You maybe wonder: « But… why should I care? »
Privacy is a right (just like freedom, justice, etc.) you haven’t always had, people fought for this in the past and will undoubtly continue to do so. It is something you should value and care for. You should care because information can be dangerous: if you entrust someone with your data, you cannot know that it will never be leaked, intentionnaly or by being hacked. You never know what is goind to happend, this harmless information today could become the material for a blackmail in the future, against you, your company or someone you know. And you do care about privacy, it is not necessarily that you have something to hide: just like when you shut the door when you go to the bathroom, everyone knows what you’re doing, still you would feel uncomfortable if someone happened to open the door.
These are just a couple easy hacks, you can of course dig and do more.
1. Don’t log with your Google of Facebook account on every website, prefer to use an email instead. And if you already did, you should be able to revoke their access by searching in the settings.
2. Be wary about the data you give: when you have the option to not give some of it you should keep it to yourself. Does this random website really need to know your birthday or your phone number?
3. Think about what you share online. Check who can see what you do and generally speaking just post online what you wouldn’t mind being on the front page of the newspaper.
4. Try not to centralize your online activity. For example, do you know that Google represents 90% of all online searches and that Chrome is 60% of the internet browsers installed wordwide? (1) And I bet a lot of you use a Gmail account. If you want to be more careful, you can try switching for example to Firefox, DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail. I invite you to look what would suit you best.
5. Security is important if you want your data to remain private. Try to use long passwords, unique to each account (look for how to create a passphrase), and if you have the option I recommend you to use two-factor authentification. This is particularly important for your most sensitive accounts: for example if your email is hacked, it will be impossible for you to prevent your data to be accessed to by someone else.
Happy surfing!