How to Stay Private Online

Sebastian Revenaz (G7)

Science & Tech

Published Issue 5 2021-2022

I can say with great certainty that you, the person reading this, is looking at this through Google Chrome, using google as your search engine. Now for most people, this is perfectly fine, they will keep it like this forever, aside from the occasional hop on incognito mode. But for some, this just doesn’t feel private.

Contrary to manys beliefs, incognito mode actually isn’t private at all. Google will still collect your search data when you’re using it, and anyone on the Wi-Fi can still see what websites you are going to, as is the nature of the DNS protocol. To start off, it is best to first switch the search engine over to DuckDuckGo, an open source search engine which doesn’t collect search data whatsoever. Chrome doesn’t have very good measures to keep any account private, and allows cross site trackers to operate easily. The next step would be to switch your browser over to FireFox. This is also open source, made by a non-profit, Mozilla. For many who are passionate about things like this, this should be enough, but there are even more ways, though they take a toll on performance.

Some might have heard of Tor, a browser that routes your traffic through multiple relays. This is much more private than all of these other options, due to how it functions. It routes all of your internet traffic through multiple “nodes”, keeping the DNS encrypted until the exit node, and keeping all of your network traffic encrypted with public-private key encryption. This does, however, take a massive toll on the speed of searches, in some cases taking it from 300 mbps to 10 mbps.In one’s perspective, the cost outweighs the benefits. One popular thing that uses Tor is an operating system called Tails OS. Tails is a lightweight linux distribution that is designed to be booted from a USB, chooses a different mac address every time you boot it, runs all of your network traffic through Tor, and stores all files in RAM, meaning they are all deleted upon a system restart or even just turning the device off. This is complete overkill, and is and should remain only used by reporters or other people in places where censorship is common and people who could be in danger. Following these steps should help to stay much more private online.