How to Protect your Online Privacy

Published in

Purple Team

7 min readJul 23, 2022

In today's world where Privacy is only a Myth, we can do whatever things to protect our privacy but the data stolen by Hackers, Data breaches in organizations can’t keep our personal data secure.

Nothing on the internet is not hackable anything would be hacked but we can do some safety measures to protect our data

Also, keep that in mind to do these things can’t secure your privacy as these things can also be hacked but the steps are to make aware you of how you can protect your data

1. Using Safe Search Engine

DuckDuckGo

We share our most intimate secrets with our search engine without even thinking: Our medical, financial, and personal issues, along with all the day-to-day things that make you. We thought All of that personal information should be private, but on Google, it’s not.

Google is known to study this information, profile it, and then release these profiles to data brokers and advertisers who capitalize on your vulnerability.

The easiest way to start protecting your search records is to switch to DuckDuckGo This is a search engine that is aimed at allowing you to browse the internet without companies gobbling up your personal data. It promises to keep your searches private, and anonymous and offers built-in tracker blocking, so the sites you visit have a harder time collecting information about you. It has a mobile browser available for iPhone and Android.

2. Using Safe Browser

Tor Browser

As we are aware that Google is tracking and spying on our browsing history and activities but Google is not actually the one who spying on us. It is our internet service provider, They have all our data on which website we visit, what should we do there, what should we surf on the internet they have all of our information.

And to stop all that Tor browser has become the second MVP asset to save us and our Privacy over the Internet.

Tor or The Onion Router is a browsing tool used to surf the web anonymously The Tor network, however, is made up of countless nodes, or relay points, that pass your data along using layers of encryption — hence the onion metaphor. Each node that your data passes through peels off another layer of encryption, showing the previous node’s IP address, as well as where it’s being sent to. The last node your data passes through is known as the exit node, and it peels off the final layer of encryption and then delivers your data to the intended server. The point of origin, and the intermediary nodes, are completely unknown.

3. Using Secure Messaging Platform

Signal Private Messenger

The next big thing to your Privacy Asset is your Online Conversation. We use WhatsApp, Messenger, and other Applications to chat with our friends Online But what about the encryption? The company says the chat is end-to-end encrypted but is it true? We saw such cases where after deletion our chats could be recovered.

To stop that we have an easy solution that is Signal Private Messenger. You should use Signal because it protects your chats. Anything that you send or receive is encrypted, which makes it very hard for anyone who intercepts the data to work out what’s being said unless they are the specified recipient.

You can set messages to automatically disappear on a contact-by-contact basis. Remember that conversations can still be captured via screenshot, though even this is blocked in the Android version of Signal.

As a bonus, you now have the option to blur photos right in the app so that sensitive data, like people’s faces at a protest, won’t be exposed.

Signal App (available on both ios and Andriod)

4. Using Encrypted Mails

Encrypted Email

Gmail or Yahoo or other mail providers are Ok but you have the right to choose the best things to protect your Privacy and nowadays using Encrypted Mail is in trend.

Encrypting email messages before they’re sent means that even if a hacker or anyone other than the intended recipient should intercept your email messages, they’re unreadable and essentially useless.

You can use Protonmail or Tutanota as both of these are incredibly secure, free, and open-source and available on all platforms.

5. Check Permissions of Applications

Privacy Settings

How much data our mobile applications will take we don’t know they have some unnecessary information that is actually not in use. From time to time check the permissions of the app you install on your phone You should also check for your Google Account that your web and activity settings are closed or not through this you can protect your privacy from going into it in the Wrong Hands.

6. Minimize the Applications from Devices

Minimize App Count

You can use a minimum of the app on your phone or in the system. Only uses applications that you are using most of the time which is for your day-to-day work. Don’t install all types of applications Once you install the applications on your device and left them and what type of permissions and what should run in the background you don’t check and this will affect your privacy. They just collect your data without even you if you open them or not. Delete that unnecessary application from your devices.

7. Using Free & Open Source Applications

Free & Open Source Applications

You can’t stop your Digital Privacy and Freedom to become it public but as the times come we all start using Free and open source software that is free of adware and malware. In today's time, we all have privacy-respecting alternatives to almost anything.

Use NextCloud to replace Google Drive,

Bitwarden to manage your passwords, instead of paid Password Managers such as LastPass and 1Pass.

Libre Office has all the necessary tools for official works and replaces Microsoft Office

Where to download Open Source Applications

Fdroid for the best marketplace for free and open source apps on android.

Use AlternativeTo to find the next best Secure, Free, and open-source alternatives of any software or mobile application.

8. Reduce Digital Footprints

SayMine

We have visited over a million of sites on the Internet and shared our information on those websites but we have forgotten on how many websites we have shared our data actually we have shared our footprints over the Internet and these footprints are much enough to find you over internet

You can use the SayMine website to track how many websites you have shared your data with or what type of data the company has of yours

Then with the help of accessing your Email ID, SayMine sends a mail to delete your data and reduce your digital Footprints

You can check the website once I thought you would like it to see how many companies hold your personal information.

Do’s and Dont’s

· See everything is hackable in today's time so these options I provide are not sufficient to protect your privacy you should aware from your side also.

· Don’t click on any of the suspicious links which come on your E-mail or don't click on any pop-ups that comes on the website that must be phishing or any malware which can be easily downloaded on your device and harm your device Be aware of that.

· Don’t install every extensions or plugins on your browsers even that if the particular extensions are of lakhs of installations it doesn’t mean that they are safe to use.

· Choice of using Passwords Manager or Saved Passwords in Browsers is your choice but keep away them from someone's reach.

· Use Have I been pwned website if your details are compromised in any data breaches or not if it happens then change your passwords immediately and make sure any mishappening not happen with your privacy.

· Time to time check your Google Account Access, that on how many websites have the access of your E-Mail account, and if not needed remove the access from that particular accounts.

· Removed unwanted applications from your devices from time to time and check the permissions of that applications if find any unusual activity remove the applications from your device.

Any type of comments are welcome. Thank you for your time :)).