In the first part of this series about privacy we visited some of the techniques of how we are actively being tracked and how to protect ourselves.
Here we will focus on different information that can be used to identify us on the internet, and ways to protect this information from getting out.
What is the thing that is most identifiable about us? Our home address? Our bank account number? Maybe our passport number?
If you are like me, you probably have had your Email address for a very long time. Presumably longer than you lived at your current address or used your bank card number. If you have ever renewed a passport then your Email address has probably outlived your passport number.
Yet, most people have close to no hesitation handing out their Email address to any organisation on the internet that will ask them. To make matters worse, single-sign-on has made it exceptionally easy to submit our most identifying piece of information to anyone who requires a login. And how many logins do we require these days …
There are obvious dangers in not securing Email that go beyond using a provider lacking encryption. Regular leaks of user data mean that most Email and password combinations are eventually exposed. With this in mind, alternating both your Email and password should be considered the norm.
Fortunately a few E-Mail providers offer this service for free. By using an alias service, we can create Email aliases that hide our real addresses. Additionally, you can simply disable an alias if you don’t want to hear from the service you created the account with.
Password managers
But how do we remember all of these Emails and passwords?
You are right, the amount of accounts that we require to use the internet these days is absurd. This is a natural side effect of more and more people using tools to prevent online tracking. In response, organisations try to force account creation to be able to recognise us and profit from this data.
Password managers help us remember all of our Email and password combinations. It allows us to navigate the internet without having to remember every website we created an account with, or constantly repeating the username and password combinations until eventually a leak catches us off guard.
Search engines
“Google” is a verb in the Cambridge Dictionary, and while it is defined as using the Google search engine to search the internet, it has become synonymous with looking things up in general.
We often forget that this information about us exists and how much of this information we willingly part with. Through the use of default settings on mobile phones and browsers, a large amount of our curiosity is shared with the same organisations that plan on monetising this information.
But advertisement is at the worst a nuisance, however there may be more sensitive queries that we have that we would not usually share if we were aware of the fact that someone is listening. While looking up information in a book keeps us anonymous, all of the same answers provided by a popular search engine will create a record.
In 2024, there are many alternatives to the popular search engines with a focus on privacy. Changing the default search engine on a phone is straight forward. It can be true that some of the alternatives don’t perform as well as others, but there is nothing that stops us from trying different ones. Most queries we have are relatively straight forward:
When does the football start? Who was the actor in that movie I watched? What is the opening time for that restaurant?
All search engines can answer these questions, so the question that remains, is whether it is worth having this query remembered forever?
In the end …
… we all must be aware of how we use the internet. Not everything that tracks is evil, not all accounts are useless, and as we have seen there are plenty of alternatives and fair solutions on the web worth looking for.
The truth is that technology advances too quickly to rely on any one solution to be safe. But using the tools that are available to us in combination with the knowledge of how and why things work the way they do, we can be confident in our ability to navigate this changing landscape safely.