Top 5 Privacy Tools: Securing your Digital Life (Part 3)
Here is a no-frills article about some genuinely helpful tools for increasing or maintaining privacy and security in everyday life. I personally use these tools and can vouch for their effectiveness.
Introduction
This will be a short and sweet wrap-up of our Securing Your Digital Life series. We have covered:
Now, we will cover some useful tools that can help increase your privacy and security online.
This article is not sponsored in any way. These are legitimate products that I have used or am still using and have found to be helpful.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list, either. There are so many privacy and security tools out there that I could probably write an article a week covering them for the rest of my life.
Have I Been Pwned?
It's so easy to mention this tool. Built by Australia's own Troy Hunt, it provides a simple way for anyone to check if their account has been involved in any data breaches. You can also subscribe to alerts to be notified when an account is involved in such a breach.
I highly recommend checking it out. Many people don't realise they have been part of a breach, and it serves as an excellent reminder to update passwords.
SimpleLogin
This tool is a pretty neat concept. Instead of giving out your email address whenever you sign up for an account online, you can use SimpleLogin to create email aliases that will forward mail to your real address.
This way, you never have to share your email address, and you don't even need to get the mail forwarded if you know you don't want it
If you want to stop spam and keep your email address private, this tool is for you.
Use Cases:
- When you want to access valuable resources behind a mailing list. Example: "Sign up to our mailing list and get your free recipe book!"
- Online shopping, where you must supply your email, even if you'll never shop there again.
Proton Mail
We briefly discussed this in our recent post about why you need a business email. Proton Mail is also available for individuals and is free if all you want is a privacy-focused email provider.
It's no secret that Google and Microsoft use their email services (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) to essentially read your emails and attachments to build an advertising profile and target ads at you. If this sounds "icky" (which it should), then Proton Mail is a great alternative.
Proton VPN
We're keeping this post short, and I might follow up with another article just talking about VPNs, but to greatly simplify it: A Virtual Private Network (VPN) in this particular context can help you:
- Prevent your Internet Service Provider (ISP) from snooping on you.
- Access region-blocked content (TV shows and movies unavailable in your country).
- Protect yourself on public WiFi at cafes, airports, shopping centres, etc.
Your computer essentially creates a secure connection to a VPN service. When you request resources online, these requests are sent via the VPN, which forwards the request and returns any responses back to you via the VPN.
From your ISP's perspective, all they see is that you're communicating with that service, and they don't see which websites and resources you are trying to access. Conversely, websites that you access through a VPN can only see traffic coming from the VPN, which can't easily be tied back to you.
uBlock Origin
Unfortunately, ads have become a common part of browsing the internet. They often make visiting websites frustrating as they compete for your attention. They can even be malicious; see malvertising
uBlock Origin is an excellent browser extension that can stop these ads and similar content from loading, giving you a clean and refreshing web browsing experience.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this and the other parts of this series useful.
If you have questions, need help, or want to chat about what we can do for your business, don't hesitate to get in touch with us.