15 Minutes to Private Browsing 

This is NOT sponsored content.  These are my personal reviews of my favorite privacy and security tools.

These practices are designed to maintain a reasonable browsing experience while looking out for your privacy. They are NOT the most secure settings. There will always be tension between ease of use and private browsing. I’m trying to find a happy medium.

I. The Browser #

Use Firefox. Firefox is a world-class browser run by a world-class non-profit. It has a far more robust privacy policy than any other browser, particularly Chrome.

The Solid Settings:

Firefox -> Preferences -> General

Firefox -> Preferences -> Search

DuckDuckGo takes some time to get used to. And you will miss the amazing search experience provided by Google. Google somehow just “knows” what you’re looking for. But that’s because Google’s logging everything you search and DuckDuckGo is not. (They are getting better. Plus it’s all the rage among the internet kids these days.)

Firefox -> Preferences -> Privacy

These settings make for the reasonable browsing experience: see your current Firefox instance as a metaphor for your traceable history. Keep the window open and you don’t have to sign in and out of accounts every time you leave the page. But if you want to start fresh, no trackers, no cookies, no logged-in accounts: just restart Firefox and you’re a brand new person.

Firefox -> Preferences -> Security

II. The Plugins #

A nice benefit of using Firefox is the active plug-in community. There are a thousand developers chugging away at privacy plugins- take advantage of them here. I’ve highlighted the biggies below. I recommend you install these one at a time. Use Firefox for a few days with it and make sure you like it before moving on to the next one because they will change your browsing experience slightly and you’ll want to know who’s doing what. These three options are in order of least intrusive to most intrusive.

The concept is simple. The browser is on your computer. Which means despite what the advertisers want you to see and what analytic companies want to know, the code living on your computer has the final say.

(1) Adblock Plus #

Adblock Plus is the creme de la creme of browser plugins. At 21,000,000 users and growing, it’s the best-turned-worst kept secret on the web. No media company has ever dared write about Adblock Plus, because it spells the end of their revenue model. Yet word has spread and there’s no way around it. Adblock Plus exposes the core problem with advertising: You can’t make me look at your ad. No advertiser in the world can force-feed me something I don’t want to see. Now instead of looking away, I have a bot that does the filtering for me. Plus it’s configurable if you still want to see ads from sites you love. Works for videos, images, banners, everything… Find it here and say hello to the new clean browsing experience.

(2) HTTPS Everywhere #

HTTPS Everywhere forces your browser to use https instead of http as it’s default communication language. Https requires better authentication between the website and your browser and it encrypts all data during transport. It is already a standard on most websites that deal with personal data and it’s becoming standard among many other responsible websites, so hopefully this plugin will soon be unnecessary. In the mean time HTTPS Everywhere will take care of those sites who have been too lazy to convert to the new standard.

(3a) Ghostery #

Installing Ghostery in its passive state opens your eyes enough to make you want to reconfigure Ghostery to take on its more formidable role. By default, the plugin simply scans the webpage you’re on, exposing the tracking devices placed by various analytics companies. You get a clean, unobtrusive list of all those who are watching you surf the internet. After watching Google Analytics follow you from site to site to site along with armies of other trackers, then you can tell Ghostery to block any or all of them. Just like that, you’re a ghost.

(3b) Disconnect #

An alternative to Ghostery, I’ve never tried it. Ghostery is older and more established but Disconnect is growing fast and their users love it. They cover most of the same ground so this is a preference thing. If you don’t like Ghostery, uninstall it and try Disconnect.

(4) NoScript #

NoScript can be a little much for some users. It’s an extremely powerful suite of privacy and security tools, but for at least a short time you need to take an active role in it’s management. NoScript blocks all active content by default. The issue is pretty much every webpage uses JavaScript to function normally these days, so at first it will break every page you visit. You can allow the JS to run with a simple click though, and as you surf the internet, you build up a list of sites you trust. After a few weeks, your “safe list” grows to encompass most frequently visited sites and it all becomes less cumbersome to manage. If you feel that you’re up to the task, go for it- NoScript is far and away the best blanket safety measure for protecting your machine from the wild web. Get it here.

III. Other Communication #

These have not so much to do with browsing the web, but they round out your privacy suite nicely.

Use Signal for Texts and Calls #

Signal is brand new, but it comes from Open Whisper Systems, a group that has already proven their meddle with a few well-trafficked Android privacy apps. End to end encryption for all texts and calls. Very easy, very safe.

Use ProtonMail for Email #

ProtonMail is another post-Snowden development. Built by two disgruntled CERN employees and hosted in Switzerland, they have sworn to protect your data from anyone who comes knocking, including themselves- they can’t decrypt your emails if they wanted to. So don’t forget your password, nobody’s holding onto it for you. The bad news is the wait list for this service has exceeded a month since its inception. The good news, then, is there is high demand for private communication services. Get your name in now.

Post Script #

I was trying to maintain a list of only free services, but there is one thing left to mention. It adds such a tremendous layer of protection that I could not leave it out in good faith.

This is a paid service at $3.30/month.

Private Internet Access VPN is an industry standard VPN. For $39/year, PIA encrypts all of your internet traffic and bounces it around their own servers before sending off the request to the end site. The end site sends their response back to PIA and they encrypt it and anonymously forward it back to you. There will be a slightly adverse affect on some of your speeds, but it is nothing significant to detriment the experience. You can turn it on and off extremely easily, one minute you’re browsing from home, the next you’re in Switzerland. They have over 20 server regions to choose from, so I can send my data through servers in Sweden, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, etc. Very handy, say, if you wanted to watch a BBC commissioned documentary available only to UK citizens, or take advantage of Sweden’s world-class copyright laws (or lack thereof). Jokes aside, this is 100% the best way to decouple the websites you browse from you home computer’s IP address. PIA is used by journalists, human rights activists, politicians, corporations, and citizens of surveillance states the world over. They also accept Bitcoin!

 
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