by Perfect safety online is no more impossible than when you’re driving on a crowded road with strangers or walking alone through a city at night. Like roads and cities, the dangers of the internet arise from choices made by society. Enjoying the freedom of automobiles involves the risk of accidents; some of those contacts can harm you if you have the amenities of a city full of unexpected encounters. People can find ways to hurt each other if you have an open internet.
But some highways and cities are safer than others. Together, people can make their online lives safer too.
I am a media scholar who researches the online world. For years, I’ve been experimenting with myself and my devices to explore what it might mean to live a digital life on my own terms. But in the process, I’ve learned that my privacy can’t just come from my choices and my devices.
This is a guide to get you started, with those around you, on the path to a safer and healthier online life.
The threats
The dangers you face online take many different forms and require different types of responses. The type of threat you’ll hear about the most in the news is the straight criminal type of hackers and scammers. Perpetrators usually want to steal a victim’s identity or money, or both. These attacks take advantage of different legal and cultural norms around the world. Businesses and governments often offer to protect people from these types of threats, not to mention that they can create threats of their own.
The second type of threat comes from businesses that lurk in the cracks of the online economy. Loose protections allow them to harvest vast amounts of data about people and sell it to abusive advertisers, police forces and others willing to pay. Private data brokers that most people have never heard of collect data from apps, transactions and more, and sell what they learn about you without your permission.
The third type of threat comes from established institutions themselves, such as the big technology companies and government agencies. These institutions promise a form of safety if people trust them – protection from everyone but themselves, while liberally collecting your data. Google, for example, provides tools with high security standards, but its business model is based on selling ads based on what people do with those tools. Many people feel that they have to accept this deal, because everyone around them already has it.
The stakes are high. Feminist and critical race scholars have shown that surveillance underpins unfair discrimination and exclusion. As African American studies scholar Ruha Benjamin puts it, online surveillance is the “new Jim Code,” excluding people from jobs, fair pricing and other opportunities based on how computers are trained to view and categorize them. .
Once again, there is no formula for safety. When you make choices about your technology, individually or collectively, you’re really making choices about who and how you trust—shifting your trust from one place to another. But those choices can make a big difference.
Step 1: Basic data privacy hygiene
To get started with digital privacy, there are a few things you can do fairly easily on your own. First, use a password manager like Bitwarden or Proton Pass, and make all your passwords unique and complex. If you can easily remember a password, you probably aren’t keeping it secure. Also, enable two-factor authentication, which usually involves receiving a code in a text message, where you can.
When browsing the web, use a browser like Firefox or Brave with a strong commitment to privacy, and a good ad blocker like uBlock Origin. Get in the habit of using a search engine like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search that doesn’t profile you based on your previous queries.
On your phone, download only the apps you need. It can help to clean out and rearrange everything periodically to make sure you only keep what you really use. Be especially wary of apps that track your location and access your files. For Android users, F-Droid is another app store with more privacy-preserving tools. The Consumer Reports app Consent Slip can help you manage how other apps use your data.
Step 2: Transfer away
Then, you can shift your trust from companies that make their money from surveillance. But this works best if you can get your community involved; if they’re using Gmail, and you send them an email, Google gets your email whether you use Gmail yourself or not. Try an email provider like Proton Mail that doesn’t rely on targeted ads, and see if your friends try it too. For mobile chat, Signal makes encrypted messaging easy, unless other people are using it with you.
You can also try privacy-preserving operating systems for your devices. GrapheneOS and /e/OS are versions of Android that avoid sending your phone data to Google. For your computer, Pop!_OS is a friendly version of Linux. Find more transition ideas at science and technology scholar Janet Vertesi’s website, The Opt Out Project.
Step 3: New foundations
If you’re ready to go even further, rethink how your community or workplace collaborates. In my university lab, we run our own servers to manage our tools, including Nextcloud for file sharing and Matrix for chat.
This kind of transition, however, requires a collective commitment to how organizations spend money on technology, away from large companies and to invest in the ability to manage your tools. It may take extra work to build what I call a “controllable stock” – tools that manage and control people together – but it can lead to a more satisfying and empowering relationship with technology.
Protecting each other
Too often, people are told that staying safe online is an individual job, and it’s your fault if you’re not doing it right. But I think this is a form of victim blaming. In my opinion, the greatest source of danger online is the lack of public policy and collective power to prevent surveillance from becoming the basic business model for the internet.
For years, people have organized “cryptoparties” where they can get together and learn how to use privacy tools. You can also support organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation that support public policy to protect privacy. If people assume that privacy is only an individual responsibility, we have already lost.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
It was written by Nathan Schneider University of Colorado Boulder.
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Nathan Schneider receives funding from a range of entities, including the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Ethereum Foundation. He serves on several non-profit boards, including those of Metagov, Start.coop, Waging Nonviolence, and Zebras Unite.
