So last week I talked about why you should consider taking steps to protect yourself online,  and now I’ll discuss options on HOW to protect yourself online.   Basic practices,  like discussed earlier,  include being careful of what you share online like pictures and stories on social media.  Be aware of any information you might be accidentally giving away.

PSEUDONYMS
Some of the easiest practices are to use (partially) fake names or email addresses for services that require information for marketing purposes,  or “verifying your age”. Free services often sell this information to others for advertising to pay their bills.  You can use your middle name or nickname,  and anyone looking specifically for you will skip right by your info,  and anyone trying to steal your identity will have mis-matching information.  Having and using fake email accounts that auto-forward to your real email allow you to kill the spam flood once you realize someone has been sharing your info without having to lose your real email address. This can be done manually by creating alternate emails that auto-forward, or with services like junkmail.com or premium services like Blur.

BLUR
Blur is a service that is dedicated to its customers’ privacy and anonymity.  They pay their bills with subscriptions so you can trust they don’t sell or share your info. Free memberships allow you to automatically generate and keep track of multiple emails for privacy and spam filtering purposes in addition to generate and keep track of randomized strong passwords,  which can be created for individual websites.  It also blocks Web tracking (data collection) and allows auto-fill of their randomized information to make it easier for you to use.
Paid memberships give you the added benefit of “fake” credit cards to keep your purchases anonymous online. The service essentially allows you to instantly generate a digital prepaid (single or multi use) gift card that protects your account information and identity. You can also generate fake phone numbers similar to Google voice and have the option to perform data backups.   With all of Blur’s services,  you have the option to instantly delete any email,  credit card,  or number that you think is being abused and create a new one.

SEARCH ENGINES
Part of the reason Google is such a popular and efficient search engine is because it tracks everything anyone does on any of their many platforms.  They are able to sell advertisements at a frighteningly accurate rate.  This is why you frequently see ads online for something you looked at the week before.  Instead consider search engines that don’t track your search history like start page or duck duck go. Start page actually utilizes google to do all of its searches, so you still get great results, but it acts as a screen to prevent data collection.  Start page will even act as an intermediary for many websites,  protecting your IP address.

VPN
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are networks that hide your IP address (and therefore your address and identity) while surfing the Internet.  It allows you to access the web through servers across the world based on the VPN network you are using, so anyone tracking you online would think you were located in say Cambodia, Turkey, or Germany instead of on your couch in your hometown.  It is crucial when looking for a vpn service to understand how they fund their business,  there are certain “free” vpns that actually sell your information or your bandwidth. There are many options, but Private Internet Access seems to be the best one around at a decent rate, $3.33 per month for a year subscription on 5 devices, thats enough for a family. All you need to do is activate the vpn on your device, and you can go anywhere online anonymously (until you login to an account, like facebook or amazon, but then you should proceed as discussed earlier).  You can easily get around this by buying prepaid gift cards with cash in any store and checking out as a guest, or with the forwarding burner emails.

Next time we’ll discuss how to protect your communications.  Do you think any of these are reasonable precautions or just a bunch of paranoid mumbo jumbo?