Internet privacy has been a hot topic for debate for the last century. With tech giants and marketers constantly pushing for more private data collection that improves their products and services, the average internet user can no longer feel alone, even in the privacy of their home.
Modern smart devices have become so advanced and tailored towards breaching user privacy. Even when we do not use our phones or tablets, these gadgets are full of apps with absurd permissions that keep collecting user data and even go as far as physically and digitally tracking users by monitoring every step of our browsing sessions.
For this article, let’s focus on minimizing surveillance in cyberspace. At the same time, an uninformed internet user may feel like it is only them interacting with a website or a search engine.
The web is full of third-party trackers and other surveillance tools that keep recording every step: where you click, how you move, where the mouse spends the most time without movement, as well as information about your digital identity – a public IP address assigned by an internet service provider (ISP), the version of your browser and an operating system (OS), and even an approximate geolocation.
In this article, we take the fight to tech giants, marketers, and their surveillance tools by applying internet privacy tools to avoid tracking online. Here we will discuss the most popular and practical solutions that extend a helping hand without cluttering or overcomplicating your connections. We will also address the extra benefits of these tools. For example, let’s look at a Google Hotel API.
This complex tool utilizes proxies – intermediary servers to change the digital location of your connections and find information about hotels, the best available deals, and changes in pricing. Digital privacy tools help us find deals and discounts in new locations, and tools like Google Hotel API extend their effectiveness to protect and enhance the browsing experience.
To learn more about this fascinating tool, check out this blog article from Smartproxy – one of the best suppliers of proxy servers. For now, let’s focus on the basic protection from online tracking before we ramp up the complexity.
Avoid social media use
Social media platforms are the biggest thieves of personal information. With massive storage of data about every move, post, and interaction on these sites and their third-party associates, a social media account binds your identity to future browsing sessions, which allows tech companies to track you at all times.
While asking all internet users to stay off the grid is absurd, avoiding social media platforms or at least limiting their use is a great first step at taking back your privacy
Adjusting privacy settings
For PCs and laptops, online tracking is fixated on browser sessions and installed programs. These processes can be used to track the user, but they do not steal as much information as mobile apps with all-enabled permissions.
To minimize tracking via digital devices and installed software, make sure to turn off the permissions that let the apps use your audio, video, file access, and location data, as well as read their privacy policy.
Use different browsers
Because online trackers have many information access points to spy on your browsing sessions. Because main browsers have default settings to store passwords, online purchases, website visits, and habits, the profile of your preferences and behavior is later used to identify you. Third-party businesses and advertisers pay good money for this information, and because most internet browsers do not block trackers, they continue spying on your connections at all times.
However, once you change your browser or even choose a privacy-oriented software like Brave, there is no history of your prior connections, and you can combine your first, untainted browsing sessions with other internet privacy tools to avoid tracking online.
Protection with proxy servers
Even with all the safety and privacy precautions, we need external tools to protect and mask the most important part of digital identity – an IP address. To achieve this goal, we have proxy servers that take over the connection and attach a different IP and a new geolocation to our connections.
We can take a step further and keep changing the used IP address with rotating proxies. These tools start using a different proxy IP after a determined time interval or a specific limit of connections. The best representative providers have millions of identities to offer, letting you choose the closest servers and maintain the fastest speeds or change your location to bypass geo-restrictions and enjoy the internet in another region.
Even with the most effective privacy tools, there is no way of knowing if you are tracked online. Modern apps and trackers are so good at extracting private information that staying off the grid seems like the only effective. If you want to continue browsing the web with as little tracking as possible, try to avoid the obvious traps and do not log in to Google or Facebook accounts while browsing.
