

Ask HN: How do you protect your privacy online? - barking

On  cryptome's  home page ( http://cryptome.org/ )  it has this statement at the top<p>"Privacy, anonymity and security services are deceptive, protect yourself."<p>This struck a chord with me because lately I have been becoming creeped out by the way I'm being profiled based on my online activity.<p>I don't like the fact that google, for example, gives me results that it thinks might be of interest to me or that the ads on sites that I visit for the first time are already tailored to my tastes.<p>Even if you don't allow cookies or you have a dynamic ip, just the information sent by your browser about your setup can be enough, apparently,  to attach a unique identity to your machine.<p>To guard my privacy I had been thinking about signing up for one of the services that offers privacy  but as the old phrase says "who guards the guards"?
======
ari_elle
I personally use 2 Browsers (FF and Chromium) for those reasons.

FF is my browser to stay private, therefore i am for example constantly not
logged into my accounts (google/gmail/youtube).

Additionally:

-) 4 Easy Steps to stop online tracking

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/4-simple-changes-
prote...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/4-simple-changes-protect-your-
privacy-online)

-) NoScript for FF

Stops every script unless you allow it.

According to <http://stallman.org/facebook.html>

_"Pages that contain Facebook "like" buttons enable Facebook to track visitors
to those pages. Facebook tracks the users that see 'like' buttons, even users
who never visited facebook.com and never click on those buttons."_

There also is a solution described to stop that, but NoScript technically
should get rid of the problem.

-) Google has it's own privacy settings, i think you can prevent from being tracked too hard with setting those accordingly

-) DuckDuckGo is getting more and more famous, it's a search engine that market itself as respecting ones privacy and not bubble people (i personally still use google)

<http://donttrack.us/>

<http://dontbubble.us/>

-) I also use AdBlock+ so i am not bothered with commercials to annoy me.

-) If you are really paranoid you could use something like Tor/VPN

<https://www.torproject.org/>

[https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-
ano...](https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-
seriously-111007/)

i personally don't.

-) don't allow third party cookies

-) automatically delete all cookies after shutdown

-) don't use sync programs/functions

-) store data online only strongly encrypted

The reason why i have 2 browsers is, that when i visit an unknown site with
lots of multimedia content and when i don't want to be bothered with looking
for what script does what (to activate some video embedded on the site for
example), then i can just copy it into chromium and it works.

And in chromium i can constantly read e-mails or visit youtube when wanting to
leave a comment, in FF i can browse privately (so simultaneously).

If you are sharing your computer with people make sure

-) passwords aren't stored

-) to delete browser/download history in general

That is all i can think of right know.

Oh and e-mail:

-) set up own e-mail server and use encryption

or

-) choose e-mail provider having servers in a country that you trust and that maybe has an encryption feature (for example: Hushmail, located in Canada, free encryption - known to cooperate with us authorities though)

-> _if you don't mind paying, CounterMail probably is interesting for you_

<https://countermail.com/>

Update:

Of course, in these days many users just give their information away for free.
They react with false assumptions about being tracked (most companies think it
is service to their customers - people aren't bothered so much with ads that
fit their needs). So if you use facebook and use it to chat with people, you
update your status, have many apps on a smartphone and just click on "agree"
everytime without being concerned, then you shouldn't be too concerned about
being tracked by Google either. Then you are just a hypocrite.

~~~
loungin
To add one suggestion, if you want even more control than Adblock Plus, you
can look at Request Policy (<http://requestpolicy.com>)

Instead of a blacklist approach like abp, you control which cross-site
requests are allowed. Most of the time all a site needs is one xsite request
to the domain hosting its static resources

------
ommunist
Is there such a thing in a system where your every click is logged and backed
up somewhere?

