Privacy How-to

Privacy Tutorials

PS : English is not my native language please excuse my grammatical mistakes.

This is a first post about privacy. It is practically impossible to browse privately on the Internet especially when using a Windows Desktop. There are other options to increase anonymity and privacy by using other OS, I might give some tutorials about it if this generates enough curiosity. By no mean I pretend to be an expert in privacy but reading, testing and applying myself some of these methods worked for me.
Please know that these tools are not to perform illegal activities , or make you anonymous but rather have a better privacy. Please know that there is a difference between privacy, anonymity and security. This post is mostly about privacy.

First step : Choose the right VPN

There are many VPNs that claim that they provide 100% privacy , but frankly only few can be considered. I will only give the service providers that I personally used after doing some research.
First you need to make sure that they do not keep logs. You may ask why is that important?
An Internet log is a report of which websites you visit and when you visit them.
Your ISP, government, want to see what you are doing online. Logs can give them a description of your internet activity. When you use a VPN your ISP and government know that you are using one but don't know what you are doing within the VPN session. Your activities can be seen only by the VPN provider. By not keeping logs no one can find out what you were doing. I hope this makes sense.

See the list below of know VPNs that matches this criteria, every one of them accept Bitcoin :), have a no logging policy and most importantly are no part of the 9 eyes , which are 9 different countries that agreed to share intelligence information about users among them. I can go much more in details here but it will take me one week to write this.
My recommended list are : AirVpn , Cryptostorm, Blackvpn, AzireVpn, I recently heard about double-vpn which is based in Russia, but I haven't test them yet.

Test your VPN connection at DNSleaktest.com

Digital Footprints

Your digital footprint is what you leave behind while on the Internet it is your online history and can potentially be seen by other people, or tracked in a database.

How do we leave Digital Footprints ?
Have you ever wonder why you seen some advertisement about some products that you recently looked for on eCommerce websites ? Well this is because Websites leave cookies on your system which can track you while browsing from site to site. This allows targeted advertisements which is used by marketing teams.
Test your Browser fingerprints by going to : https://panopticlick.eff.org/

You need your browser to look like everyone else. Disabling JavaScript, using Linux etc will actually make you stand out out from the masses. This is really really really important! How many people disable Javascript , enable https everywhere and use Linux ,not many in the world, even less around you !!

Start Fighting digital footprints by using :
On Firefox Only : Random Agent Spoofer
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-spoofer/?src=search

Add-Ons that offers to randomize identifiable information for you. It changes the agent of Firefox, or switch to a very common user-agent, as it can not only do that, but also change other privacy settings to prevent additional data leaks.

After the installation you will see a small blue icon on the top right corner select the most common windows Browser.

Disconnect https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/disconnect

This FireFox Add-ons stops tracking of third-party sites. It also keeps your searches private and make browsing faster.

Self Destructing Cookie
Automatically removes cookies when they are no longer used by the browser tabs. The information that are used to spy on you might not be available anymore.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/

I will give more details, in-depth tutorials with pictures about these tools later on, like I said I need to know if this will interest people.
Please let me know if you have any critics I can use to make this a better post, improve my writing skills, or mistake that I have made regarding privacy in this post . You can find more information about privacy at privacytools.io.