This is Internet 101 for us oldies. Good practices all around.
On 4/16/2018 10:56 AM, Traci Duncan wrote:
Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy – Robert Epstein – Medium
Interesting article. What are your thoughts?
BTW, is Firefox accessible on the Mac?
Hope you enjoy,
Traci
https://medium.com/@re_53711/seven-simple-steps-toward-online-privacy-20dcbb9fa82
Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy
Robert Epstein
<https://medium.com/@re_53711?source=post_header_lockup>Mar 16, 2017
I haven’t received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile phone for
more than two years now. If you care about your privacy — or even if
you’re just sick of being bombarded by ads for diet pills seconds
after you send an email to a friend complaining that your pants are
too tight — here are seven simple steps you can take to make your
online presence more private:
1) /Junk Gmail/. All Gmail emails, both incoming and outgoing — even
the angry draft emails you decided not to send — are analyzed and
stored permanently by Google, Inc., with every snippet of information
the company can extract from your emails added to the massive profile
it has compiled about you. I recommend using http://ProtonMail.com
<http://protonmail.com/> instead of Gmail. It’s based in Switzerland
and subject to strict Swiss privacy laws. It takes only a few seconds
to sign up, because the company doesn’t ask /anything/ about you
(imagine that!). The basic service is free, and the paid version is
cheap. ProtonMail is incredibly easy to use, and it also uses
end-to-end encryption for maximum privacy. Unfortunately, you might be
using Gmail and not even know it. To save money, thousands of
businesses and universities use Gmail under their own brands — even
news services such as /The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report/,
/Salon/, and /The Hill/. To find out whether you have been unknowingly
corresponding with someone through Google servers, open that person’s
email and then find and click on the “view full header” option in your
email software. If you find “google.com <http://google.com>” anywhere
in the expanded header, Google has been monitoring all of your
communications with that sender. Even if you switch to ProtonMail, you
will still have no privacy when corresponding with someone using Gmail
or hidden Google servers. I tell such people that if they want to
communicate with me, they will need to use a different email service,
and they usually do.
2) /Switch Search Engines/. Google’s search engine is the best because
it indexes far more web pages than anyone else — at least 45 billion.
But Google (the search engine) is also the most aggressive spying tool
ever invented — funded from the outset by the NSA and the CIA
<https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e>
to identify people who are a threat to national security. Google
records every search you conduct, and your Google profile contains a
complete history of every search you /ever/ conducted — even those
sketchy ones! Worse still, my research
<http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes> has
shown in recent years that Google’s search engine is also the most
powerful mind control device
<https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts>
ever devised; it shifts the opinions of millions of people around the
world every day without them knowing it. Instead of using Google.com
<http://Google.com>, use http://StartPage.com. If you use the Firebox
browser, you can even make StartPage your default search engine. Why
StartPage? Because it doesn’t track you, and because it gives you full
access to Google’s amazing index. In other words, it gives you great
search results while also preserving your privacy. StartPage also
doesn’t give you any search suggestions, which Google uses
systematically to direct your searches
<http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_2017-The_Search_Suggestion_Effect-SSE-ICPS_Vienna-March_2017.pdf>
as they please.
3) /Kill Chrome. /Google developed the Chrome browser because the
massive amount of information they were collecting about you from
their search engine wasn’t enough for them. With Chrome, they can see
which web pages you visit — /and/ what you do on those pages — even if
you go to those pages directly rather than going through their search
engine. If you value your privacy, /never/ use Chrome, even in the
bogus “incognito” mode. Instead, use http://Firefox.com, which is
maintained by a nonprofit organization. As I reveal in “The New
Censorship
<http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated>,”
Google can still//get information about you when you’re using Firefox
or Safari, but nowhere near as much as they get when you’re using Chrome.
4) /Axe Android/. As I explain in “Google’s Gotcha
<http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/05/10/15-ways-google-monitors-you>,”
even Chrome didn’t give Google enough information about you, so the
company developed Android, an operating system for phones and other
mobile devices — the equivalent of the Windows operating system that’s
on most desktop computers. Chrome gives Google information about you
only when you’re online, but because Android controls all your phone’s
functions, it can track you — the phone numbers you dial or the music
files you access , for example—even when you’re /offline/. If you
value your privacy, donate your Android phone to a charity (such as
http://CellPhonesForSoldiers.com), and buy a phone from a company that
doesn’t use Google’s deceptive business model
<http://techland.time.com/2013/03/27/googles-dance/>. Companies like
Apple, Microsoft and Blackberry make most of their money by selling
/products/, whereas Google makes almost all of its money by suckering
you with free services it uses to track you and then charging
businesses a fee to send you targeted ads. If that doesn’t creep you
out, maybe it should.
5) /Heave Home/. If Google has mind-fucked you into installing their
new “Home” devices all over your apartment or house — and, yes, the
company is currently urging people to install one in every room — send
those cute little cylinders straight to hell. The Home device records
everything
<https://www.wired.com/2016/12/alexa-and-google-record-your-voice/>
you and your children say, and even when you think it’s inactive, it
is still sending a signal back to headquarters.
6) /Clear Cache and Cookies/. Companies and hackers of all sorts are
constantly installing invasive computer code on your computers and
mobile devices, mainly to keep an eye on you but sometimes for more
nefarious purposes. On a mobile device, you can clear out most of this
garbage by going to the settings menu of your browser, selecting the
“privacy and security” option and then clicking on the icon that
clears your cache and cookies. With most laptop and desktop browsers,
holding down three keys simultaneously — CTRL, SHIFT and DEL — takes
you directly to the relevant menu; I use this technique multiple times
a day without even thinking about it.
7) /Pick a Proxy or VPN/. For even more privacy, sign up for either a
proxy or a VPN — a service that creates a buffer between you and the
internet, fooling many of the tracking routines into thinking you’re
not really you. VPNs provide more protection than proxies. My favorite
VPN at the moment is http://PrivateInternetAccess.com. For under $40 a
year, you can install the PIA app on up to five devices. It’s
lightning fast, and you don’t need to be a computer geek to install or
use it.
Before or after taking one or more of these steps, you can check to
see how secure your computer or mobile device is by running tests at
websites such as http://DNSLeakTest.com or http://BrowserLeaks.com.
In Dave Egger’s 2013 book, /The Circle/ — due out in April 2017 as a
movie starring Emma Watson — the only way one of the main characters
can find to “go off-grid” is to kill himself by driving his vehicle
off a bridge. If you follow the seven guidelines I’ve outlined above,
you won’t need to resort to such extremes to regain some privacy in
your life — at least for the time being.
_____________
/Robert Epstein/ <http://DrRobertEpstein.com>/(//@DrREpstein/
<http://twitter.com/drrepstein>/) is Senior Research Psychologist at
the //American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology/
<http://AIBRT.org>/in Vista, California and the former editor-in-chief
of /Psychology Today/magazine. He is the author of 15 books and more
than 250 scholarly and popular articles on creativity, artificial
intelligence, internet manipulation and other topics. He is the
co-discoverer of the //Search Engine Manipulation Effect/
<http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes>/(SEME)
and, more recently, the discoverer of the //Search Suggestion Effect/
<http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_2017-The_Search_Suggestion_Effect-SSE-ICPS_Vienna-March_2017.pdf>/(SSE)./
Sent from my iPhone
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