Regardless of how you use the internet, it’s nearly guaranteed that you are being tracked in some way. Natalie Triedman recently shared how people, often unknowingly, are sharing their location. We aren’t saying that you should freak out and stop using the internet, but it’s a good idea to be smart about your browsing.
Follow these tips to start protecting your information online. We’ve included some quick steps that everyone can do, as well as some more difficult and advanced methods for keeping your web data secure.
Quick Ways To Protect Your Online Privacy
Disable Cookies
In case you aren’t familiar with how cookies work: they are little pieces of data stored on your computer. They are used to remember information (like items in your online shopping cart, names, passwords, etc.) about your browsing activity. More secure websites usually have more secure cookies, but other sites’ cookies lack any encryption at all.
You can choose the level of security you want to achieve by allowing some cookies, like only those from sites you visit often, or by completely blocking them.
Disabling cookies works both on desktop browsers and mobile browsers (like Safari for iOS & Google Chrome for Android).
Use A Private Browser Window
Most browsers — including Chrome, Firefox and Safari — offer some sort of private browsing window. Using these windows tells your browser not to save your browsing history and can isolate certain browsing so that it’s more difficult to link your browsing back to your other accounts.
When you use a private window, called Incognito window in Chrome, the browser won’t save your browsing data or activity, but the website, your employer or your internet service provider (ISP) will still see your activity. So, this isn’t a total protection of your information.
Use a Secure, Privacy-Focused Search Engine
There are quite a few options for private search engines. These search engines work differently than big search engines like Google or Yahoo, because their business model is completely different. Many of them rely on advertisements within the search results for revenue, rather than selling their users’ information.
These are some good options for privacy focused search engines:
- Search Encrypt – Search Encrypt uses local, client-side encryption to keep your search history private from other users on your devices.
- DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is the most well-known private search engine. It focuses on skipping tracking to provide a more user-focused search engine.
- StartPage – StartPage is a private search engine that sources its results from Google, with additional privacy protection measures.
- Qwant – Qwant is a “search engine that respects your privacy” based in France. It doesn’t track people’s searches, and it helps avoid the filter bubble effect.
Intermediate Methods for Protecting Your Internet Data
These methods aren’t necessarily “difficult”, as anyone with basic computer literacy could complete them. They will just take a few minutes to install or set up.
Install An Encrypted Browser
While most major browsers offer security features and allow users, somewhat, to protect their information, these take security to another level. These browsers have eliminated many non-essential features to provide a more secure (and minimalist) experience.
These are some good encrypted browsers to try:
Use A Virtual Private Network (VPN)
VPN, or virtual private networks, allow you to connect to the internet through a remote (or virtual) server. As a result, the data sent between your device and this server is securely encrypted. Using a VPN gives you privacy by hiding your internet behavior from both your ISP and any other group that may be tracking your browsing information. These also work to access blocked websites, that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to due to internet filters, at school or work.
There are quite a few solid options out there for VPNs. They typically cost between $5–10 per month. It can be handy to have a VPN, though, if you need to remotely access a server or a website that isn’t available, while travelling.
Read More: 22 VPN Services to Protect Your Privacy
DNS Leak Testing
While using a VPN, even if your IP address is hidden, it’s still possible to give clues about your identity via your DNS traffic. DNS works to turn a readable web address into an IP address that the computer understands. If information about this process is leaked, browsing information can be leaked. Luckily, there are tools that will tell you if your connection is leaking DNS data. Try DNSLeakTest.com to see if your connection is truly secure.
Advanced Methods of Protecting Your Data
Use Virtual Machines
Using VPNs and encrypted browsers will protect you from the majority of threats. Web browsers are one of the more vulnerable factors for data breaches. However, snooping and data scraping can occur through files like PDFs. While these files may appear harmless, they can act as homing beacons, and potentially alert monitoring entities when you are viewing the “contraband” file. Setting up a virtual machine, can help eliminate your risk.
Virtual machines are like having a separate operating system running within your computer. If a file is suspect, download it onto the virtual machine, disconnect from the internet, and open the file. This makes sure that even if the file is harmful, it won’t be effective for tracking or snooping on your computer.
VMWare and VirtualBox are two reliable and free virtualization solutions.
Use A Live USB Operating System
Live operating systems can be started on almost any computer from a USB stick or a DVD. Their goal is to maintain privacy and anonymity, or to work around censorship.
Tails, the live OS preference of Edward Snowden, uses cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, emails, and messages. And when you’ve finished using the system, simply unplug the USB or eject the DVD, and there will be no trace of your use on the host computer.
How Much Information Do You Share?
Regardless of how you feel about sharing your data with big companies like Google, it is important to at least understand the information you are sharing. These eight methods certainly won’t guarantee that your digital privacy is locked down completely, but they are a step in the right direction.
If you are looking for more information on how to protect yourself and your data from digital threats, Tobias van Schneider gives some good tips.
I wish people would stop recommending USB based operating systems.
Is it down to a lack of knowledge about the technology in use?
I can’t fathom it otherwise, because they are the least private operating systems there could possibly be!
‘Wear leveling’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling) means that data will get left all over the devices that the user will never be made aware of and even if they are aware of the risks will never be able to clean up unless they invest in the kind of tools necessary to extract such data – and anyone who knows enough to do that knows enough not to use a USB based operating system for privacy/anonymity in the first place!
This defeats the whole point of a privacy orientated operating system before you even boot it for the very first time.
If you want to use TAILS then burn it to CD/DVD and run it from there, with no swap partition/file use and, if possible, recompile it beforehand to make use of RAM encryption techniques like those used by Tresor and general hardening like GRSecurity, and implement ZRAM compression and similar to improve performance and reduce the risks.
Do *not* use it on USB or any other kind of Flash ‘memory’/storage device!
When we know that the search engines track our browsing data in form of cookies, why not it is being brought before common people publicly. So that it enables common users aware of the facts that they should be more vigilant while allowing accepting cookies from unreliable sources. Data security is going to be a next big deals.