How to protect your digital privacy?

How to protect your digital privacy?

How to protect your digital privacy? 

No matter how or for what reason you are using the internet, it is guaranteed that you will be tracked online by most of the services you are using. Almost all sites keep the track of your behavior on their site. What site you surf, what were the items you searched etc. all being tracked and are used by the site for their own benefits. Surely this tracking by different sites are generally used to help us, but it is also not a good idea if it done without the user’s permission.

Here in this article, we are going to discuss some of the ways by which we can protect our digital privacy.

Here are some of the ways by which we can protect our digital privacy:

1. Disable Cookies

Cookies are a small piece of data that are stored in your computer. Cookies are used to store information about your browsing activities. Information’s like names, passwords, and items in your shopping cart list etc. most secure sites usually use secure cookies, but most website’s cookies are not secure at all and lack any form of encryptions.

By disabling cookies we can prevent such insecure sites to gather information’s from our computer. Cookies should be enabled for those sites which you follow very often and are secure and safe to use.

Both desktop and mobile browsers have the options to disable cookies.

2. Use a private browser window (Incognito window)

Incognito Mode

Most modern browsers like Mozilla, chrome etc have a private browsing window. When you use the private browsing window you search activities are not recorded or stored in the computer. And so it becomes difficult to track your online activities. Even though the information is not stored in your computer or search history, the ISP(Internet Service Provider) and the site you are surfingknows what you are surfing online. Even though this method is not the most secure one, it still better to use it for online privacy.

3. Use privacy-focused search engines

When you surf the internet, it better to use a search engine which doesn’t keep track of your browsing history. Search engines like Google and Bing keep track of the search history of their user. So people should use a search engine which doesn’t track their users and keep their search records secure. Some of the best privacy forced Search Engines are –

DuckDuckGo – It is the most used private search engine, it skips tracking on a user and provides a better search experience.

Start Page – Start Page source its results from Google but add an extra layer of privacy protection.

Qwant – It’s a France made private browser which helps to avoid filter bubble effects.

4. Use encrypted browsers

TOR-Encrypted Browser

Even though modern browsers like chrome, Firefox and Opera give us options to protect us from digital tracking, it still have a flaw when it comes to securing our digital life. However encrypted browser give us an extra layer of protection in these case.

Some of the good encrypted browsers are

1. Tor Browser
2. Epic Privacy Browser
3. Brave Browser

5. Use VPN (Virtual Private Network)

VPN

VPN allows a user to connect to the Internet using a virtual network. As a result, the data that you sent and receive are encrypted and no other services are able to track those data. It helps to remain anonymous on the internet and also helps to surf the sites which are censored by internet filters. Not all VPN services are safe to use, so before using it make sure that the VPN is encrypted and do not keep and logs. Always use VPN from a reputed company.

6. Use of Live USB operating system

Tails- Live Usb Operating System

A live USB is a flash drive or a disk which contains a full operating system. You just have to plug it in any computer and the OS will boot up as a regular Operating system. You can use any Linux distro which gives you the option to use a live feature. It helps to preserve your privacy and anonymity. You leave no trace on the computer you are using. Most such operating system comes with an encryption tool to encrypt your communication. A great example of such a privacy forced Linux operating system is Tails. Tail allows you to use the internet anonymously without leaving any trace and have some great cryptographic tools to encrypt your communication. You can download Tails from this site-HERE

So this are few way with which you can protect your online privacy. It’s a good practice to surf the internet using such tools and measures to help yourself being protected in this digital world.