Be careful using Google, Twitter, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, Microsoft, YouTube and Facebook – All these sites (and more) are thought to collect huge amounts of data on you, which they sell to advertisers and allow access to government agencies. Limit or stop all use of these services. Instead of using Google search try DuckDuckGo.com, a free software project that doesn’t profile or track search queries. Use FIREFOX – There’s not much difference between the big browsers, but Firefox is the most open. It is open source and it’s not owned by a giant corp that’s part of the PRISM surveillance program like Apple (Safari) and Google (Chrome). Use FIREFOX ADD-ONs – There are various ways you’re tracked on the internet, including the browser version you use, your OS, the fonts on your system, your browsing patterns, as well as things like JavaScript and other plugins. Here are a few Firefox extensions that will, hopefully, mitigate some of that:
- NOSCRIPT. A free, open source extension that blocks JavaScript, fonts and other plugins from loading automatically; as the name suggests, there are no scripts allowed.
- HTTPS Everywhere. A web browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, a collaboration by The Tor project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its purpose is to automatically make websites use the more secure HTTPS connection instead of HTTP.”
- AdBlock Plus. This is another extension similar to Ghostery, but aimed at automatically blocking ads – it also blocks ad servers from tracking you.
- Ghostery. Allows users to detect and control web bugs which are objects embedded in a web page, invisible to the user, that allow the collection of data on the user’s browsing habits.” This means it stops the various servers owned by large corps such as Google, Facebook, Twitter from automatically tracking when you visit a website with their embedded code in it.
