After last year Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Most of the people became really concerned about their privacy. Even though everyone knew Google was doing that for years, Not many knew how much personal data was being collected, How are they are being exploited.
You can do few things to safeguard your privacy
- Using privacy protecting browsers (Or by using addons/extention on popular browsers)
- Using VPN
Browser level security.
There are various browser extentions are there to protect your privacy from trackers. UltraBlock for chrome, Ghostery on Firefox. These addon can block third party cookies and trackers.
Recently i switched a new browser called Brave. Brave is an Open-source project and it’s based on Chromium project. Those who love Google chrome but are also privacy conscious folks can switch to Brave, Personally i love brave because of various reasons
- Adblocker is built into the browser
- It blocks all trackers and upgrades connections to https.
- Brave is faster than Chrome, Third-party trackers usually slow you down. Since brave blocks traffic, It’s bit faster than Chrome.
- And my favourit feature => You can browse privately in Tor Mode (If you want to bypass govt firewall’s and access blocked sites)
Using a VPN.
Governments have tracked people down by their IP address, with the help of the person’s Internet Service Provider. You may want to hide your IP when browsing the internet. So VPN’s you to make your internet private. There are tons of paid VPN’s out there. Personally i prefer Cloudflare Warp VPN for 2 reasons.
- It’s fast - With Argo, cloudflare routes visitors through the least congested and most reliable paths in the internet.
- It’s cheap - Currently it only costs around ₹69 in India
Limitation
Warp is currently available only for mobile
Desktop version is will be out in few months
- WARP+ on mobile cost around 69RS here in india
Privacy concerns.
But for me cloudflare is better than my ISP or Google anyday. Still few people raised concerns about Cloudflare practices
- reddit thread bashing cloudflare for it’s unethical practices
- Hackernews thread
But if you are still concerned about privacy, then you can setup your own wireguard vpn server on some cloud. Yup, that might be bit more effort and cost you more money for hosting a server.
Happy browsing!