How to browse like a bawse
While our privacy concerns rise, we don’t know where to get started
Being tech-savvy is not what it used to be. Installing a printer driver, or typing really fast and using all digits, simply won’t cut it. As technological capabilities are expanding beyond pretty much everyone’s comprehension, it is hard to keep track of the right questions to ask.
“Is there another way to escape the Zuckerberg than by becoming an undocumented mountain hermit?” is one of those questions. Or a slightly toned-down version: “are there ways to browse more responsibly that are not extremely demanding?”
To the latter, the answer is yes. Here are 5 problems and 5 solutions you can easily implement, written by a not so tech-savvy person who may or not be afraid of robots.
Browser
I love Google chrome for many reasons, but after downloading my Google Takeout folder (7.5 GB worth of data on my location history, Google and YouTube queries, interests et cetera) I decided I’d had enough. Although most of my work happens in Google Docs and Drive, I recently adopted a more hard-to-get approach when it comes to my personal data.
Accessing the internet all starts with your browser. It may come as no surprise that your privacy is not exactly Google’s priority. This makes sense: as one of the world’s champions in data hoarding, its business model is dependent on squeezing every drop of salable info out of you, and learning how to do so more efficiently as they go.
What you can do:
So what would happen if the developer of your browser had no incentive to make profits off your data? This was the idea behind Mozilla, a non-profit founded by people worried by the ways the internet was being commercialized back in 1998.
Firefox, its flagship browser, works as good as any, but is essentially created as an antidote to the data stockpiling aspirations of big tech.
A worthy alternative is Brave, which has a lot of integrated privacy plugins. Last time I tried it — which must have been two years ago — it was very slow, but things might have changed in the meanwhile.
Search engine
Said objections go for your search engine too. Luckily, alternatives to Google are getting better by the day and provide more ethical options when it comes to looking up interesting animal facts.
What can you do:
At the moment, I’m trying out Ecosia, “the search engine that plants trees.” I have to admit to being a little bit skeptical, but at the same time I realized that it was worth a shot if I was going to use Google anyhow.
Its business model is fairly simple: you use their search engine and Ecosia places ads. Its ad-revenue is used to plant trees to combat climate change. This means, however, that for it to work, you must be okay with viewing some ads on the right-hand side in the browser.
I’m impressed with the organization’s financial transparency, and the way it gamifies your internet searching by placing counters listing the amount of trees planted (over 94 million at the time of writing), and your amount of queries (apparently, it takes about 45 searches to plant a sapling).
A more privacy-focused and ad-free alternative is DuckDuckGo.
Adblockers
What you can do:
Most people are aware of the benefits of adblockers and how they not only keep “23 singles dying to meet you” at bay , but they also shield you from ads on YouTube and Spotify web.
I am currently using uBlock Origin, but there are many free alternatives out there.
Dodging cookies and trackers
When you browse the web, websites learn about you through your visits. This is because your visits and behavior (how long you are on the site, where you click, etc.) are being logged and stored. Websites keep tabs on you, so upon your return you can be treated as a regular customer. Cookies are one particular kind of tracker.
Of course, this has its perks: it makes your experience as a user nice and smooth, since you don’t have to introduce yourself every time you visit.
But as always, comfort has its price. Perhaps the website employs an advertising agency, or a hosting platform to facilitate a comment section? Of course they need a little bit of your data as well to function flawlessly.
Things really take a turn for the worst when other third parties get aboard. These third parties —other than the website directly visited by the user — are also tagging along in monitoring your behavior on the website. That data can be valuable in all kinds of ways, and will for the most part be sold to others or be used for advertising purposes.
Here, several problems arise. It is fairly impossible to ensure your data will be “handled with care” or used ethically. Secondly, a little chunk of data here, some specks there, can collectively be pieced together to form an impressively accurate picture of you. One that is often no longer anonymous. And lastly, all of this happens without us knowing or understanding much about it.
What you can do:
I use Privacy Badger, a browser add-on that blocks invisible trackers and learns as it goes. On several more commercial sites, the application blocked dozens of trackers that had nothing to do with the site I was actually visiting. It is developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group.
Which brings me to the last heads up: encryption
When using wireless internet, there is the looming possibility that somebody is listening in, much like a wiretap when calling over a landline.
What you can do:
In short, encryption makes sure whatever you do online cannot be intercepted by other wireless devices. More accurately, your data is still interceptable, but incomprehensible because all your communication’s contents are encrypted, or codified beyond recognition.
More and more websites make use of encryption to safeguard your data security to outside threats, which means the web address will be preceded by https. http without the “s” at the end means a page is not being encrypted.
Another useful add-on by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is called HTTPS Everywhere, and automatically redirects you to the encrypted version of a website (if there is any).
By all means, these recommendations might not be based on my state-of-the-art knowledge of the latest challenges posed by the internet. But they do go a long way in shielding you from its most immediate dangers, giving you a head start in learning more about your online privacy (and potentially planting a little forest along the way).
