Privacy Protector

Advice recap: Three major tips to help you keep yourself safe and secure online

Welcome back, ya swashbuckling scholars. It’s time for a recap of last semester’s Privacy Protector.

For all the newbies out there, Privacy Protector (PP) is an instructional series meant to inform the technologically challenged on the basics of keeping information as private as possible while cruising the main streets and back alleys of the internet.

Pay attention, this stuff is important!

Every electronic device with internet access has an Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a unique number, like a fingerprint, used to identify each device that visits a website.

Companies like Google collect users’ IP address, track the sites they visit, and sell that information to private companies — a total privacy invasion.

A virtual private network (VPN) acts like a glove, making sure your IP address isn’t shared with websites you visit. Instead, a VPN routes your internet connection through a different IP address, which makes you appear to be surfing the net through a different device, in a different place.
Good VPNs are based outside the US, don’t log the sites you visit (snoop-proof), and cost around $6/month.

Most smart phone users know about Whatsapp, Viber, and other internet-texting apps. But close looks at privacy agreements for apps like Whatsapp can turn up discrepancies, raising questions about their practices.
Enter Signal, an open-source, online texting app with the same encryption technology Whasapp uses, minus the Facebook ownership.
Signal works just like Whatsapp, so the switch is easy.

For anything. As much as possible, anyway. Seriously.

Google is one of the biggest snoops on the internet. They have a history of privacy breaches under their belts, and have become increasingly untrustworthy.

We will explore the alternatives to Google’s myriad services in coming issues.

For now, use Startpage.com or DuckDuckGo.com as alternatives to Google’s search engine. StartPage allows you to use Google’s search engine without sharing your IP address.

Remember, there is no way to surf the net in complete anonymity. For more information on the aforementioned tools, go to PrivacyTools.io.

Stay tuned for future installments of PP, where we’ll explore more exciting new ways to remain as anonymous as possible while you surf the net. See you next issue!

Brian Howey is the News Editor for the Laney Tower. Email him at deathandtaxes(at)tutamail.com

Related posts:

I would like to share a few thoughts about the “events” occurring around us personally and around the world. I do not have a problem with how other live their lives and what measures they take to…

There are three useful ways to look at a primary election. (That is, 3 ways better than asking talking heads.) Traditional polls (as represented by RealClearPolitics), forecast models (Nate Silver’s…

Web design refers to the design of the webpages we see on different websites. A website contains different types of pages. Web design is the sum of appearance and layout of the pages, and contents…