You Are Being Watched, Why Online Privacy Matters

Do you care about your online privacy? What’s that? … You have nothing to hide? That’s what most online users believe, they believe that since they’re not engaged in any fraudulent or suspicious activities, then they have nothing to hide or fear.

”Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” — Edward Snowden.

Whether you care about online privacy or not, you are continuously being watched while using the internet. Governments surveillance agencies, internet service providers (ISPs), online advertisers, and cybercriminals are all getting access and using your personal data and browsing behavior to serve their own agendas.

Don’t believe me?

You can simply go to this website https://hacked-emails.com/ and check if your personal email address has even been hacked, harvested, and sold to hackers in the darknet. Chances are your email was probably hacked a couple of times.

How is my data vulnerable?

A useful rule of thumb is that if it’s on the internet it isn’t private. Even people who browse the web on a daily basis and use it for all kinds of things don’t think there’s a need to feel concerned about their online privacy.

But if you were to sit down and really think about it you would realize that you should be extremely concerned about your privacy when you’re browsing the internet as it can be extremely unsafe, especially if you’re unaware of this fact.

On a typical day, an internet user usually uses their private passwords to log into different websites, check their personal email inbox, and purchase something online with their credit cards. These are all very sensitive information about yourself that you don’t really want anyone but yourself to get a hold of.

But sadly there are many organizations and ‘bad people’ who want to get access to your private data, government agencies want to spy on their people, advertisers want to buy your browsing behavior data to send you target ads, and God knows what else.

The fact that the majority of people online are unaware of these threats falls in the favor of these snoopers and cybercriminals who pray on this fact alone. This makes their job a lot easier since most people already tend to share too much about themselves online.

Therefore the fact is each time we use the internet, our private data is at risk.

But the thing is it’s actually a good thing that people know this—that their online life is not as private as they think it is or that they’re being watched even though they didn’t do anything wrong. Being aware that you’re being watched and monitored will help change your perspective on things, you will start to value your online privacy.

What to do about it?

If finally, you have come to the realization that your online privacy is important and you should do whatever it takes to protect it, then hopefully there are some things that you can do to help enhance your online privacy and protect your personal data.

(1) The first thing that you should do is minimize the amount of private information that you share about your life online. Because the less you share about yourself, the harder it will be for anyone to get access to your sensitive data. Especially since public social media sites have made it a lot easier for cybercriminals to mine your data on-scale.

(2) After that, you can start using search engines that don’t track you online (such as the Tor browser or DuckDuckGo), because Google is known for tracking and collecting their user’s data to sell it to 3rd-party companies and advertisers. Private browsers don’t store their users IP addresses andon’t’t use tracking cookies.

(3) Place a sticker on your computer or your personal laptop’s camera, even the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg tapes over his personal laptop’s camera (and microphone as well). Because It is quite possible for hackers to install malware on people’s devices that enable them to get access to a computer’s camera to spy on you.

(4) Invest in a reliable online anti-virus software that detects and protects you from online malicious advertising and ransomware hacking attempts. The web is full of risks and hackers are constantly circulating the internet looking for the next victim. A premium anti-virus software designed for enhancing your online security will help minimize the risk of getting your data leaked.

(5) Don’t click on any suspicious links online. Those underlined blue web links are what makes the internet go around, but sadly they can also be used by hackers to exploit and gain access to your private data. You can use a link scanning service such as https://www.virustotal.com/ to analyze suspicious files and web links.

(6) Use end-to-end encryption services such as ProtonMail for email, and Signal or WhatsApp for private messages. These encrypted services will help keep your communications private the way they should be. No hacker, government or any other third-party can read or identify the data being transmitted.

(7) Lastly, you can use a virtual private network (VPN) service to help keep your personal data secure and private while browsing the web. A reliable VPN uses multiple online security protocol technologies to allow you to surf the web with complete privacy, anonymity, and peace of mind.

Conclusion

While government agencies, internet companies, ISPs, hackers and many other entities praying on people’s little to no awareness of online privacy. Individuals and online users should also take responsibility for their own privacy by implementing the above online privacy measures.

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