The internet has become a staple in our everyday lives and the truth is, most people just don’t care about about their privacy when it comes to being online. It is very obvious that the more private and secure you make your online profile — the less convenient it becomes. Nobody wants to log into Twitter, Facebook or TikTok every single time they open up the application on their phone or computer. That is just tedious and ain’t nobody got time for that. Frankly, I don’t even want to have to login to sites that I visit everyday or even multiple times a day and I highly advocate for online privacy and security. We, as people, have become accustom to instant gratification and that bleeds into something even as small as needing to enter a password or not. For the most part, we will take the easier and more convenient option even if that means leaving a trail of fingerprints everywhere we go on our technological “yellow brick road”.

I want to acknowledge that there is a difference between online privacy and online security. When we talk about privacy, we’re talking about how browsers fingerprint your activity by tracking your IP address, your location, what operating system you use, what type of computer you own and even the size of your monitor. If you are interested in seeing what type of data the most popular browsers (and some lesser known browsers) actually collect from you, check out this website. When we talk about security, we are talking about how secure your system and online profile is overall. They blend together, and in this article I use them somewhat synonymous together, but just know that even though they go hand in hand they’re also different. I wanted to point this out because in the next section we’re going to go over some simple steps you can take to become more secure and private. It’s just that some steps will make you more secure and some will make you more private. If this sounds confusing, think of it this way. A password manager is a highly recommened application that, I believe, everyone should be using. Although using a password manager and secure passwords will make you more secure, it doesn’t mean that it will make your browsing private. Removing telemetry options or enabling a VPN to obfuscate your IP address are steps that would make you more private rather than secure. I wanted to explain this just so you know the difference.

Is balance possible?

The reason that most people tend to not care about their privacy online is because it can be tedious. As I have already said, the more secure you become the less convenient your online life becomes. When you start adding long and hardened passwords, two factor authentication, email aliases, etc. It can become a lot. Now you could jump in head first and start using something like TailsOS, booting off of USB’s and then deleting everything that you did on that computer once you power off the device but that isn’t very practical for everyday use. There are just 3 steps that you can take today to start being more secure and private online and they’re not even difficult steps to do.

1. Password Managers

This step will make you more secure rather than private, but these days it is an absolute necessity. You should never be using the same password for different accounts. Especially sensitive accounts such as your banking institution. Along with not recycling your passwords, they should also be secure. I recommend a password be no less than 20 characters long with varying upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Some websites limit you to 14–16 characters (which I think is absolutely wrong) so in those cases make it as long as you’re allowed to. Once you have a password manager set up, you no longer have to worry about remembering long and complicated passwords and you never have to worry if you’re passwords are too short or crackable. There are only a few password managers that I would recommend and those are;

• Bitwarden
• 1Password
• KeePassXC

Any of these three selections would work great. I will say that Bitwarden and 1Password are more ‘user friendly’ in that they are cloud based. You setup your account and master password and the vault is then stored in the cloud. KeePassXC on the other hand is self-hosted so it is aimed at more the advanced computer users. Bitwarden also has a self-hosting option as well if you’d like to look into that.

2. Choice of browser is important

There are many browsers in the world these days. From Google Chrome (The leading browser today) to Safari, Firefox, Brave, etc. If you are looking to take your privacy and security a little more seriously then I suggest switching to an open source browser such as Brave or Firefox. Out of the box, Brave has the most sane defaults for privacy without sacrificing any convenience. Firefox would be my second choice but if you use Firefox, it is suggested to tweak a few settings to harden it even more. This is a free world and you are of course allowed to use any browser that you want, but if privacy is something that you are becoming interest in — do not use Google Chrome. They are the leading browser today and they’re also the biggest culprit of data collection. If you currently use Chrome and want to get away from Google’s absolutely absurd amount of data collection — check out Brave. It is a chromium based browser, meaning it’s pretty much Chrome, without all of the nasty data collection.

There are also other less known browser out there that are hardened a lot more out of the box such as Mullvad Browser and Librewolf. These browsers are great for when you are out at a coffee shop and you have to use public WiFi to connect to the internet. These browsers usually have a lot disabled out of the box such as browsing history, cookies and telemetry. They’re good for quick searches and casual browsing and will not leave much fingerprinting if any at all. The great thing about these browsers is that you can use one of them or all of them! A lot of people in the privacy/security community would, for example, run Brave as their main browser that they use for social media and other accounts when they are at home on their personal network. Then if they’re out and about using something like public WiFi and needed to do some browsing, they’d pull up something like Mullvad or Librewolf. Personally, this is what I do.

3. Using a VPN

Contrary to what your favorite Youtuber says about that big VPN company that they’re shilling to the masses — VPN’s will not protect you from everything. A lot of people are confused to what a VPN actually is. It doesn’t make you completely hidden on the internet and it doesn’t actually make you 100% secure either. Don’t get me wrong, they’re an extremely helpful tool if you use the right ones, but they’re not the end all be all of privacy and security. Think about it like this — You get a brand new luxury vehicle. It’s a 2022 red Mercedes Benz. Now you go and take your brand new car out for a drive and because it’s a beautiful day out you decide to speed down the road. Then you get pulled over and now the police have all of your information about you and your vehicle. You stand out like a sore thumb and that’s what happens to your online personality when you do not use a VPN. Now imagine that you and everyone in your town gets the same exact car. A used Silver 2015 Toyota Prius and you all leave for work at the same exact time and you all travel the same exact route every single day. Now, you are you’re own person driving that car just as your neighbor is and same with his neighbor. The difference now is that when you are driving down the road, nobody can tell who is who because everybody is driving the same exact car with the same exact license plate. This is pretty much what is happening when you use a VPN. It just masks your identity so that it is a lot harder to identify you. Now, the caveat is that you don’t want to run a VPN constantly. It wouldn’t make sense to run a VPN and then go and log into your Gmail account (Why are you using a Gmail account anyway) which exposes who you are. You only really want to use a VPN whenever accessing public WiFi or even your WiFi at work. If you are looking for a VPN provider, here are the only ones that I recommend you use.

• Mullvad VPN
• ProtonVPN
• IVPN

Conclusion

So these were just a few easily configurable steps that you yourself could take if security and privacy is something that you are intersted in. If there is somebody out there that is reading this and thinking “Pssh, I don’t care that companies suck me dry of my personal data — I have nothing to hide!” To those people I say.. A lot of people have nothing to hide. That doesn’t mean that we want big corporations leeching and selling our data. If you don’t care about online privacy and security I beg of you to just take one of these steps. The easiest step to take is switching browsers and just doing that can be a huge step. If you are a person who doesn’t care about online privacy then I am going to assume that you’re probably using Google Chrome as your browser. Do yourself a favor and delete Chrome and replace it with Brave. It’s the easiest service to switch and you’ll be helping yourself a lot just by doing that one step.