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As the internet becomes more tangled with daily life, it becomes increasingly important to watch how you protect yourself. Trusting websites, browsers, and internet service providers is not enough. As an empowered internet user, it is your responsibility.
The industry is dedicated to monitoring and combining people’s data in order to target them more efficiently with advertising.
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
? Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life
This tracking takes place in several ways, including physically, as we carry our phones with us everywhere we go. In addition, all of our online operations are virtually monitored.
Here are four ways to increase your privacy:
TOR
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship. That’s their motto.
The Tor Browser is a web browser that uses the Tor network to anonymize your web traffic, making it easy to protect your privacy online.
This makes it possible to read the news anonymously, a desirable feature in a country where you don’t want the government knowing which news sites you’re reading, when you’re reading them, and for how long.
Such caveats: Tor’s web browsing is slower than your daily browsers, and some big web providers block Tor users. Tor Browser is also illegal in oppressive regimes that want people not to read, write and communicate anonymously. Journalists and dissidents around the world today welcomed Tor as a pillar of democracy online, and researchers are struggling to improve Tor’s privacy properties.
Signal
You may have heard the mantra, “Use Signal, use Tor.”
The signal is the best-of-breed encrypted messaging software that allows you to send text messages, voice notes, voice calls, and audio calls. Under the hood, it uses cryptography that, to the best of our knowledge, not even the National Security Agency can brute-force.
Proton Mail
ProtonMail is a secure email service designed to protect your inbox and identity.
Although all major email services claim to respect your privacy, ProtonMail goes beyond others to protect you. That’s what makes the major email providers like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com different. ProtonMail encrypts all server data to make it useless without the key to decrypt it. ProtonMail cannot read your email.
Besides being unable to read the email stored on their servers, ProtonMail is headquartered in Switzerland where privacy laws are notoriously strict. This means ProtonMail cannot be compelled to give data to U.S. authorities because Switzerland is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing deal between the U.S., Canada, Australia, UK, and New Zealand.
Privacy Coins
Privacy coins are unique cryptocurrencies allowing a consumer to achieve anonymity while making blockchain transactions. User identity and origin of transactions are fully secured. These coins allow senders and receivers to remain anonymous with various privacy levels, such as secret wallet addresses and transaction balances. Payments remain private with privacy coins.
It is estimated that the cryptocurrency market today offers 78 different privacy coins. Although each project certainly wants to provide as much privacy as possible, the fact is that five projects dominate. Included are:
- Monero
- Dash
- Zcash
- Bitcoin Private
Private transactions do not inherently encourage malicious practices like money laundering and terrorist funding. Some consumers simply appreciate their financial privacy and exercise their constitutional rights, but the number of government agencies clamping on untraceable digital currencies is steadily increasing. Interestingly, many well-known individuals like Naval Ravikant, Elon Musk are still advocating privacy-focused applications.
Conclusion
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
? Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
We’re going to be long on the internet. The more we understand how our data is collected and used — and how to keep secret what we want to keep private — the richer, safer, and healthier our digital lives would be.
It’s really hard to be completely anonymous on the internet. But by applying them, we can increase our privacy.
