Internet privacy: the apps that protect you from your apps

Tech companies don’t have favourite songs, but if they did, they would all pick Radiohead’s Just – “You do it to yourself, you do/ And that’s what really hurts,” they would croon, staring their users dead in the eye. And strictly speaking, they’d be right: many of the worst excesses of the industry are, technically, optional. The world isn’t actually a binary choice between living in a surveillance state and opting out of all technological development since the turn of the millennium. You can opt out – you just have to know how. Of course, that knowledge is not always easily acquired, nor is it necessarily easy to apply. So a new breed of services has arrived to try to help normal users take control of their digital lives.

Companies including Disconnect.Me and Jumbo act as something like a digital concierge for their users, tweaking privacy settings, deleting sensitive data and throwing a spanner into the inner workings of surveillance capitalism. […]

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