Data breaches are on the rise, as at least 7.9 billion records have been exposed in 2019 alone.
At the same time, online surveillance has taken many forms and poses a very serious problem. It can come from your internet service provider or a hacker lurking around.
Another thing that gained massive attention over the last couple of years is the government’s use of surveillance technologies that go against every right to one’s privacy.
Since Snowden’s leaks back in 2013, it’s no longer a secret that some governments around the world are monitoring the use of the internet.
That means they get access to everything that you do online, from the very minute you start using your phone, computer, or any other device that you can connect to the internet.
You’ll often come across the terms Five, Nine, and 14 Eyes as one of the biggest threats to your online privacy. These are international surveillance alliances formed between countries around the world.
Outstanding article. We’ve implemented many of the suggestions here… NORDVPN is our latest addition, and it protects all our devices and voip phones by way of the router (DD-WRT)… had used PIA, but they’re based in US. Every computer runs Linux… not a Mac or Windows system in the house (except for one Windows 7 hard drive we swap in to program the Motorola radios, but that’s it). Protonmail, Ghostery, Brave Browser, and DuckDuckGo (which has become FAR better in the last year or so, and no longer even go to google search for anything). Gibiru is also a privacy-centered search engine.
Have a few things left to degoogle ourselves, and google voice is the giant striped elephant in the room. So, what we use in addition to the items in the article…
Wire for text messaging and voice.
Mailfence for a calendar and email server for business.
We don’t use Facebook or Twitter for anything except to promote our business… absolutely nothing controversial or personal there. We use gab for the controversial stuff (you know, like freedom-related issues).
We don’t use google drive, we use Mega.nz (yes, it’s in New Zealand, one of the five-eyes, but trust it more than drive or dropbox and never store sensitive docs there… anything sensitive is stored on an encrypted file on the computer and backed up on a flash drive).
Another thing we do, which is very important, is use lengthy passphrases, typically of unrelated words… as an example (not one we have ever used, but would be good): fishing-boxcars-fleecing-glubberbub. 35 characters, including a special character (the hyphen) and a nonsense word that won’t be in the dictionary. If you also need a capital letter, just add one. Unguessable, virtually uncrackable, and easy to remember.
The takeaway is this: If you are NOT using a VPN, your life is wide open for anyone to see. Stop that… VPN service is cheap… $3,49 per month. You spend more than that at a coffeeshop one time while you check you email on their unencrypted wifi. EXpress VPN and NORD are consistently the fastest and the best.