Why does it feel like tech titans know more about your life than you do?
The reason that most big companies make their software free is because they track, collect and sell their user information data for advertisement agencies.
Privacy is the ability to keep your activity to yourself, like writing a personal journal. Anonymity, in contrast, is when people can see what’s happening, but don’t know it’s you doing it. An illustrative example would be creating graffiti on that old building in your hometown during the night. Everyone can see the result, but no one knows who did it.
This article will focus on giving some free alternative tools that can be used to improve the privacy side of things.
Browser
Browsers like Microsoft Edge or Chrome can collect information like your browsing history, usernames, passwords, location, etc. And no, the incognito mode won’t stop this data being collected.
My recommendation:
Brave is a free open source chromium-based browser that is very privacy-focused right out of the box. By default, it will block ads and trackers, and it’s also customizable and fast.
I’ve chosen it over Firefox because it is better out of the box, but with the right customization Firefox can become as desirable as Brave or even better.
PS: make sure that in settings that the used search engine is Brave or DuckDuckGo.
VPN
The most important features of a VPN is hiding your traffic from the ISP and spoofing your location, which is useful for accessing region locked content such as Netflix shows.
Mostly, all other advertised features are just marketing.
My recommendation:
Proton is the only well known VPN provider that I would recommend if you consider getting one. It is open source and the company has a fairly clean security and privacy record.
Password manager
What if you use the same e-mail and password for all of your accounts, and hypothetically Facebook has a data breach?
Well, most likely it will get to the dark web and now every malicious actor knows your Facebook log-in details.
However, because you used the same e-mail and password pretty much everywhere, they can access all your online services.
The solution is to use a different password for each service, but who can remember tens of different complicated passwords? I certainly cannot, here’s where a password manager comes into play.
My recommendation:
Bitwarden is a free open-source service, I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and I’d be probably 2 years biologically older if they weren’t around.
Not only that I can generate a unique secure password (I’ve been using 64 length characters passwords lately, good luck guessing that one) but it also synchs to all my devices.
As a bonus, the autocomplete feature fills the username and password in a flash using a click on my smartphone or just a keyboard shortcut on my laptop. Saves a lot of time in the long run.
Cloud storage
How would you feel if all your holiday and cat pictures be on a stranger computer? Again, I have bad news for you: this is exactly what’s happening.
The most private (and economical option in case you’re paying for cloud storage) is buying and storing your data on a physical hard drive.
Especially in today’s day and age when they can be as small as a wireless headphone case.
If you’re like me however, you just cannot live without cloud storage
My recommendation:
Mega gives 20GB storage and is end-to-end encrypted, It is convenient as it’s browser based, and it’s encrypting and decrypting during the transfer process which is something that not many providers do.
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