Hi there, I’m quite new to this digital hygiene thing. I try to avoid apps on my phone that tracks useless data for their initial purpose. How do you guys read news ? Would love a “respectful” app that doesn’t track too much data, but I’m open to any solution. Would like to browse international and french news.
Ground News has a decent app that has minimal tracking, and location access can be blocked without the app refusing to work.
Does a RSS feed work for you?
I’ve been absolutely loving my FreshRSS and NetNewsWire set up. Even my local news is easily accessible in a feed for me, now.
Got my non-tech spouse on board, too. She’s been liking it.
I’ve never looked into RSS feeds, is it necessary to host your own? Can’t he just use NetNewsWire and subscribe to a public RSS?
Hosting a server doesn’t seem like a proper option for someone that is looking for a news app for their phone
NetNewsWire supports multiple methods for accounts – local, various cloud services, and self-hosted. And it is free. I highly recommend someone interested in RSS check the app out and subscribe to a few feeds.
Looking for some starter feeds to sub? Check out Feedspot’s RSS directory.
Hosting your own FreshRSS instance is totally optional, and is absolutely a proper option for someone privacy-focused. It doesn’t have to be a big, scary monster – simple options exist, e.g., using fly.io to host FreshRSS, as someone wrote about on this blog.
I like lire. It works with any of the popular feed syncing services, self-hosted, cloud-hosted, or it can just run locally on your phone. Also, when full text extraction works, it’s a gamechanger. Unfortunately some websites (like bleeping computer) block it.
Have you tried Apple’s included “News” app? I’m in the US, so I’m not sure how well it would work for you. But Apple generally doesn’t sell your data, although I’m sure they do analytics for internal use.
I use that, Ground News, and daily digest emails from my local city newspaper and the indie neighborhood news site.
