Nobody wants their privacy invaded, and the whole point of the internet is anonymity and privacy itself.
As time goes by, we’re slowly being cheated of our privacy, and little by little not only are we losing it, it’s also being shared around and even sold to major corporations. And let’s not forget the hackers and other cyber criminals that might want to track your activities while they’re thinking up ways to get something of yours for themselves. So, what can be done about it? Keep on reading, and find out. Here are ten tips on how to avoid being tracked on the web.
Terms of Service Agreements
Whenever you go to some website, and you decide to create an account, you fill up the form, write in your email, choose your password, and then you have to click that little box where it says that you agree to the Terms of Service. Most people just checks the little box and moves on, and they have no idea what they agreed with. Don’t be one of those people, check it out and know what you’re getting yourself into, because everyone counts on you not reading the details, and they might write anything in there.
Change your search engine
If you don’t want to have even your search engine tracking you, you might want to change your online habits. Search engines like Startpage or DuckDuckGo are what you want to use if you want your searches to remain private, while settings like Google’s Incognito or Microsoft’s Do Not Track don’t always do what they’re supposed to. The decision whether you’ll be tracked or not is often left to the websites you’re visiting, and there are no laws about respecting the Do Not Track requests.
Install browser add-ons
Browsers often have a bunch of add-ons that might help with keeping your data secure, and the ones like Privacyfix, Ghostery, Do Not Track Plus and similar ones can allow you to decide who you want to allow to track you, or if you want to deny tracking of your online activities to everyone.
Use VPNs or Tor network
VPN like TorGuard, GhostVPN, IPVanish or PIA are a perfect option if you wish complete anonymity and protection online. They’ll hide your IP address, encrypt your data, protect you from malware and hackers and more. Tor network is a good option as well, but it works in a different way. Where VPN encrypts your data, Tor will hide it by sending it around the world so that in can’t be tracked back to you. And, it’s free, while VPNs cost a bit. On the other hand, Tor comes with a lot of restrictions, for example, you won’t be able to use Google if you want this to work, while VPN allows you to keep everything the same, the only difference is that you’ll now have a new app that needs to be started before you get to your browsing session.
Read what you agree on when downloading smartphone Apps
All apps need to ask for some things when you start downloading them. And many of them ask for a lot of it. Like, your GPS and access to other private information. Facebook even downloads your entire contacts list. If you want to find out which apps are taking your data, and what is it that they’re taking, try www.mypermissions.org.
Adjust Facebook privacy settings
There are a lot of settings on Facebook, especially when it comes to adjusting your privacy. For the best effect and maximum safety, you should probably make the people in your friends list be the only ones who can see your info. If your privacy is set to Friends of Friends, that includes thousands upon thousands of people, and that’s not private, nor safe, at all.
Use different email addresses
It’s probably a good idea to have one email for your work, another for personal correspondence, and the third one for online stores and similar things. That way, if one of them is compromised, not everything is lost, and it also makes it harder for companies to profile you. Another option is cloaking devices for emails, like Gliph.
Create different passwords for each account
Whenever you create a new account, you need to think of a password that you’ll use to access it. And even though one password seems like a good idea, it’s really not. Imagine if someone figured out your Facebook password, and you put the same one everywhere else, let’s say on your email, Twitter, Instagram and so on. The person who figured out your password now has access to all those other places as well. So remember different passwords, and the more complicated the better.
Clear out the cookies and caches
Websites that use cookies have you constantly get them on your device, and those can be used for tracking you for months on end unless you clean them all up on regular basis. They aren’t the only thing that the companies use, but cleaning them up is one step towards your safety.
Remove your data from data brokers
In order to do this, you can use different services, like Catalog Choice, DeleteMe or Safe Shepherd. There is a monthly fee, however, and the online profile won’t be entirely removed, but every bit helps.
Those are some of the things that you can do to make it harder for the companies to track you and study your behavior. Not all of them are free, or perfect solutions, but with several combined, you should be perfectly secure and safe during your time on the Web.
