Last week, we looked at some quick easy wins to improve your privacy in just a few minutes (post linked in the thread). This week, browsers, searching and cleaning up your digital footprint.
I’m spending a few weeks stepping through the Privacy Toolkit from
@bitcoinpolicyuk. This has been thrown into even sharper relief this week by the comments of the incoming head of
@Ofcom (the UK’s censorship quango), who sees VPNs as a ‘problem’ and deliberately hasn’t met with any tech companies before formulating policy for a sector he clearly doesn’t understand.
What is also clear is that they want to know absolutely everything about you, at all times, whether you want them to or not. So it’s up to us all to tell them, “No, actually”.
The Chrome browser sends to Google far more information about you, and about your search history, than you might like. The simplest fix is to switch to software and search engines that collect less information; such as
@brave.
For those in censorship-heavy countries (like the UK) the
@opera browser is another option; it has a built-in VPN that you can toggle on and off, and you can greatly restrict the amount of data that is gathered about you. Using
@DuckDuckGo as either your browser, or your default search engine in your browser of choice, is another simple fix.
For maximum privacy, use
@torproject’s Tor Browser. It’s slower, but much more private and secure. And you can easily circumvent any restrictions that the censorship junkies want to put in your way.
Finally, in order to scrub some of your personal information that might already have been stolen or sold, check out services such as DeleteMe (
@joindeleteme) or Incogni (links to both in the thread). These will remove as much information on you from data brokers as they can.
Next week - email and password habits to improve….
Privacy, and our basic freedoms, are under attack from all sides.
Incredibly, the so-called 'liberal democracies' are now leading these attacks; arresting their own citizens for posting online, rolling out facial recognition cameras, and moving to ban VPNs.
"What can men do against such reckless hate?" And are we losing this battle?
Absolutely not. There's still time to fight back, and we have much in our arsenal. We at
@bitcoinpolicyuk have put together a 'Privacy Toolkit', that should let anyone, whatever their skill level, take a few small steps towards improving their privacy and their freedom, and making themselves just a little bit harder for governments to track and to oppress.
This isn't comprehensive, and we'll continue to update it as time goes by. We hope it's useful to everyone and serves as a handy guide to help us all push back against government overreach, wherever we find it.
Link in the thread and comments welcome! 👇