Privacy

PRIVACY

This page is short because Privacy is a core part of most other topics on this site. For example, a big part of configuring any smartphone. It's also a big reason to use a VPN. This is why, for a long time, this page did not exist (it went live in July 2024).

April 21, 2025: How to Protect Yourself From Phone Searches at the US Border by Lily Hay Newman an dMatt Burgess for Wired magazine. One suggestion that takes up much of the article is to travel with a secondary phone that has a sanitized version of your digital life. They suggest this travel phone have separate communication and social media accounts. Only put stuff on the phone you need for your trip. The travel phone should have its own phone number, or just use it on Wi-Fi. For its phone number, many companies sell eSims for short durations (this is from me, the article only mentions SIM cards, so a bit dated). Sadly, the article says nothing about hiding apps using the built-in features of iOS and Android.

April 17, 2025: How Americans Are Surveilled During Protests by Lauren Goode, Michael Calore, and Andrew Couts for Wired magazine. The obvious defense is to leave your phone at home, they do not mention the pros/cons of just turning it off. Some defenses: Turn off Face ID on an iPhone, turn off fingerprint logon on an Android phone, don't go to a protest alone, don't drive your own car to a protest (to avoid license plate scanners), do wear a mask (both for health reasons and to obscures your face).

March 2025: A new topic was added to this site, Avoiding Software from the USA. A big reason for this is privacy.

Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List by Yael Grauer. It is indeed a big list. Quoting: This list, also known as BADBOOL, was started on September 29, 2017 and was most recently updated in July 2024... This list was the main reason that I created this pgae.

In my opinion the best thing you can do to avoid tracking is to use a DNS service like NextDNS. I have used NextDNS for a few years, pay for it (there is a free version) and have been very happy with it. For one thing, it can log DNS requests, which is a very simple way to see servers contacted under the cover, regardless of your operating system. It also supports profiles, so that one web browser can use one profile, another browser on the same device use a different profile and the host Operating System use a third profile. Perhaps the best feature of each profile is a white list and a black list. Any DNS blocking service will make mistakes, and NextDNS easily lets you allow things that it has blocked by default or block things that it has allowed by default. You can use both a browser based ad/tracker blocking extension and NextDNS at the same time in the same browser.

Protect yourself from online tracking by Privacy International. This is here just for completeness, I am not a big fan of it. For one thing, it seems to have been abandoned, all the sections were written in 2021 and not updated. Seems like someone got a grant to do a project, did it, and walked away from it. For example, the Windows section on avoiding targeted ads, does not mention Windows 11. It also does not say which service pack it refers to and there is no excuse for such an amateurish omission. Things have changed in Windows, especially how it deals with the newer secure DNS. Likewise, the topic of Chrome browser tweaks does not say which version of Chrome it refers to. As to the poor recommendations made here: it says nothing about not using the Chrome browser. Also, the section on DNS level ad blocking in Windows is about modifying the hosts file. That is ridiculous.