Why should you care?

I’ve been following cyber security in the news for a while now, and I believe it is the biggest problem of internet in recent years. As from time to time occurring discoveries of vulnerabilities, especially recent ones Meltdown and Spectre I felt I could share some of my personal views and internet browsing practices that could be useful for any “non-techy” user. The reason you should care about your privacy and safety online is to reduce the risk of sharing your personal details with third parties which may have some intentions that are not necessarily good plus filtering loads of unnecessary scripts may speed up your browsing, increase computer battery time and have less distractions while on the web.

Basics

Whenever you are browsing website where you fill any form with your personal data, you want to be sure that website is at least using HTTPS protocol, usually easily identifiable by a lock icon in the web address bar, i.e. Chrome web browser indicates that with a lock icon and “Secure” label next to it, website address is also therefore starting with https://… – this ensures that data you enter does not travel over the network in plain readable format for whoever could read it in the middle between your computer and web server where your data is being stored.

You also need to generally be cautious about where you click and what websites you visit. I noticed that some people are easily distracted and sidetracked by Ads that look as part of interface or contains a button.

How to increase privacy

Even though you’re sure you’re using secure connection, that does not always ensure that nobody else could take that data.

Technically any third party script on the website can access what you do in there. This does not mean that all of them do shady things, but average users usually have no clue what scripts are running there at all when visiting particular website.

Step to take here – disable external scripts which all potentially can capture the data that you’re entering on the original website. What is that and how to do it? Well thanks to internet – you do not need much knowledge to do so. Install and enable browser plugin called Ghostery. As this plugin is going to block all possible tracking scripts, you may want to use site whitelisting feature for the websites you know and trust, or just particular services (i.e. Google, Facebook, and others). In my personal experience I’ve seen sites sharing tracking and ads information with more than 50 third party services at the same time.

Generally most of those tracking of your behaviour on the website are there for enabling creators to improve your experience, or provide you free content in favour of you seeing some ads. Tracking enables free news, free music and other things tailored for you by what you were searching for, or visiting as a return for viewing some ads. You have probably noticed that once you’ve searched for something, you start seeing these things on Social media, and many other websites you visit. And if you don’t like that – you can stop sharing your info with the help of some tools like AdBlock. Now some websites will start complaining about AdBlocker and stop showing you free content, therefore you can whitelist particular website to workaround the issue. I always prefer whitelisting, as by default my settings block anything that is not needed to see the actual website and I only allow the ones I trust.

Summary

Things to consider:

  • Make sure you enter data on HTTPS enabled sites
  • Avoid dodgy sites
  • Ghostery – blocking tracking scripts
  • AdBlock – blocking ads
  • Whitelisting – practice to allow ads and/or some tracking on your trusted sites

What you’ll get:

  • Less ads
  • Less tracking
  • Faster load speeds
  • Less frustration and distractions
  • Potentially longer battery life of your laptop

If you’re completely crazy about privacy or anonymity, you may want to look into paid VPN and Proxy services and combine them together.

In the end, I can not miss to share one article, which is technical and only web developers may understand it, but it basically tells, that most of the data leaks happen not at the level of Meltdown and Spectre or anything close to that. Here is the link.