They Know When You’ve Been Sleeping….

Welcome to Geekslv.com . This week’s blog post is late because of the change of our web domain.

The bad news is you have lost a lot of privacy by being online. The way things are set up it is almost impossible to stay anonymous on the Internet.  For example, you can be identified by your IP address, browser, and browsing history.  This information is still being transmitted even if you use private or incognito mode in your browser. Data mining can be used to match up this data to your real identity.

So, what can you do about it? Assume you have less anonymity and privacy. “ Dance like nobody’s looking.  Write e-mail like you expect it to be read in court”1. Give out the minimum of information required.  For example, when you fill out a form online, fill out only the fields that are required.  For advanced privacy consider using a throw away e-mail or signing up under a fictitious name (don’t do this on official forms).

There are a couple of add-ins to your favorite browser that can help.  These are tools that help limit the way websites can track you.  Check out Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin.  Remember, if you like the products, then contribute to their development (or in the case of Privacy Badger contribute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

 

1 Anonymous Facebook meme

 

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