A fundamental aspect of freedom is the ability to move about in your environment without fear of being tracked and monitored by people who might use information for their purposes and not necessarily for your own benefit.

For example, when you step outside of your home, you tend to expect a certain level of privacy and anonymity. Aside from people who recognize you while walking down the street and surveillance cameras mounted on homes, businesses and government property, you don’t anticipate that someone is keeping tabs on your every move and when these activities took place.

However, organizations from product manufacturers to government agencies to advertisers and marketers and many more want to gather as many details as possible about people’s habits and preferences when they go online.

The idea is that getting to know people more intimately through computerized tracking systems, manufacturers can anticipate demand for products and target ads about them more precisely to the people who are most likely interested in making a purchase.

But criminal hackers are also interested in finding sensitive information about individuals.
The potential for such ongoing data collection often prompts individuals to wonder, : what is a VPN ” ? which is short for virtual private network. VPNs are an excellent line of online defense for businesses and homeowners alike.

If you are concerned about entities monitoring what you do on the internet, it’s worth considering the importance of staying anonymous online.

Examples of Risk

Going online may be riskier than you realize. Each time you type in your user name (often it’s your email address) and password, if the connection is insecure, hackers listening in can grab your information.

When you visit a website and allow it to place cookies on your computer, smartphone or tablet, the site uses it to keep track of you and your preferences. It might keep track of the fact that you logged in with an account. When you click on items in the online catalog, the site owner is keeping tabs on them too.

Using search engines exposes a great deal of personal information that you would never want anyone to see, perhaps even your closest friends or spouse. Think of typing in the name of a disease or its symptoms, or for a lawyer that help you get a fast divorce. People who are poring over your search engine history could figure out details about your private life and then use that to exploit you later. Perhaps you are researching a topic about sex or how to invest money and you rightly feel that it’s nobody’s business but yours.

Your location can also be given away if you fail to stay anonymous online. A website will detect the IP address you’re using to connect to the Internet, and this includes geographic information as well as your time zone. This means a website could build up a history about your habits, such as when you wake up and start using a web browser, to what sites you visit daily and if you wake up in the same location or perhaps move around a lot.

Unfortunately, stalkers can go online and keep monitoring their victims if they do not protect their anonymity. They will create fake social media accounts and try to become friends with their victim so they can monitor activities and the timing of these activities (such as sharing photos or updates).

When hackers access your most sensitive information and dump it online, it’s a practice called “doxing.” It could be done as a prank to annoy someone or serve as a malicious warning.

If a criminal manages to access your backup cloud account for your smartphone, think of the revealing private photos you’ve taken that are only meant to be seen by your significant other, or emails and text messages that would be embarrassing if leaked.

Medical information is another category of sensitive information you’ll want to take pains to secure. Consider that many doctor’s offices now offer online patient portals. You log into the portal over a website from the comfort of your home or at a computer kiosk at the doctor’s waiting room. If you are using an insecure computer to log into the portal, criminals eavesdropping on the connection could then access your details. This could range from recent a diagnosis to what prescription drugs you are taking.

Safety Measures

There are a number of steps you can take to increase security and improve anonymity online.

* Firewall: Anyone who uses a laptop or computer to connect to the internet over a broadband modem directly is running a risk, as noted by PC Magazine. It explained that you should always activate the firewall software built into your router or the firewall installed on your computer.

* Password Complexity: Don’t ever use for your password a word that can be found in the dictionary. Brute-force hacking lets criminals try every word until they break into an account. Use a longer password made by combining words and characters with a combination of upper case and lower case characters for best results. Avoid using the same password for different accounts, since a criminal who has access to email could then break into your credit union account and so on. You’ll want to set a reminder to make new passwords periodically, such as once per month.

* Refuse to Provide Details to People Who Contact You Online: If someone emails, texts or sends you a direct message over a social network and you don’t know them, it’s prudent to avoid giving them sensitive information. Banks, doctor’s offices and companies you already do business with will not contact you for information this way.

* Do Not Share Passwords: It’s friendly to share a password with a friend or relative, such as to let them use your video streaming or music streaming account. But what if that person’s computer or smartphone is hacked and criminals manage to take over your account? If you use the same password for this account as you do for email, hackers would soon have a foothold into your online information.

* Don’t Click on Links in Emails and Texts From Unfamiliar People: Your anonymity is at risk when you click on an unsolicited link via email or text message. A hacker will attempt to trick you into logging into a copycat site of a website you already trust, for example, or will entice you with a free offer if you visit the site now. Instead, do a search for the company’s name and compare its URL with the URL you’ve been sent to see if they match.

* Avoid Free, Public-Access Wi-Fi: When you go to a cafe, the free Wi-Fi is intended to keep you there while enjoying a meal, so you don’t have to use up cellular data to connect. But public Wi-Fi is ripe for attack, and hackers can set up Wi-Fi hotspots that actually record your name and password so criminals can use your credentials. A workaround for this problem is to use a virtual private network or VPN, which allows you to connect online without giving up sensitive information to snoops.

* Check Privacy Settings on Your Web Browser: You can tell the browser not to accept cookies, or enable the option to clear cookies each time you shut down the browser.

However, don’t be lulled into a false sense of security when your browser says it’s in Incognito or Hidden mode or when you check the “Do not track” option. While the settings do discourage sites from tracking your or loading cookies, companies may not actually fully comply, as noted by Digital Trends. You also have to anticipate that marketers may figure out a new, undetected method of keeping track of visitors.

* Don’t Log Into Search Engines: Your account with Google, for example, might make it convenient for you to get Gmail email messages, check out YouTube videos or do searches, but the company is keeping records of everything you do. Log out of search engines before you type in a query, to keep these details out of the company servers. Look for alternative search engines that don’t use cookies or ask for you to log in. This goes for browsing with your desktop and laptop PC as well as smartphones.

* Scrub Photos and Videos: The videos and photos that you make with your smartphone (or from the built-in webcam of your smartphone or desktop machine) often include meta data about the circumstances they were shot under. Software then lets you examine a video or image file to see when it was made and the location. If you are trying to keep your whereabouts private, the information can be exposed if you don’t first strip out the metadata.

No Reason to Delay Boosting Your Online Security

You owe it to yourself to take steps today to safeguard privacy and sensitive data while online. Changing passwords on a regular basis and using different passwords for accessing things like your bank, email and social networking accounts makes it harder for criminals, who will switch their attention to people whose security is worse than yours.

The consequences of leaving information exposed include identity theft, your bank accounts being plundered and your credit score plummeting. What’s more, you avoid the risk of stolen, embarrassing emails or photos being shared by hackers against your will. In worst-case scenarios, stalkers or other criminals could use your lack of anonymity to attack you in real life. It’s easy to see that staying anonymous online is essential for doing tasks including working from home, shopping, communicating with loved ones and paying your bills.