Privacy is generally somewhat lost these days. The internet is full of spying eyes, data gathering mechanisms and huge data storage servers. Those contain legally and illegally collected data of every person who maintains any kind of online presence.
Avoiding Orwellian world gathering more and more data about you isn’t easy as more and more things are done and stored online. However, as an individual you have the universal human right to the privacy. There’s no state, corporation nor malicious actor who can take it away, if you choose to protect it. Of course they will try, but you can enforce your right to the privacy with the following tools and learning how to use them.
Amnesic operating system
Tails – a portable operating system that fits on 8MB USB stick and runs only on memory. Meaning there’s no any traces left on your PC what you have done when you switch the power off.
Anonymous browser and relay network
Tor browser – The Onion Router offers private browsing without tracking or surveillance. It’s main purpose is to maintain anonymity. It anonymizes your web traffic routing all of it through the Tor network. It’s important to keep on mind that Tor is not 100% secure especially as some exit nodes are malicious. However, generally Browsing location will be hidden and your traffic can’t be tracked, but in certain situations at least part of browsing activity can be seen. If you want maximize privacy, you should use Tor through VPN. The biggest problem with Tor is the speed. generally it’s desperately slow.
Privacywall.org PrivateView – is a service that lets you preview websites that appear in our search results page. When you use PrivateView, no personal information such as your IP address will be sent to the website.
Set up own WireGuard VPN network
WireGuard is simple and fast modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography, it’s designed as a general purpose VPN for running on embedded interfaces and super computers alike. Set up easily your own VPN (for example on any virtual server) and access it from your Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS and Android systems/devices using free apps.
Privacy oriented public DNS resolver
1.1.1.1 – a public DNS resolver operated by Cloudflare that offers a fast and private way to browse the Internet. Do not let your ISP spy on what sites you are visiting, route your DNS requests to 1.1.1.1. and leave no DNS traces on your ISP’s logs. Of course there are traces on Cloudflare’s end, but that’s another story. Anyway, connect using VPN which uses 1.1.1.1. to resolve DNS, and browse on incognito mode. This simple setup alone improves your privacy quite much.
On the fly disk encryption software
VeraCrypt – free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux which uses PBKDF2 with strong hash algorithms and high iteration counts. It is secure as long as your password is secure against dictionary attack. You have to use long- and random-enough password.
Nitter – a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. No JavaScript or ads. Client never talks to Twitter.