List of awesome open-source Humane Tech projects

On this beautiful day the following privacy-related Humane Tech entries were added:

Privacy

  • Signal | github - Signal is a messaging app for simple private communication with friends.
  • uBlock Origin - An efficient wide-spectrum blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

After the Facebook demetricator, the same author also created a demetricator for Twitter :slight_smile:

Social Networks

Proud to mention the first Humane Tech project created by one of our members @valere, and also the first project to be awarded the Humane Tech badge. Check it out:

Privacy

  • Exodify - Wondering if an app is tracking you? Now you can see it directly in the Play store.

Thanks @aschrijver :wink:
This browser extension is only made possible thanks to the hard work of Exodus Privacy and their REST API! They are a great group, and putting such hard work, consider supporting them -> https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/

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A nice addition in a new 'Awareness` section on Humane Tech:

Awareness

This application shows how much information can be derived from the personal data people carelessly provide to social networks (in this case FB). Check the video on how it works:

Note: If considering using for yourself, read the privacy statement and know that in order to analyse your data, some of it is forwarded to 3rd party services (IBM Watson and University of Cambridge… no not Cambridge Analytica :wink:). Therefore I’ve mentioned the privacy statement in the description of the awesome list.

The latest Humane Tech additions:

Privacy

  • ConsentCookie | github - Customizable script that allow users to opt-in for cookies on a case-by-case basis.
  • Mozilla Contain-Facebook - Firefox plugin to prevent tracking outside of the Facebook website via 3rd-party cookies.

Awareness

  • Chomper | github - Command-line internet blocker for the Linux desktop.
  • hack-an-engineer | github - Examples of intentional and unintentional hacks of software engineering media sources.

I highly recommend DuckDuckGo. It’s just awesome, and they’ve just released an outstanding new browser extension that actually blocks trackers.

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Thanks @anon76657042, I am using DDG almost exclusively (only for sporadic bad results I check Google, see if they are doing better) and fully agree!

But this awesome list is primarily for humane OSS projects, not humane tech products in general :slight_smile:

Really? Because the title of the Github page is “Awesome Humane Tech”. Seems to me that it is about human tech in general.

I am finding many thread unintelligible many threads because of the use of acronyms. I have no idea what is being said. What is OSS? I have no idea what you mean. I think anyone reading this and seeing “DDG” would have absolutely no idea what that means. There is another thread full of acronyms as well where I didn’t understand what was being written. Thanks.

Sorry, you are right, I use acronyms too easily :slight_smile:

DDG was in reference to your post above… the acronym for DuckDuckGo (while ‘googling’ is a word, saying “I am going to DuckDuckGo it” is a bit clumsy)

OSS means Open Source Software.

Regarding Github. Its the largest collection of open-source projects worldwide, targeted to software developers.

Most awesome lists deal mostly with OSS (though not always and this is not a requirement). The introductory paragraph in this list describes its purpose.

@aschrijver You’re right about sticking to open source. When it’s not fully open source you never know what the real intentions are.

DuckDuckGo for example they’re for-profit just like Google. They made an estimated USD $7 million revenue last year which supports 45 employees. DuckDuckGo tries to make the appearance that they are different, but are they really? They are funded by venture capital, and the founder previously made $10 million by an SEO website which listed random names and name misspellings in the web’s wild days. So we have to be very careful. Many services imply they are doing good, but are they humane tech? Or just a slight improvement, or just an alternative to the big monopolies?

I wouldn’t trust any company with investors, that’s for sure.

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And slowly the Humane Tech list is growing. Some nice additions:

Privacy

  • Fair Analytics - A Google Analytics-alike server that doesn’t undermine user’s privacy.
  • Privacy Respecting - A curated list of privacy-respecting Services and Software.
  • Hosts - Consolidates several reputable hosts files, and merges them into a single unified one.
  • Blocklists - Shared lists of problem domains people may want to block with hosts files.

Hosts and Blocklists are nice (and sometimes better) alternatives than ads/tracking blockers.
Parents may consider this as a means not easily detected by your tech-savvy kids :wink:
Blocklists contains very specific hosts file examples that explicitly block e.g. everyting-Facebook.

Social networks

Two more additions to humane tech. One is a beautiful substitute for Google Analytics. Measure exactly what users are doing on your site or in your app, without invading their privacy by having Google aggregate and collect all of this information.

Privacy

  • Matomo | github - The leading open alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data.
  • Referrer Spam Blacklist | github - Community-contributed list of referrer spammers.

Thanks for the list @aschrijver very useful.

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Love the badge; thanks for making it.

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Thank you, @patm :slight_smile:

One new entry to the list. One entry Chomper by one of our own member @aniket has been moved to Mindfulness category.

Social networks

  • Granary | github - The social web translator that breaks silo’s by converting data between social networks.

Mindfulness

  • Chomper | github - Internet blocker for Linux with whitelists, blacklists and timers to help you be more productive while working.
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Thank you @john! You maintain a very nice list. I have added it to the ‘Related awesomeness’ section :slight_smile:

Would you be willing to include a link back in your ‘Other lists’ section and/or a link to CHT in the ‘Organizations’ section? That would be great. I can PR if you want…

Related awesomeness

The latest addition to Humane Tech is a browser extension that automatically strips Google Analytics (UTM) querystring parameters.

What are those? They are added by many sites that use Google analytics and are automatically added to URL’s in the page, and also come from links you copy from mail messages. They are the utm_* statements after the question mark on the URL. Google uses this to determine that the URL came from you. For this purpose it includes ID’s and the like. Anyone clicking such link will send the parameters to the domain specified in the URL, where Google Analytics picks up this information.

When you use URL’s elsewhere having these parameters then Google can detect that and track you across sites, as well as the people who click on them (and determine those you have reached by your link sharing).

Privacy

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Hey @aschrijver! Could you please add to your GitHub list a link or links about Validbook. It is not for profit and open source project. Here are the main links:
Validbook description and “Proposal to Cooperate” - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2018May/0024.html
Validbook alpha - http://futurama1x.validbook.org/
GitHub code repositories - https://github.com/ValidbookFoundation

I am not sure, to what category Validbook should be added. Although, primary service among Validbook Services is Validbook social - a social networking service. Validbook as whole is not just and mainly not about social networking. It is based on a more abstract, higher level paradigm of optimizing cooperation levels among humans, things and virtual entities. Functionaly, it is a set of cooperation services like - service to create Self-Sovereign Identity, Digital Documents Signing Service, Social Networking Service, etc. More in this post - Validbook - a universal platform for cooperation