Protection and privacy online

Using every-day online services and social media sites can lead to your private information being at risk.

Most of us want to keep the convenience and benefits of doing business on the internet while keeping our information private. The good news is that there are a range of tools we can use to do this!

Read this informative article 11 free tools to protect your online activity from surveillance. These tools can be used as part of employees’ daily activities and incorporated into routine tasks. Download some of the free tools introduced in this step and be more secure!

Let’s take a look at three of the tools in a little more detail.

TOR Project

This tool is basically a web browser that allows for anonymous web surfing. When using TOR Project, users connect to a series of virtual tunnels where information is encrypted and bounced between nodes. It has proven to be very effective, so much so that the Russian Government offered a reward to find a method to identify users. This Tech Times article covers the story.

Privacy Badger

This tool is a web browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third party trackers from being able to secretly track which web pages you visit. One key advantage of Privacy Badger is that if it suspects an entity (maybe a website or advertiser) is trying to track you across multiple websites it will automatically block that entity.

Signal

This tool is for phone calls and text messaging as opposed to web activity. Signal is one of the better tools you can use for encrypted phone conversations. Even Hillary Clinton is now using Signal as reported in this Fortune article explaining how she came to use it. It uses end-to-end encryption to secure your communication, and no information is stored on any servers. Why is this important? One example is explained in this Guardian piece exploring the NSA’s warrantless searches into people’s information.

Your task

Download some of these free tools we’ve covered and test them out. Do you find them effective? Should everyone keep their information private while online or is this simply more relevant to business owners?