(3 mins read)
These are some things you can do to be safer on the internet, while only either
improving your overall experience of surfing the internet or not worsening it.
- Do not use Gmail (except for accessing services like youtube or play store)
- Move to tutanota if you do not need IMAP
- If you need IMAP, rethink if you actually need it
- Custom clients like superhuman are known to be privacy invading, unless your entire
job is to read and write emails, you don't need a custom client
- If you really need IMAP, use protonmail with protonmail bridge
BROWSER
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- Use firefox
- Disable all data collection from the settings and set all fingerprint protection
and stuff to max
- Switch to DuckDuckGo instead of Google as your default search engine
- Install uBlock Origin and ClearURLs extensions (and Dark Reader)
- Firefox's Gecko is the only other mainstream browser engine left apart from Apple's
webkit and Google's blink/chromium, you should support it
MESSAGING
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- Use signal
- It's not the most secure and the phone number requirement is annoying but it's a
good sweet spot between adoption/UX/security
- Your devices likely use your ISPs' default DNS servers
- These servers are often unencrypted and your ISPs know what websites you visit
- Go to your device settings and switch to custom DNS servers (like 1.1.1.1 is a
decent public encrypted DNS server from cloudflare)
- You likely don't need a VPN, and VPNs aren't as secure as not might think either
See fingerprinting
KEYBOARD
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- Your phone's keyboard probably tracks a lot of what you do
- For android, FlorisBoard is a good alternative
- You can also just use GBoard but disable any sort of tracking from their settings
- Brownie points if you can disable internet access for your keyboard too
SIGNUPS
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- Delete accounts of things you no longer use
- Every time you signup for anything, spend a couple of extra minutes going through
their privacy settings and disabling any sort of data collection
- Depending on yours and the companies' locations, they *may* be required to have
certain opt-outs
- Check your devices' settings for these opt-outs too
- You can use free tools like Mozilla Monitor, Mine, Optery, or paid ones like
Incogni for data removal requests. (None of these work well)
- Use a password manager
- Use a separate authenticator app for 2FA (instead of the same password manager),
just in case you were to ever get locked out of either one
- Do not buy an 8 sleep mattress
WHY CARE
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- Governments like your data, and your data will only ever be used against you.
See UK, US, India
- Once your data has been collected, it *will* be breached
- Filing deletion requests will, at best, erase some of it from some basic,
particularly visible kinda places. Just blocking some advertisers is all you can
do
- It will stay forever in the archives of random osint researchers or scammers or
governments or hacking groups or something