As the Internet becomes entwined with everyday life, it's increasingly important to watch how you protect yourself. Trusting websites, browsers and ISPs is not enough. As an authorized Internet user, this is your responsibility.
The industry is dedicated to monitoring and combining people's data to target them more effectively with advertising.
"Those who can give up basic freedom for a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom nor safety."
– Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of a Life
This tracking takes place in several ways, including physically, as we carry our phones with us everywhere we go. In addition, all our online operations are virtually monitored.
Here are four ways to increase your privacy:
TOR
Protect yourself from tracking and surveillance. Bypass censorship. This is their motto.
Tor Browser is a web browser that uses the Tor network to anonymize your web traffic, making it easier 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 to know which news sites you read, when you read them, and for how long.
Such warnings: Surfing the Tor network is slower than your everyday browsers, and some major web providers block Tor users. Tor Browser is also illegal under oppressive regimes that want people to not read, write and communicate anonymously. Journalists and dissidents around the world today have hailed Tor as a pillar of online democracy, and researchers are scrambling to improve Tor's privacy features.
Signal
You may have heard the mantra "Use Signal, use Tor."
Signal is a best-of-breed messaging encryption software that lets you send text messages, voice memos, voice calls, and audio conversations. Under the hood, it uses cryptography that, as far as we know, not even the National Security Agency can brute force.
Proton Mail
ProtonMail is a secure email service designed to protect your mailbox and identity.
While all the major email services claim to respect your privacy, ProtonMail goes above and beyond to protect you. This is what makes different email providers like Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Outlook.com different. ProtonMail encrypts all server data to render it useless without the key to decrypt it. ProtonMail can't read your email.
Besides not being able to read the email stored on their servers, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, where privacy laws are extremely strict. This means ProtonMail cannot be forced to hand over data to US authorities, as Switzerland is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement between the US, Canada, Australia, Britain and New Zealand.
Privacy Coins
Privacy Coins are unique cryptocurrencies allowing the user to achieve anonymity while making blockchain transactions. User identity and origin of transactions are fully protected. These coins allow senders and receivers to remain anonymous with varying levels of privacy, 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. While each project certainly wants to provide as much privacy as possible, the fact is that five projects dominate. They are included:
- Monero
- Dash
- Zcash
- Bitcoin Private
Private transactions do not inherently encourage malicious practices such as money laundering and terrorist financing. Some users simply value their financial privacy and exercise their constitutional rights, but the number of government agencies enforcing untraceable digital currencies is constantly increasing. Interestingly, many celebrities like Naval Ravikant, Elon Musk are still championing privacy-focused apps.
Conclusion
"All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret."
– Gabriel García Márquez,
We will be on the Internet for a long time. The more we understand how our data is collected and used – and how to keep private 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 implementing them, we can increase our privacy.