed to focusing on privacy (hence the lack of VPN / Tor recommendations) Though you should definitely look into that stuff if you’re interested in taking it a step further!