It’s incredibly easy to find about someone in the digital world of today. While that may serve as a blessing in some cases, it also means a lack of privacy and freedom.
When you surf the internet and use various services from different companies on the web, your personal information, usage habits, and preferences are exposed to the world wide web. Your personal information, when exposed, could be used by blackmailers and social engineering attackers. These attacks are common in important personnel working in reputed companies.
Companies must invest in awareness programs to teach their employees to protect themselves in the digital world. Information exposure can also lead to several problems for the common people as well, for example, their political liberty could be taken away.
Whether you’re looking for steps to stay anonymous on the web yourself, or you’re looking for means to promote anonymity in your company — the following steps will help you out in this quest.
Use Tor for anonymous web browsing
Tor is the largest, open-source software project built around the idea of enabling anonymity during web browsing. It’s a robust, metadata-resident software project that conceals the user’s identity and location by using an overlay network.
While the Tor project cannot achieve 100% anonymity due to technical limitations, it’s still the most advanced solution we have at the moment. When used in collaboration with other techniques mentioned below, Tor can let you achieve a high level of anonymity.
Tor is often wrongfully labeled as a tool used by criminals to do bad things. However, consider the example of a robber that uses the highway to run away from the crime scene after a robbery. Just because the robber used that specific highway to get away, we can’t label the highway as a tool for criminals.
Tor is officially available on desktop computers and Android devices. For iOS, unofficial alternatives that utilize the Tor technology are there.
Use Signal for secure communication
Instant messaging apps are the most common means of modern day-to-day communication. Almost every smartphone user either uses WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage as their primary messaging service. Needless to say, these two are the most popular messaging services out there — but they’re not that secure.
WhatsApp’s recent privacy policy change urged millions of users to take a step forward in ditching WhatsApp and shifting to some other, secure messaging service.
The signal is a privacy-focused, end-to-end encrypted messaging app from the original creator of WhatsApp. The signal doesn’t use any sneaky tactics to take users’ data and share it with third parties. Whether you’re looking for a secure messaging app for your personal use, or are looking for a quick messaging solution for your company, Signal might be worth looking into.
Use residential proxies to conceal your location
A residential proxy puts a second layer of protection on your IP address and location. When you have a proxy enabled and you visit a website on your browser, the target server doesn’t receive that request from your IP address directly.
When you apply a residential proxy, your location appears to be in another area that you’d have selected from the settings. That way, your actual location is concealed and your privacy is maintained.
Be aware of what you post on the social media
Sharing your daily life activities on social media is a common trend nowadays. While older generations might find it cringe to post every bit of their activity on the internet, newer generations are quite comfortable with it.
While posting a simple detail about you might not feel threatening at first, things could turn out to be complicated when several pieces of information are compiled to generate a single picture of you. That picture could end up in a form that you don’t like the world to see.
To prevent that possibility, refrain from posting details about you that you won’t like to be linked to yourself in a complicated way.
Check app permissions
Android and iOS both have features to let you revoke permissions from any app on your smartphone. You can use this feature to revoke suspicious permissions asked by certain applications. For example, if a calculator application is asking for your call logs, there’s a high chance it could be trying to mine your data.
It’s difficult to protect your privacy and stay anonymous in today’s digital world. However, acting upon the above-mentioned strategies will get you, or your organization, closer to a secure digital environment.
