How we vet, rank, and stay honest.
Default Privacy lists 870+privacy tools. This is how a tool earns a place, what our labels mean, how the free checks work — and why money can't move any of it.
How a tool earns a listing
Evidence in, not marketing.
Listed on merit, never paid placement
No one can buy a listing, a ranking, or a badge. Where an outbound link is an affiliate link, we mark it as such — and it never changes whether or where a tool appears.
Checked against the tool's own record
Each entry is built from the tool's public materials — its site, source repository, documentation, and audit reports where they exist. Attributes are set from that evidence, not from marketing claims.
Attributes you can filter on
We surface the facts that change a privacy decision: open-source, no-KYC, security-audited, accepts-crypto, platform, and jurisdiction. Each is a claim you can check, not a vibe.
Honest about limits
No tool makes you invisible. We describe what a tool does and where it stops, and we flag tools that are deprecated or no longer maintained rather than quietly leaving them up.
How the free tools work
What each check reads — and what it never touches.
Every free tool runs on public signals or in your own browser. No account, and nothing you enter is stored.
- Password Strength Analyzer
- Runs entirely in your browser via Dropbox's zxcvbn. Your password is never sent to a server; breach lookups use a k-anonymity hash prefix, never the full password.
- Privacy Scanner
- Loads a public URL server-side and reports the trackers, cookies, third-party requests, and security headers it observes — a snapshot of that page at scan time, not a verdict on the company.
- Breach Check
- Queries the Have I Been Pwned database for a personal email and returns the known breaches it appears in, with recovery steps.
- Email Security Checker
- Reads a domain's public SPF, DKIM, and DMARC DNS records and grades how well they block spoofing. It inspects published records only — it never touches mail content.
- WHOIS Privacy Checker
- Reads a domain's public WHOIS record and reports whether registrant details are exposed or privacy-protected.
- DNS Leak Test
- Observes which DNS resolvers actually answered your device's lookups, so you can see whether queries are escaping your VPN.
Found something wrong?
Every tool page has a Suggest Edit and Report Issuelink. Attributes change when the evidence does — a maintainer drops open-source, an audit lands, a project is abandoned. Tell us and we'll correct it.
Browse the directoryWho's behind this
Default Privacy is an independent privacy-tools directory — not owned by, or beholden to, any tool it lists. We make no money from placements. Default Privacy is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.
Last reviewed 2026-07-11