While they often are, there’s no rule that web apps have to be a privacy nightmare.
Thanks to Hacker News¹, I recently came across Learn systemd by example². The site itself is hosted by Hetzner, a German hosting provider that take user privacy seriously³ and uses Cloudflare as a privacy-conscious CDN⁴. The only third-party resources it uses are Google fonts. Users of uMatrix⁵ or uBlock Origin⁶ can easily block these resources and the web app works perfectly fine without them.
I’d also use Wordle itself as an example of a reasonably user-privacy friendly web application. The only third-party resources it uses is Google Tag Manager (which is blocked by default by uMatrix).
I use Firefox with a number of web extensions (Firefox Multi-Account Containers⁷, Decentraleyes⁸, uMatrix, uBlock Origin, Privacy Redirect⁹). These all provide me, an end-user, much greater control over my online privacy than I’d have with a mobile app. I’ve also recommended Decentraleyes and uBlock Origin to non-technical friends as extensions they can install and not worry about configuration.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071240
2. https://systemd-by-example.com/
3. https://www.hetzner.com/legal/privacy-policy
4. https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/
5. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
6. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin
7. https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers#readme
8. https://decentraleyes.org/
9. https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect