In this era of time where the world is increasely imposing censorship, targeting free speech and using targeted advertisements that appear out of the movie "Minority Report", it has became increasing hard to preserve your privacy online. Over the past years we have heard things like Google selling your data, tech companies that were involved with the NSA spying on foreign citizens, the revelations of spying and breaches of privacy goes on and on. So the question is how does one protect themselves in a world where privacy is almost non-existent and smart things are looking to do the same thing.
Decentralizing Your Social Networking Experience
The first thing one should do is refrain from or try to restrict your activity of using Social Networks that have a history of selling your information to advertisers, whom conduct experiments on it's users and who censor free speech. Facebook is a social network that does that on a regular basis and the censorship of free speech there is increasing. Twitter also has been known to ban users that have opposing opinions. If you're a gamer that enjoy discussing games then go to player.me, if you like blogging use Tumbler, if you like to discuss politics then use Gab.ai. The more you decentralize your social networking experiences into different categories, the harder it will be to censor the web as well as selling your information. As the old saying goes, never put all your eggs in the same basket.
Search Engines
One thing you can do about search engines is try to use a search engine like duckduckgo or something like that. Honestly for me, I use google regardless because it's easier to use and I have a lot more search results than most 3rd party search engines plus I use google trends. While I have been told that google does copy people's content I can't really verify that for sure however I can say Facebook does due to the fact that I advertised an idea and magically a different company came up with that "original" idea a short year later which to me was no accident.
Internet Browsers
There's plenty of different browsers, For those that prefer the most privacy Tor would be better however your browsing experience is slower so I would recommend something like SRWare Iron because it's basically google without the garbage and the excess apps on the screen. It's definitely light weight too so it doesn't hog your memory like Google Chrome does, I find it to be a really nice experience personally.
Ad Blockers and Blocking Targeted Advertisement
Every time you watch a youtube video, you might find that you'll see an ad like for the Nintendo Switch because you did a lot of searching online for the Nintendo Switch or you were looking for a new North Face hat so there are ads on the webs for North Face products. These are not accidental advertisements, this is what's called Targeted Advertisements through 3rd party plug-in trackers creating a profile on your interests, things you like, people you read up on, topics that interest you and it can get very detailed down to the point. You need to use a plug-in like Ghostery which blocks these trackers and ads, you can find the links to download here in the Chrome Webstore. It's a tracker blocker and a ad blocker in one.
In the next article I'll discuss how to bypass future censorship as countries even western ones clamp down on free speech.
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