đź“… 31 Jan 2021
Since joining Fosstodon, I have been taking a lot of steps to increase my privacy and security online. I wanted to highlight a few of the steps I’ve taken to address what up until now has been a pretty lax approach to my life online.
First, I’ve been using a VPN for months. I don’t want to endorse one of them specifically, but if you are interested in VPNs just do a little research. I didn’t mind spending a little money on mine and I was able to find one that wasn’t too expensive and covered all four of my devices.
Second, more of a house-keeping thing, I have purged a ton of old email addresses, accounts, and changed settings on social media. I don’t use social media hardly at all. My twitter account is mainly used professionally - I probably only log on once a week. This may change in the future but I am a student right now and just don’t need it. For old accounts, I made sure my mailing address was up-to-date (or deleted it if possible), set a very strong password if I couldn’t delete the account, and purged all of my data before doing so. I also made sure notifications were set, if possible, so I’d be notified of any login attempts.
Third, and this is something fairly recent, I have started practicing compartmentalization. The principle behind compartmentalization is that you use different browsers for different activities. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, it is no longer enough to just use private browsing. So, I mainly use Firefox, but when I want to do random surfing of the web or research, I use either Tor or another browser.
Finally, I did some research and added quite a few plug-ins to my Firefox browser. I have quite a few focused on pop-ups, cookies, and trackers. I’ll just highlight Facebook Container and Cookie AutoDelete. Do your research and find the ones that best suit your needs.
Day 13: #100DaysToOffload
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