In 2007 Council of Europe announced January 28th as an Annual Data Privacy Day. The idea behind this day is to raise awareness between businesses and people on how important is to keep their personal online information safe.

Throughout the years as our data gets more digitized and we share more information online, we access sensitive information online, data privacy is taking a greater importance.

Data is the one of the most important assets right now, and how safe it will be depends on every individual personally. I decided to share some privacy based softwares that are good to have in order keep yourself safe online to celebrate the Data Privacy Day.

Virtual Private Network

Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a well known software. Millions of people are already using it worldwide and the popularity of it increases everyday. VPN helps people to be secure and anonymous online by encrypting their traffic and changing IP address. With VPN no ISP or hacker can access your sensitive information or see what you are up to online. It’s an especially useful tool while connected to public Wifi or accessing very sensitive information.

For a VPN I recommend using Surfshark, which is especially easy to use, use newest and most secure technologies, the price doesn’t bite and lets you connect to unlimited number of devices. It’s one of the high-quality VPNs that provides good speeds and doesn’t collect logs, which helps to ensure privacy and anonymity online.

Read more about Surfshark and buy their subscription with 81% off here.

Antivirus

Antivirus Softwares are data security utilities, who are installed in a computer systems in order to protect it from viruses, spyware, malware, spam attacks and many more cyber threats. It is recommended to have one on every computer to keep it secure from threats that can come from the internet, external drives, CD/DVDs and importantly keeps your sensitive data secure. Avast is the most popular antivirus software and has the largest share in Antivirus application market.

Avast gains good scores from independent testing labs, has password manager, network security inspector and many useful, security-related extra features. It’s a free Antivirus, but some features requires additional costs.

Password manager

A password manager is a security software that helps you to create strong passwords for privacy. Password managers also stores all your passwords in one place so you do not need to remember single one of them, just the one to your password manager account. Passwords are stored safely with using encryption. Strong passwords means strong security, however not everyone knows what is a strong password and this is where password managers comes in handy. One of the best password managers is Keeper.

Keeper was developed to help individuals and businesses protect their sensitive informations with proving very strong passwords and store them in one place using very secure encryptions which are capable of preventing security breaches and data theft. It costs approximately $30 yearly.

Privacy extensions

These are the few extensions that I would recommend having in order to increase your privacy online:

Privacy badger — It’s a free and open-source browser extensions created by Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its purpose is to promote internet privacy by blocking advertisements and tracing cookies that do not respond to the Do Not Track setting in user’s web browser.

HTTPS Everywhere — It’s a free and open-source extensions which was also developed by Electronic Frontier Foundation together with The Tor project. It makes all the websites use a secure HTTPS connection instead of HTTP (if they support it).

uBlock Origin — it’s a free and open-source browser extension for content filtering, including blocking ads. It is recognized as being less memory-intensive than other extensions, which means it uses less memory and CPU time, and because of this you can browse much faster.

And of course using Incognito mode is always a good choice to gain at least a little bit more privacy.

To sum up, it is a crucial time right now to take care of our privacy online, and I’m glad there are such days as Data Privacy Day to remind us that. There are many more good softwares, extensions, ways to keep yourself safe, these are the ones I use and I hope It helped some of you.

Be safe!