crystallised-circuits:

Internet Safety

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. 

UPDATE #1 (9/8/20): I started using Vivaldi and goddammit is it brilliant!!! Extreme customisation, it’s chromium-based so you have all your fancy Chrome extensions and it has a lovely mobile app too. My current browser setup on both desktop and mobile is Vivaldi with Firefox as a backup, both with DuckDuckGo and adblockers.

sleepy-eclectic-dreaming-witch:

Regarding the update of privacy laws and stuff

Just a quick reminder that y’all should always be mindful of what you post online. I’m seeing the posts about how to disable the cookie sharing and stuff, and I wanna say that even if you do that, you never should forget that the internet is very much an open-access place, and companies/people can and will take what you put on here voluntarily and use it for their own means; whether that is legally or not.

It is very easy to believe that privacy laws and the like will protect us, even if you have to jump through a ridiculous amount of loops to enable that privacy. But as someone who has given too freely and trusted too much in the past (and subsequently had that trust taken advantage of), don’t forget to think critically.

What is it you’re sharing? Why are you sharing it? How will it reach your targeted audience? WILL it reach ypur targeted audience? Can it be used against you? WILL it be used against you? Can it be manipulated? Can it be taken out of context? If you offer up this information, how could it be recieved? For what purposes could it be exploited? Is this something you are prepared to have immortalized on the free web? Is this something you will be able to change or retract? And if you can’t change or retract it, are you sure you want to be putting it out there in the first place?

I’m not saying don’t trust. I’m not trying to fearmonger, or make every single post a huge anxiety-inducing thing. All I am saying is don’t trust too easily. Be prepared for consequences, even ones you may not be able to forsee right now.

Your privacy should be taken seriously by websites, but we all know that a few words in a terms and conditions contract – that most of us don’t even read – could mean the selling of everything you choose to trust these sites with; and it will be entirely legal for them to exploit you that way. And there are others who will do the same thing, but skirt the law in the process.

Only you can truly protect your privacy online by being selective about what sites you join and what you choose to share on them. So be careful out there.

amethyst-wind-uk:

They are built in to the sites themselves. It’s ubiquitous. Websites are literally built with these things as their foundations.

It’s disgusting.

fastestvpnguide:

Need
a bit of extra online privacy? I have three letters for you: VPN. And
if you’re going for extra credit, go with a provider in an internet
privacy friendly country (yes, a few still exist). I’m talking about
places like Panama, Romania or Sweden.