Search & Browsing
Ever wondered why adverts for items you have previously searched for using Google seem to follow you around the web and appear constantly?
Google is thought to be a search engine – it’s not; it’s an advertising giant with its own power plants and huge data stores
Your search history and habits are recorded, stored, analysed, and sold on to anyone who will pay Google for the information; this is how Google generates huge revenues,
Your data is not only sold on to advertisers, it’s recorded, analysed and accessible to most of the “Western World’s governments”
Do you ever think that others may be reading your emails? Short answer is yes – every single email is recorded, stored and analysed
Ever heard of the “PRISM Surveillance Program” – look it up and think about what privacy means to you
Text Messages
Well – what do you think?
Yes – they are all captured, stored, read and analysed
Two “Secure” Browsers & a Search Engine
There are others, but I personally like these three
DuckDuckGo.com
DuckDuckGo is one of the most successful privacy oriented search engines that stands as an alternative to Google. It uses “sponsored links” to display the advertisements but the ads are not focused on you but only the topic you are searching for – so there is nothing that could generate a profile of you in any manner – thereby respecting your privacy.
It lets you select a country to get the most relevant result you may be looking for.
Although, you might miss quite a few functionalities (like filtering images by license) – that is an obvious trade-off to protect your privacy.
Qwant.com
Qwant is probably the second most loved privacy oriented search engines after DuckDuckGo; it ensures neutrality, privacy, and digital freedom while you search for something on the Internet.
If you thought privacy-oriented search engines generally tend to offer a very casual user experience, you need to rethink after trying out Qwant. This is a very dynamic search engine with trending topics and news stories organized very well.
Firefox.com with Add-ons
There’s not much difference between the three browsers, but Firefox is the possibly the most common.
NOSCRIPT is a free, open source extension that blocks JavaScript, fonts and other plug-ins from loading automatically; as the name suggests, there are no scripts allowed.
HTTPS Everywhere is 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 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.
Encrypted Email
There are others, but I personally like these two
Tutanota.com
Tutanota is an encrypted email service that protects your right to privacy by offering seamless email encryption. They have improved Tutanota so much that there is no reason any-more to still use Gmail, Yahoo, GMX or other email services that can read your emails and harvest your data.
ProtonMail.com
ProtonMail writes about an increasing number of users looking for an alternative to Gmail
Messages are stored and transmitted in encrypted format between our servers and user devices. Messages between ProtonMail users are also transmitted in encrypted form within the secure server network which minimises the risk of message interception. The zero access architecture means that user email data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to the company – great idea, but if you lose your password they cannot recover your data.
Encrypted Chat, Text, Video etc
Have a look at this –
Signal.org
Signal messages and calls are always end-to-end encrypted and engineered to keep your communication safe. They can’t read your messages or see your calls, and no one else can either. You can keep your chat history tidy with messages that you can set to disappear.
I’m passionate about privacy – so I’ve listed a few things above for you to go and figure out for yourself – please pick up the privacy baton …. tell others as it is important