Remember back in the day when we were worried about Big Brother government's intrusiveness into our personal affairs? Well nothing's changed. We know this, thanks in part to Edward Snowden's heroic disclosures. It's just been made much easier to tap us because of our online lifestyles.
In my opinion, though, as for spying and privacy violations, the average citizen has more to worry from the private sector. (Unless of course you're Muslim, affiliated with one of our enemies du jour, or cross swords with government policies.)
Your browsing habits are now for sale
Case in point: If you've been following the news, President Trump signed a bill in April that permits ISPs (Internet service providers), like Oceanic Time Warner and Hawaiian Telcom, to sell your browsing habits to marketers. This is akin to your phone service provider listening to your phone conversations, then selling those transcriptions to telemarketers.
Here are some tips to protect your privacy in this age of exploitation and plunder of personal data.
Use a VPN
If you don't want ISPs or others (like governments or hackers) to examine the details of your Internet usage, you can surf anonymously by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service. Of course, you have to trust the VPN provider. Here's one site that recently reviewed VPN services: https://goo.gl/jVqcrB. (I'm currently test-driving a VPN service called NordVPN.)
Here 10 reasons to hide your IP with a VPN: https://goo.gl/n39uE9
Use HTTPS Everywhere
This browser extension is provided freely by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When installed, it forces encrypted connections to https (encrypted) websites you visit, and when fully enabled, will block all unencrypted requests. You can read about this tool and get it here: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Disable Third-party cookies
Be aware cookies are little pieces of data sent by a website and stored in your browser. Third-party cookies are cookies placed in your browser by a website other than the one you're visiting. This occurs when you visit a website and their advertiser(s) set a cookie, which allows that advertiser to track your visits to other websites. Here's a link explaining how to block third-party cookies. https://goo.gl/PnAXt3
Read provider privacy and data use policies
Do this for any service you use, including Google, Facebook, travel booking services, your ISP, etc. They all BADLY want to know as much about you as possible so they and/or their partners can get you to open your wallet and spend, spend, spend! As an example, here's what Google does with their users' data: https://goo.gl/LPEHv2
Of course whatever measures we take to shield our privacy will be met with countermeasures. There's too much money at stake to expect otherwise. So if data privacy is important to you, you've got to stay current with protection measures.
Wishing you an inconspicuous day in cyberspace!
Thanks for reading.
Sam
---
If you haven't already, you can subscribe to our email tips by visiting www.kokuadigital.com and entering your name, email, and "add to email list" in the request form, then click Send.
