Privacy and Anonymity
Privacy
Privacy is an increasingly rare commodity these days. To find out what kind of information is there about you do a search for yourself on Pipl.com, you might be surprised at the number of companies that claim to have information about you and your relatives.
That’s because your personal information, including your email address, phone number and daily activities on Social Networks and apps, are worth a lot of money to legitimate businesses, your new employer, government and bad guys (read hackers).
The bad guys just want to steal from you and sell it on the DarkNet. Legitimate Companies want to know as much about you as possible, so they can sell you more products and services or serve you ads that are highly relevant to your preferences. And your possible new employer might get the wrong impression of you.
So i’m going to talk about a few steps that helps you, to protect your information.
There are a couple ways to secure your own privacy without having a lot of tools installed or the need of know how.
- Information you Share
- Email address
- Fake Identity
- Browsing anonymously
Information you Share
The more information you share, the easier it’s going to be for someone to get their hands on it. All the company’s who are providing free apps are making money with your information.
Take a look at your social media profiles, the people who need to know your birth date, email address and phone number probably already have them. And what exactly is the point of sharing everything about yourself in your Facebook, Twitter or other social apps?
If you care about your privacy, you won’t do it. A recent example from a privacy issue:
Make yourself more difficult to find on social media
Consider using a pseudonym on social media sites. This will make it difficult for strangers to search for you on social media sites.
Email Address
If you’re using a email address with your real name use it only for Banking, Government and Webshops where you leave your home address. Your work email address is for work not for private use. For Mobile Apps, Forums and social meda use a pseudonym email address. Go to Protonmail to create a email address. Don’t use your own name but fake one! (See next chapter how to).
Fake Identity
Creating a fake identity is really simple, just go to: FakeNameGenerator.
Browsing Anonymously
Way back i started using Firefox as my default browser. I’m still using firefox as my primairy browser. With some plugins it’s a great browser:
- Privacy Badger (block trackers)
- uBlock Origin (block advertisements and more)