Say Hello To Privacy
How to get rid of companies tracking you for ads
Like many other software developers, I am highly dependent on daily and extensive use of browsers. Indeed, browsers may be the 1st or 2nd most used applications for many of us. While there are plenty of options to select nowadays, Google Chrome always comes as a fast, reliable, and nice option. With auto-sync, great support of different platforms, millions of useful (and unuseful) extensions, and some more features, it is very hard to resist against it. But what I want to talk in this essay is how scary would it be to give everything we have to a private company that earns money from advertisements? How can we protect our passwords, search history, addresses, credit cards’ information, etc.?
It was some months ago when I started thinking about it. Why have I, voluntarily, gave a key to all my life to a company that earns money from an advertisement? What happens if it cannot (or doesn’t want to) protect them? And a more serious question, how can I ensure they are safe while nothing is open-source and no open community is observing it? These questions led me to start getting rid of Google step by step. Here, and I’d like to describe them to you.
Open Source
The first issue that starts obsessing my mind was that Google Chrome is based on Chromium, an open-source browser that is available to download for all platforms. But Google Chrome is not, as far as I know. How scary it would be to use a closed-source application for your most-private daily stuff, where you have to just trust a company that is paid to show an advertisement to users. Fortunately, there are many other options to replace Google Chrome available to download, including Chromium itself. And believe me, you won’t even notice you are not using Google Chrome. With Chromium, you can at least trust an open-community with conflict of interests that would not agree to violate their users’ privacy. But there are other options too, Mozilla Firefox is a great example that is supported and used by millions. Or if you are more interested in privacy, I would suggest Brave, which is based on Chromium, Open Source, and designed for privacy.
Passwords
The most important feature of Google Chrome for me was the password manager that syncs between all devices automatically. If you sign-in with your Google account, passwords are saved into your cloud account and can be accessed through other devices and even through the internet. Moreover, all passwords are saved locally across all devices so you can see and edit them without the internet and just by the application. Nice and useful, right? But here came my first concern. If my passwords are saved locally, it means they are accessible on a directory on my disk, and what happens if somebody can access my directories without my permission? Or even simpler, what happens if my colleague wants to use my system temporarily? How can I ensure he/she wouldn’t check my passwords, or even copy them?
A great feature with a great privacy concern. What did I do?
I turned into an open-source alternative, Bitwarden. It comes with many features that you can check yourself, but the most important ones for me were:
- Importing passwords from ANY browsers (if it can, so can anybody else!). So, with just one click, you have all your passwords in a place.
- Cross-platform. It comes as extensions for browsers, iOS and Android applications, and desktop versions for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
- Automatic lock if you don’t use the application or extension for a while, or even if you lock your screen. So, I have no concerns if a stranger wants to use my system.
- Password Generator, automatically generates and saves passwords for new logins. Passwords are generated with a high security standard and can be customized based on your interests.
- Supporting secure notes, meaning it can save your credit information or addresses as secure as your passwords.
- Supporting 2FA for premium accounts. Nobody can access your info even with your master password.
I am using Bitwarden for months now, and I would say I have never used browsers’ password manager anymore. Once you install it, you see how vulnerable your password had been before.
Trackers
The next problem I had was that Google Chrome has no way to stop being tracked by websites. You can’t believe how much you are tracked before you start using Privacy Badger extension. It may take some time to learns what should it blocks and what should not, but it’s totally worth it. You would be surprise when you see a list of trackers on each website you visit daily. A same feature is installed on Brave by default, and recently, Apple has introduced the same feature Safari. The following screenshot is a list of trackers that are being used by Medium. Can you see Google there?
More than browsers
While Google Chrome may be the first thing to remove, there are other improvements too.
Search Engine
This may seem a bit crazy, but why don’t we replace the search engine we use? DuckDuckGo is a great replacement which comes with privacy guarantee. Although it may not be comparable to Google, it still can be useful for 70% of cases where you are not looking for something very special. It also comes with an extension that shows privacy information to you.
WARP and 1.1.1.1
I highly recommend a new feature introduced by Cloudflare. WARP is a free, fast, and secure VPN that encrypts all of your network traffic from the origin to the destination. It also offers iOS and Android applications as well as DNS settings for using with your desktops.
DoH
DNS over HTTPS is a protocol for performing remote Domain Name System (DNS) resolution via the HTTPS protocol. Learn how to enable it for different browsers here: https://fossbytes.com/how-to-enable-dns-over-https-on-chrome-firefox-edge-brave/
Summary
The list does not end here. There are other steps you can take easily to improve your digital privacy. Do not let anybody take advantage of your digital like, earn money from your interests, or affect your decisions based on your digital history.
