Browsing the Internet safely has almost become a must, given the many dangers on the Web. Identity theft, data theft, email hacking, and selling your Internet activity to third parties are legion and affect everyone. But there are ways to protect yourself from these threats. This involves a few essential tools and more reasonable and healthier online behavior.
Protect yourself with a VPN
A VPN allows you to create a dedicated tunnel through which all your internet traffic flows and remains hidden from your internet service provider. In addition, this internet traffic is encrypted, making it unreadable by a third party, should it accidentally fall into the wrong hands.
Finally, a VPN masks your real IP address by routing your connection through another IP address.
Browsing with a VPN will therefore ensure you very high confidentiality and should protect you from most of the dangers of the Internet for a modest investment.
Manage cookies
When you visit different websites, some of them place information about your visit, called "cookies," on your hard drive. Cookies may include information such as login or registration identification, user preferences, online "shopping cart" information, and any other information the visitor may have left on the site.
Your browser stores this cookie and sends its information to the web server each time you return to this site. The site can then use the cookie to personalize the display, serve specific advertisements, or simply log you in more quickly.
These cookies are called first-party cookies. However, there are cookies, called third-party cookies, that communicate data about you to an advertising clearinghouse that in turn shares that data with other online marketers.
These third-party cookies include “tracking cookies” that use your online history to serve other ads.
Manage cookies that you store on your hard drive is essential. If you want to remain more anonymous online and not share your information with other sites, take the time in your browser to detect and delete cookies, including third-party cookies. This is possible with most browsers and will prevent you from having your personal information spread all over the Internet.
Favor secure HTTPS sites to browse the Internet safely
The abbreviation HTTPS stands for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure," and it is an encrypted transmission protocol for communicating between your browser and the server of the website you are visiting.
Most major websites are HTTPS enabled and appear as such with a padlock in your browser’s address bar. HTTPS makes it nearly impossible for someone to snoop on your internet traffic and steal your data while it’s in transit.
So you can rest assured when you browse websites that have this padlock in the address bar. This does not mean that you should not visit other sites. But that you should be extremely careful and not enter any confidential information about yourself, and even less so make purchases there.
Using TOR as a browser
TOR stands for “The Onion Router”. This browser was originally developed and used by the US military to hide their IP addresses. It was later released as free, open-source software and has been constantly improved.
Concretely, TOR is a network that simulates numerous proxies by using the connection addresses of other TOR users in order to hide the IP of the original user.
Tor makes it nearly impossible to spy on your web traffic and determine what site you are visiting or who and where you are.
But TOR is not a perfect solution. First, it is slower than other browsers and is more prone to bugs or security holes. So it is important to keep the TOR browser up to date and to respect its security warnings when using it. However, it is still very useful for anyone who really wants anonymous browsing that leaves no traces!
Be very careful with your passwords
Your passwords are access keys. Like your house keys, they must obey a few basic rules:
- be protected and kept safe
- not be shared with other people
- not be easy to guess
- do not allow access to many sites (do not use a single password)
- be changed regularly
There are still too many people who use a single password for all their access and who choose a simple birthday or their child's first name as a password. They put themselves in great danger and can easily become victims of fraud, data theft or even identity theft.
