Protecting your privacy

Bits of Freedom has started a wiki (in Dutch) about measures you can take to protect your privacy. It currently contains information about secure email, file encryption and blocking of tracking and other mechanisms used by advertisement providers.

For general anonymous communication, The Onion Router (TOR) can be used. For more information, visit the TOR website and the TOR documentation page.

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension written by two NYU students that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one's tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view.

Anonym.OS LiveCD is a bootable live CD based on OpenBSD that provides a hardened operating environment whereby all ingress traffic is denied and all egress traffic is automatically and transparently encrypted and/or anonymised.

Alternatives for the Google Search Engine that proxy the search requests and results in order to stay anonymous for Google are: Scroogle and Startingpage. It is also possible to use the GoogleSharing Firefox Extension to visit the Google Search pages anonymously (request headers stripped/unique ID from response cookies deleted).

Clicktracking is the act of tracking the links on which a user clicks on a webpage. Google tracks the clicks to the websites clicked at the search page. This tracking by Google can be prevented by enabling the 'Remove click tracking' option of the OptimizeGoogle Add-on for Firefox or by using Greasemonkey in combination with one of the many available anti-clicktracking scripts which can be found at the userscripts.org website.

In order to prevent websites from executing malicious javascript or gathering information about your system in order to uniquely identify you (see panopticlick.eff.org), the NoScript Firefox Extension can be used. This allows a user to select which domains are allowed to run javascript in the browser. It has also countermeasures against XSS, clickjacking and the ability to force using SSL for certain websites in order to prevent attacking tools like SSLStrip.

Ghostery is an extension to block trackers like Google Analytics, Statcounter and advertisement networks from spying on you.

SRWare Iron is a Google Chrome alternative which is also based on the Chromium source. In contrast to the Google Chrome browser, SRWare Iron doesn't try to track you in any way possible. A privacy comparison between Chrome and Iron can be found here.

WhisperMonitor is a kind of firewall for certain Android smartphones. It monitors outgoing Internet traffic (exposing hidden communication channels between your mobile phone and the app developer) and allows you to block certain connections.