A lot has been happening on the internet lately,
security breaches through internet sources have been increased to a very large
extent as we are being excessively dependent on online platforms for almost every
need of ours.

Through keeping track of our online activities
companies like Google, Yahoo, Bing (the most trusted search engines) could see
our I.P. address and with the help of that I.P. address, they keep track of our
online activities, our searches, our routine, our preferences, even our
location. Never think no one is watching you or no one is tracking your
activities, they are watching us, keeping track of us.

 

They know everything about us, although these big
brands usually use this information for making money in a pretty harmless way,
they simply sell our information to bigger brands which use it for increasing
their profits.

 

This may feel harmless at this point but this
information in the wrong hands may become pretty harmful for us.

In this scenario, we must know and take certain steps
to ensure our protection.

Using incognito mode

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Using incognito mode can surely increase your
privacy especially when you are using shared or public computers.

While using incognito mode your history and cookies
aren’t saved no matter how frequently you visit a site, every time you close a
window everything related to that window is cleared out automatically.

This means even if you forget to sign out of personal
accounts before closing the window, you automatically are signed out of your
account to prevent someone from accessing your account.

Using privacy plugin

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When you use the internet there are many
different things, one of this thing is HTTP which means there is no encryption, an alternative to that is pretty simple HTTPS, means it uses a secure socket layer
(SSL).

To understand this let’s assume that when you access a
server from your personal computer it creates a tunnel between that server and
your system, that tunnel is used for all the information transferred from that
server to your computer and vice versa, this is where (SSL) comes into play,
HTTPS sites are encrypted, meaning this can’t be breached, so it protects the
transport of the information of your activities on the internet.

For this, you could install the ‘HTTPS EVERYWHERE’ plug-in which will force your browser to go to the SSL version of the site
because many of the sites online have both HTTP AND HTTPS versions, this will
make sure you always access the encrypted version of the site.

Using VPN’s

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This stands for the virtual private network; it
is the basic way of hiding your I.P. address. It bounces your server address to
another anonymous server of a different country giving you free, secure, and
anonymous access to sites that are even blocked in your country.

You could access the content of different regions that
are not available for you.

It helps to keep you’re your online activities hidden
from companies that may use your information to mend profit.

THE best VPN I would recommend is Hola VPN, though it’s
not free it provides VPN of almost every country, meaning it would be quite
difficult to hack or look into your information while using this and you could
access the content of almost every country of the world.

Using TOR

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Though people always associate TOR with drug
dealers, criminals, or people running from the government, it is very useful to
protect the anonymity of your I.P. address.

It was designed for government agencies and is used by
journalists, dissidents.

It’s called the onion router; it bounces your network
to another tor network then to another to eventually what is called the exit
nodes which are spread all around the world, so it’s next to impossible to
track back the person using it.

However, you should be very cautious while using this
router as there are many dark corners in this though which you could wind up in
pretty serious stuff.

Avoid using basic search engines

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People are stuck to popular search engines like
Google, Yahoo, and Bing, but these sites usually track and collect your data
like your name, birthday, email address, I.P. address, device information,
preferences, gender, and phone numbers through the access you provide them and
through the cookies, you create while browsing, to overcome this threat you
should switch to independent web browsers like duckduckgo.com. This search engine doesn’t provide personalized search results and doesn’t sell your
information to other service providers.

Use digital currency 

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Hiding your online information could be achieved
by this, all comes to trash when it comes to making payment online, for that if
you use your credit or debit card, you have to provide all the information you
are so keenly trying to secure.

To overcome that issue you could turn to an alternative currency called digital currency or cryptocurrency.

The best thing about this currency is that it’s
anonymous because it doesn’t allow any third-party authorization which makes
the source and recipient trace proof.

The most popular cryptocurrencies these days are
Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.