Your online privacy is increasingly at risk. Internet giants are collecting more and more information about you, and building up an ever-clearer picture of your lifestyle and interests. And there’s no telling how that data might be exploited. Experts warn that, in the future, businesses could start vetting your online profile before offering you a loan – or a job.
Then there’s the risk of hacker attacks. When your personal details are out there in the cloud, they could be stolen without your ever knowing about it. You could be a victim of identity theft, or someone could use your credentials to scam others.
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Unfortunately, once your personal data is out of the bag, there’s very little you can do to become anonymous again – so it’s best to keep your online activity as private as possible in the first place. Here’s how.
Don’t get tracked on the web
One threat to your privacy is computer networks that follow you around the web. Sites such as Facebook are notorious for this type of behaviour. You might visit a site that appears to have no connection to any social network – but behind the scenes, its HTML code is requesting a cookie from Facebook, which alerts Mark Zuckerberg that you’re visiting that site. That information is then used to personalise the adverts you see, on Facebook and elsewhere.
If you delve into the Facebook options, you can opt out of such personalised advertising. In fact, that’s true of a great many services, but it’s a pain to have to do it on each site: an easier approach is to visit Your Online Choices. This handy page lets you opt out of personalised advertising from more than 100 tracking systems at once (including Facebook and Google) with just a few clicks.
This doesn’t stop the tracking, however – it just tells the companies not to use it for advertising. To properly protect your privacy, you need to block tracking cookies altogether. One way of doing this is to enable the “do not track” feature in your browser; as the name implies, this tells websites not to track your activity. However, compliance is voluntary, so it’s not a solution you can rely on.
A more robust option is to configure your browser to reject all third-party cookies – so, for example, only Facebook itself can request cookies from facebook.com. You’ll find this option in the settings of all major browsers. The catch is that if a legitimate website relies on embedded content that’s fetched from elsewhere on the web, this could make it stop working.
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The safest way to ensure you’re not being tracked – or, at least, to monitor who’s tracking you – is to install a tool like Ghostery. This free browser extension exposes tracking technologies on every site you visit, and lets you selectively block them. Be warned, though, that you might find it a bit daunting to deal with at first: there’s a whole lot of snooping going on out there.
How to keep your activity truly private
Blocking tracking cookies provides a degree of protection, but your online activity is still far from private. Your ISP keeps a record of every server you connect to, and thanks to the recently passed “Snoopers’ Charter”, this information can be accessed by dozens of government agencies, with no need for a court order.
If that unnerves you – and it probably should – the answer is to sign up with a virtual private network service (VPN). This re-routes all of your internet traffic through an encrypted “tunnel” between your PC and your chosen VPN provider; the provider then forwards the packets to their destination, and sends back the response through the same secure tunnel.
From the user’s point of view, a VPN is effectively invisible: once you’ve signed up and enabled the client software, you can carry on using your web browser and other software as before. Some VPNs, though not all, will be happy to let you use BitTorrent as well.
To your ISP, however, your traffic becomes completely impenetrable. All they can see is that you’re exchanging encrypted data with the VPN provider; the specific sites and services you’re using are a mystery. The sites themselves don’t know where you’re connecting from either, as the connection appears to come from the VPN provider, rather than your home.
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This means that your ISP can’t keep tabs on what you’re doing – and if a government agency asks it to hand over your records, these won’t reveal which sites you’ve been visiting. Of course, if the powers that be are really determined to find out what you’ve been up to, they could demand the information from your VPN provider: for this reason, many British citizens choose a VPN based in another country, and preferably use a service that doesn’t keep logs of customer activity.
The only downside of a VPN – apart from the fact that most providers charge a monthly or annual fee – is that the extra “hop” between you and your online destination can make your internet connection slower. With most major providers the effect is small and easy to live with, however; it’s certainly preferable to browsing without no privacy protection.