Welcome to ffs.cx. If you've found your way here, you're probably at least a little curious about your online privacy, maybe frustrated by it, or just starting to pay attention. Either way, you're in the right place.
A while back I downloaded 1Blocker on my iPhone. If you haven't used it, it's an ad and tracker blocker that shows you a live log of everything it's blocking. Later that day I opened it to check the list of blocked trackers and was shocked with what I saw. By the end of the week it had blocked around 1,700 trackers and by the end of the month it was up to about 9,000.
Every app used. Every website visited. Dozens of trackers, firing constantly, sending data to companies I'd never heard of. Analytics platforms, advertising networks, and data brokers all quietly running in the background of my everyday digital life. I knew tracking existed in some sense, but seeing it laid out in real time was something else entirely. It made it feel real in a way that reading about it never really could.
That's where it began. I started looking into it properly, what was actually being collected, who was collecting it, and what I could do about it. And that's when I ran started to reazlie a big problem.
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Most of the content I found was either too complicated or too compromised to be useful.
The "too complicated" side is easy to understand if you've spent any time in privacy communities. A lot of the people who are passionate about this stuff are also deeply technical, and their advice tends to reflect that. Self-hosted servers, custom DNS configurations, and threat modelling frameworks are all valuable, but completely inaccessible if you're just a regular person getting started who doesn't want their phone reporting back to seventeen ad networks.
The "too compromised" side is subtler but arguably worse. Searching for almost any privacy tool and you'll find dozens of YouTube videos and blog posts ranking the "best" options. What most of them don't tell you, or bury in small print, is that they earn a commission every time someone signs up through their links. The VPN space is particularly bad for this. The "best VPN" recommendations you find are largely a function of which VPN providers have the most generous affiliate programs, not which ones are actually worth using.
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So I built ffs.cx to be the thing I couldn't find when I was starting out.
The idea is simple: honest reviews of privacy tools, written for normal people, with no financial stake in what you choose. No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No one paying to appear at the top of a list. Just an attempt to cut through the noise and give people straightforward, accurate information about what actually works and what's worth their time.
I'm not a security researcher or a professional auditor. I'm just someone who got genuinely curious about this, went down the rabbit hole, and wanted to share what I found in a way that's actually useful to people who aren't already deep in it.
If that sounds like something you've been looking for, you're in the right place. A good starting point is the <a href="wts.php" class="content-link">Getting Started</a> page if you're new to all of this. Or browse the service categories if you're looking for something specific.
And if you ever think I've got something wrong, or there's a tool worth reviewing that I haven't covered, please <a href="contact.php" class="content-link">get in touch</a>. That's how this gets better.