Hello everyone. A bit of a different post today.

Today I want to write about different methods to help protect your privacy in the modern age. This is not an easy task, as you might have to sacrifice a lot in order to preserve your privacy. Most corporations on the planet are after your data in one way or another. Google and Facebook being the most notorious for harvesting data on its users.

All of these corporations feed your data back to the NSA via a program called PRISM. This was revealed in the 2013 Snowden Leaks.

Let's start off with the cliche argument against privacy:

"I have nothing to hide so what's the big deal?"

There is a reason your windows in your home have blinds. There is a reason you don't tell random strangers in real life or online where you live. There is a reason you don't disclose your income to random people. There is a reason you don't share your phone number with random people.

You may say you have nothing to hide, but hiding something does not always mean you're hiding something bad, or illegal. People hide their bank balances from others, people hide their addresses, current locations, phone numbers, etc. from the general population.

You may argue that it's different with that, because that data is data you're keeping from random people on the street or online. Those random people might stalk you, harass you, blackmail you, etc. Surely a corporation wouldn't do that? Right?

Aside from rogue employees snooping on users, we have to look at how the data gathered from these corporations is used.

Oh, it's just for advertising purposes, right? Surely corporations wouldn't attempt to manipulate users based on the information they harvested, right?

This is simply the tip of the iceberg for privacy violations of users across multiple websites.

Now, let's start breaking down where your privacy and security is currently compromised. To begin, let's go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and input your email address(es). This website will tell you if it has found your data in a breached database from a website.

If multiple results show up from HaveIBeenPwned, let's start from square one. Let's download a password manager. I recommend KeePass. KeePass can be downloaded here: https://keepass.info/download.html

This will keep your passwords safe in a locally stored, encrypted file. I recommend letting it generate passwords for you, so you do not have the same password for every site. After this, you will want to go to every site you use currently and change the password for every site using KeePass' generator. Be sure to store these passwords in KeePass.

It is important to also have 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled on as many accounts as possible. For Android, I recommend Aegis Authenticator.

Next up, let's get a new email provider. Gmail, owned by Google, is not private for obvious reasons (stated above). Yahoo cannot be trusted. Your best bets are either an account from ProtonMail, or Tutanota. I recommend both, but I prefer ProtonMail. Due to ProtonMail and Tutanota not harvesting and selling user data, its revenue model is different than Gmail, Yahoo, etc. so there are paid tiers on the site. Free, Plus, Professional, and Visionary. Lifetime accounts do exist, but they are extremely expensive and hard to come by. These tiers are explained here.

After signing up for ProtonMail or Tutanota, you will need to go through all of your online accounts and change the email from your previous email to your new private email.

Next, let's talk finance. Google tracks your credit card purchases even if you don't use Google or have an account. So, if you want privacy you can use cash. For online payments though, you might want to look into using Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is a different version of Bitcoin with the ticker of BCH. It shares the same chain as the other version of Bitcoin, BTC, up until August 1st, 2017. Bitcoin Cash is a trustless, decentralized, and secure cryptocurrency. This comes at a cost though: the blockchain (the system that Bitcoin utilizes) is transparent and can easily be tracked. To circumvent this, we can download https://electroncash.org and use the CashShuffle tool. CashShuffle takes your coins in your wallet and securely and trustlessly "shuffles" them with other users coins. See an example transaction here.

You can find merchants that accept Bitcoin Cash here.

Now we move onto web browsers. It is best to ditch Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (which is now based on Chrome)/Internet Explorer, and Safari. I personally recommend Firefox, Waterfox, or the Tor Browser. I do not recommend Brave as it is built on Chrome. They have stripped out most things related to Google, but being based on Chrome still gives Google power as Chrome based browsers dominate the market, allowing Google to set internet standards themselves. Not to mention Brave is not as configurable as Firefox and Firefox variants, and the add-ons have to installed via the Chrome Web Store. In the long run this is bad for privacy.

I recommend Waterfox if you do not feel like dealing with Tor Browser. It has most Mozilla stuff stripped out.

Add-ons I recommend:

uBlock Origin,

HTTPS Everywhere,

Privacy Badger,

Decentraleyes,

Privacy Possum

If you really want privacy, at the cost of doing away with functioning websites, then I recommend either the Tor Browser at the highest security setting, or an extra add-on for Waterfox called NoScript Security Suite.

Search engines. Google itself should never be used, for obvious reasons. I either recommend StartPage, DuckDuckGo, or Searx.me (or any other Searx instance). This was in no particular order. I do however, try to avoid DuckDuckGo as they are in a Five Eyes country, but it's still better than Google.

Next up is a bit of controversial topic in the privacy community. This helps against basic surveillance but will not help you evade law enforcement if you're some Top 10 Most Wanted dude on the run.

VPNs.

VPNs help mask your IP address when browsing the internet or doing anything over an internet connection. Instead of seeing (your home IP address) a website will see some IP from Switzerland, Japan, Africa, or whichever country your VPN server is located in. For VPNs I either recommend Mullvad or ProtonVPN.

For texting, it's best to move off Telegram, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), iMessage, or even SMS and switch to Signal for end-to-end encrypted text messages.

For a Notes (Apple app on iOS and macOS) equivalent that is cross-platform I recommend Standard Notes.

And on to operating systems. It is best to not use operating systems such as Windows due to numerous privacy violations and concerns. If you absolutely need to use Windows, I recommend Win10Privacy to at least help a little bit. Apple's macOS is closed-source, but due to their business model they have less of an incentive to harvest user data. Their business model relies on hardware sales. However, due to it being closed source it should still not be trusted. Regardless, it's better than Windows in terms of privacy.

If you want an actual private operating system, I recommend pretty much any Linux distribution. I personally use Ubuntu/Kubuntu. While Ubuntu does collect some data, it's possible to completely disable, and it's not as much data as Windows.

As of right now, this is all I can think of since it's all I use. I will continue to keep this updated with more recommendations in the future.

Thank you for reading,