crystallised-circuits:

Yeah, I know, you’ve all sat through the talks at school telling you never to tell strangers your credit card details or whatever. But it has come to my attention that there are a worrying number of people who don’t know the actual practical things you can do to stay safe and secure while on the web. These tips cover invasions of privacy from anybody including big companies and hackers. It’s probably worthwhile to give ‘em a go.

Personal Safety

• Password Safety – Use a different password for every website. I’m not kidding. If you think you’ll struggle to remember that many, you have two options. Firstly, you can use a password manager such as OnePassword, which is probably the safest option. If you’re like me and can’t quite bring yourself to trust one (there’s no reason not to, it just doesn’t sit right with me) you can use variations on a password for unimportant sites, and then come up with secure ones for sites you share more personal info with. 
• Have I Been Pwned? – This is a website which tells you if your email has been involved in a data breach. Don’t worry if you have been pwned – you have different passwords for everything, remember! Just be aware of what data has been leaked, and change a password or two if necessary. Sign up for their email notifications to stay on top of recent breaches.
• ProtonVPN – A VPN, if you don’t know, stands for virtual private network. Picture all the different connections between devices in a network, linked through WiFi or cables, as highways. VPNs section off a lane for your own private use, so nobody can see what you’re sending or receiving. It’s unlikely that anyone will be looking on your home network, but on public WiFi networks it’s important to prevent anyone seeing anything they shouldn’t – it’s not hard to packet sniff! You can also use them to bypass school and workplace website blocking, and access sites blocked in your country. Obviously ProtonVPN isn’t the only one, but I’d recommend em as they encrypt everything and have some pretty beefy systems in place to prevent tracking. It’s available on all devices for free.
• ProtonMail – Yes, yes, more ProtonStuff, but this is a really good one. I’ll get onto why Google tracking you is a bad thing later, but if you want to break out of Google’s ecosystem, ProtonMail is a good alternative to GMail. It encrypts all your emails, which means nobody intercepting the email will know what it says. That means it’s great for private matters that you want to keep secret or avoid Google telling people about, like banking and stuff. It’s also a bit more customisable than GMail.
• Social Media Checkup – Do you know exactly how much someone can find out about you, just by looking at your social media? Facebook is a special offender for that one (I don’t even have an account there anymore – and dear lord was deleting it a struggle) but Insta, Snapchat, Twitter and yes, even Tumblr, might provide a creep more info than you bargained for. Think about how much you want to make public, or how much the app has on you at all. There are plenty of tutorials on how to adjust your settings.
• HTTPS Everywhere – A very handy extension that forces websites to encrypt all your data as you send it back and forth.

Avoiding Tracking

• Why? – I know it might seem weird that a large company, or even the government, might want to keep track of little old you. Sure, they can target you with relevant ads, but whatever, you use an ad-blocker anyway. That is, until you realise that behind the scenes, on almost every website you visit, data-brokers are collecting info on you and what you do online, and building a profile of you. It’s not anonymous. And it can be used for anything from determining your creditworthiness and insurance premiums to detailed surveillance. Yeah. With all the protests going on lately, it would make sense to keep these people from learning about you for your own safety and your future.
• DuckDuckGo – Start by using this search engine instead of Google, and installing the Privacy Essentials extension. It’s a good search engine, for one thing. For another, it prevents tracking and lets you know whose schemes you’ve foiled, you meddling kid. It gives each site you visit a privacy rating, and lets you know how much it’s increased that by. For example, Tumblr usually receives a D, but DuckDuckGo has blocked some trackers and improved it to a B. It has also informed me that trackers have been found and dealt with on over 50% of the websites I visit. Google is unsurprisingly the main culprit.
• Alternative Browsers – There are lots of things you can use instead of Chrome, and many of them work really well! I recommend Firefox, since it’s almost exactly like Chrome but open-source, and it also protects you from trackers and has lots of fun extensions. There are some other good PC ones too like Opera and Vivaldi, but I haven’t used them before so I wouldn’t know how good they are. DuckDuckGo has its own mobile browser which is currently my main one.
• Adblockers – You can’t get targeted ads if you don’t get ads! You can choose who to show ads for too, so if you want to support a certain site you can whitelist them. Try UBlock Origin, or Adblock Plus. Install ‘em as extensions for whatever browser you’re using.
• Privacy Checkup – Go through your Google account with a fine-toothed comb and check what is being tracked about you. Pause your YouTube history, your Maps history, your Google Assistant history. Clear what you can. Check Amazon too. Also, never ever use Cortana or Siri or Alexa or anything like that. Ever. No matter how cool having a robot assistant is.

And that should be that! I’ll try to keep updating this post with new tips as I find them, but this is everything I do for the minute to ensure I’m protected online.