A Simple Guide to Privacy Online

Online tracking is everywhere on the internet. Here’s a guide to help protect yourself against tracking, and reclaim (some) privacy online.

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Introduction
This blog is about privacy. But unlike most of what you find out there, it’s not about getting to 100% (or, well 99%) privacy. It’s about taking your from around 1% “privacy” (where basically everyone reading this is now) to around 60%. It won’t protect you from everything, and I’m not going to go into the technical details of how it works -- there is already plenty on the web about that.

What I can do, however, is give you a super simple guide to privacy -- much of which I use (or have used) myself. Please be aware that I can make no promises about how effective this is. There is no such thing as perfect privacy (ever). While I do believe that a lot of this will help get better privacy (as I said, I use a lot of it myself), I cannot make any guarantees. If you want to be sure about any of this -- then please do research on it yourself.

That said, I hope this can at least be a good start, and that there is something you can learn from this! Let’s get started.

In short, the major points of this article are: Avoiding Internet Trackers (Ad-Blocking)
What to do: Install the Brave browser (https://brave.com/download/). It’s default settings are actually decent, so you can use it out of the box.

Here’s why: The first step to privacy is getting rid of trackers online. Basically every ad you see online attempts to track on profile you -- so the only meaningful projection you have is to block all ads. Sites also use plenty of other techniques to track and spy on you. With its default setting, Brave blocks (most) of these trackers.

Hiding your Internet Searches and Location
What to do: get the Mozilla VPN (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/). It’s quite cheap if you get the yearly plan -- less than a pint of Guinness per month. While there are other VPNs out there, I use Mozilla because: Here’s why: Whenever you go online, your activity can be tracked back to the network you are on. This means than other can see what sites you visit, and your current approximate location. When you use a VPN, it disguises what network you are on -- hiding your location and preventing others from seeing what websites you are connecting to.


Hiding your Text Messages
What to do: Download Signal (https://signal.org/download/) and use it for texting, calling and doing video calls.

Here’s why: even text messaging platforms such as WhatsApp that claim to be encrypted and private really not not worthy of trust in that regard -- at all. (WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, after all!) Signal is the only one I know of that, b default, has actual privacy built in.

Hiding your Location, Part 2
What do to: use Open Street Maps (through the OsmAnd app: https://osmand.net/) for maps.

Here’s why: a lot of map services (such as Google Maps) track your location. While this can lead to some useful abilities (like predicting traffic) -- it also necessarily reveals your location. And even if your location services are off the things you search for on maps can reveal a lot about your location. OsmAnd can be used without internet access -- it basically just downloads static maps to your phone, but does allow you do turn on location services and see yourself on the map.

The caveat here is that this will never be as good as Google / Apple maps -- and it does not have up-to-date information on business hours, traffic, etc. I’d use this more sparingly -- after all, having a bad maps / navigation experience can be a huge headache. But if it works for you -- then great!

Privacy and Photos / Videos
What to do: if you want to protect your location, don’t take or share pictures / videos.

By default, smartphones typically save information on your location inside photos. If you later post or share these photos, anyone who downloads them can see where you were when you took the picture. So if you post a picture of something you saw online -- anyone who can find that photo can download it and see where it was taken.

There are ways to remove this data from photos this (called metadata removers) -- but I am not sure which ones are best / can be trusted. I don’t want to advise, as such. So I will say this -- if you are concerned about people seeing your location, don’t take pictures there. If you are not concerned about that -- then do as you will.

A Few More Points
Privacy is always dependent on context. Some things you will want to be private. Others, you don’t. It’s always important to ask what sort of privacy you want -- avoiding surveillance marketing via targeted ads is very different from preventing someone from seeing your Instagram posts. The above is means to help you keep privacy in general -- but anything you post online / on social media can and will be tracked back to your account.

If anything is made by Google, Facebook Twitter / X, or Bing / Microsoft -- you should never trust it to be private or secure. Never rely on promises about privacy rights form for-profit companies unless you have a specific reason to trust them. Similarly, if you don’t like Brave Search (the default Search engine in Brave), then DuckDuckGo and Startpage are decent alternatives. Don’t use Google Search (or Google Chrome) if you want privacy.

Don’t turn off your ad-blocker. Ever. Even sites that say “we rely on ad revenue to function”, in many cases, use Google Ads (or Facebook Ads) to host their ads. This means that these ads are still invasive, could still give your data to Facebook / Google, and are still may be spying on you.

Doing a video call will reveal your location. If you really want to keep your location private, avoid video calls -- not even a VPN can prevent your location from being leaked on a video call due to how the underlying tech works. Signal can protect against this, but you have to change the settings -- it’s in Privacy → Advanced Settings → Always redirect calls.

“Deleting” things online should never be assumed to be permanent -- it might mean that your friends cannot see it anymore, but the company absolutely still can in many cases. And in some cases, they might still be able to share or copy that data themselves.

Never, under any circumstances, use Tor. While it technically is “private” you are basically guaranteed to mess it up some way or another unless you really, really, really know what’s going on. You’ll need to change its default settings, connect to it from a VPN, and follow several other strict rules to actually be safe there. So unless you want to spend at least 30 hours learning how Tor works, what its pitfalls are, and how the internet works in general -- just don’t use it.

If you are on a computer that somebody else owns (such as a work or library computer), then you should never assume that you have any level of privacy. It’s always best to assume the owner of the computer can see everything you do -- in many cases, this is true.

Some Final Remarks
Being private online is not about having anything to hide -- in the same way that locking your door it not about having anything to hide. The more we get people talking about that, and seeing online privacy as common sense, the better off we will be.

Privacy is a right -- and we should all have it.