Trying to take control of your online privacy can feel like a full-time job. But if you break it up into small tasks and take on one project at a time it makes the process of protecting your privacy much easier. This month we’re going to do just that. For the month of October, we’ll update this post with new tips every weekday that show various ways you can opt yourself out of the ways tech giants surveil you.
Online privacy isn’t dead. But the tech giants make it a pain in the butt to achieve. With these incremental tweaks to the services we use, we can throw sand in the gears of the surveillance machine and opt out of the ways tech companies attempt to optimize us into advertisement and content viewing machines. We’re also pushing companies to make more privacy-protective defaults the norm, but until that happens, the onus is on all of us to dig into the settings.
All month long we’ll share tips, including some with the help from our friends at Consumer Reports’ Security Planner tool. Use the Table of Contents here to jump straight to any tip.
Table of Contents
- Tip 1: Establish Good Digital Hygiene
- Tip 2: Learn What a Data Broker Knows About You
- Tip 3: Coming October 3
- Tip 4: Coming October 6
- Tip 5: Coming October 7
- Tip 6: Coming October 8
- Tip 7: Coming October 9
- Tip 8: Coming October 10
- Tip 9: Coming October 14
- Tip 10: Coming October 15
- Tip 11: Coming October 16
- Tip 12: Coming October 17
- Tip 13: Coming October 20
- Tip 14: Coming October 21
- Tip 15: Coming October 22
- Tip 16: Coming October 23
- Tip 17: Coming October 24
- Tip 18: Coming October 27
- Tip 19: Coming October 28
- Tip 20: Coming October 29
- Tip 21: Coming October 30
- Tip 22: Coming October 31
Tip 1: Establish Good Digital Hygiene
Before we can get into the privacy weeds, we need to first establish strong basics. Namely, two security fundamentals: using strong passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and two-factor authentication for your online accounts. Together, they can significantly improve your online privacy by making it much harder for your data to fall into the hands of a stranger.
Using unique passwords for every web login means that if your account information ends up in a data breach, it won’t give bad actors an easy way to unlock your other accounts. Since it’s impossible for all of us to remember a unique password for every login we have, most people will want to use a password manager, which generates and stores those passwords for you.
Two-factor authentication is the second lock on those same accounts. In order to login to, say, Facebook for the first time on a particular computer, you’ll need to provide a password and a “second factor,” usually an always-changing numeric code generated in an app or sent to you on another device. This makes it much harder for someone else to get into your account because it’s less likely they’ll have both a password and the temporary code.
This can be a little overwhelming to get started if you’re new to online privacy! Aside from our guides on Surveillance Self-Defense, we recommend taking a look at Consumer Reports’ Security Planner for ways to help you get started setting up your first password manager and turning on two-factor authentication.
Tip 2: Learn What a Data Broker Knows About You
Hundreds of data brokers you’ve never heard of are harvesting and selling your personal information. This can include your address, online activity, financial transactions, relationships, and even your location history. Once sold, your data can be abused by scammers, advertisers, predatory companies, and even law enforcement agencies.
Data brokers build detailed profiles of our lives but try to keep their own practices hidden. Fortunately, several state privacy laws give you the right to see what information these companies have collected about you. You can exercise this right by submitting a data access request to a data broker. Even if you live in a state without privacy legislation, some data brokers will still respond to your request.
There are hundreds of known data brokers, but here are a few major ones to start with:
Data brokers have been caught ignoring privacy laws, so there’s a chance you won’t get a response. If you do, you’ll learn what information the data broker has collected about you and the categories of third parties they’ve sold it to. If the results motivate you to take more privacy action, encourage your friends and family to do the same. Don’t let data brokers keep their spying a secret.
You can also ask data brokers to delete your data, with or without an access request. We’ll get to that later this month and explain how to do this with people-search sites, a category of data brokers.
Come back tomorrow for another tip!
