Privacy is a hard thing to come by these days. It seems like just about every friendly neighborhood social media site wants to know where you are at ever waking moment. How do we solve this? Well, that's a hard question. With the rise of tracking technology that does things such as fingerprint your browser
(https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ for more information.) it is getting increasingly harder to defeat these attempts. What shall we do then? I say, go for the source of revenue, by blocking the crap out of ads and minimizing the amount that you are tracked as much as possible.
If you are still running windows, I would recommend looking at alternatives. Linux mint is a nice user friendly alternative, although I personally prefer arch. If you don't want to take the time to figure out how to install arch, check out instantOS. It installs everything for you, and has a nice design philosophy that makes it fairly simple for beginners to get started and allows room for power users to stretch out. I use it as my daily driver and have few issues.
Next, you'll want to install a more privacy focused browser. Most linux distros come with firfox preinstalled, and while I wouldn't recommend using it as-is, you can harden it by changing some settings and installing addons. for more information on that.
For those who want a more plug and play solution, I would recommend Librewolf. While it isn't the most user friendly (the most annoying thing being that it forgets your logins when you close down the browser) it's one of the best I've used so far. I currently use it as my daily driver, with stick firefox as a back up for those annoying websites that don't play nice. I use it with LocalCDN, which lowers the amount of request that go out for things like fonts and javascript libraries, CanvasBlocker, which helps protect against canvas fingerprinting, (more about that in the cover your tracks link above) and clearURLs, which removes the tracking info from urls, like amazon and instagram. I'd also like to recommend sponsorblock, which skips over those annoying youtube sponsors automatically.
Finally, remove uneeded accounts with sites like facebook, twitter, and google. I personally still have a google account, but only use it on my android phone and for youtube and gmail.
At the end of the day, becoming more privacy focused takes work, because so much has been done to make it inconvenient. You will need to do more research than reading my crappy little blog, but hopefully this can get you started. Good luck, and remember to always keep on top of your opsec! I'll try to answer any questions in the comments.
(https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ for more information.) it is getting increasingly harder to defeat these attempts. What shall we do then? I say, go for the source of revenue, by blocking the crap out of ads and minimizing the amount that you are tracked as much as possible.
If you are still running windows, I would recommend looking at alternatives. Linux mint is a nice user friendly alternative, although I personally prefer arch. If you don't want to take the time to figure out how to install arch, check out instantOS. It installs everything for you, and has a nice design philosophy that makes it fairly simple for beginners to get started and allows room for power users to stretch out. I use it as my daily driver and have few issues.
Next, you'll want to install a more privacy focused browser. Most linux distros come with firfox preinstalled, and while I wouldn't recommend using it as-is, you can harden it by changing some settings and installing addons. for more information on that.
For those who want a more plug and play solution, I would recommend Librewolf. While it isn't the most user friendly (the most annoying thing being that it forgets your logins when you close down the browser) it's one of the best I've used so far. I currently use it as my daily driver, with stick firefox as a back up for those annoying websites that don't play nice. I use it with LocalCDN, which lowers the amount of request that go out for things like fonts and javascript libraries, CanvasBlocker, which helps protect against canvas fingerprinting, (more about that in the cover your tracks link above) and clearURLs, which removes the tracking info from urls, like amazon and instagram. I'd also like to recommend sponsorblock, which skips over those annoying youtube sponsors automatically.
Finally, remove uneeded accounts with sites like facebook, twitter, and google. I personally still have a google account, but only use it on my android phone and for youtube and gmail.
At the end of the day, becoming more privacy focused takes work, because so much has been done to make it inconvenient. You will need to do more research than reading my crappy little blog, but hopefully this can get you started. Good luck, and remember to always keep on top of your opsec! I'll try to answer any questions in the comments.
