Use Tor

Tor, which stood for "The Onion Routing Project" was originally developed by the navy to aid in concelaing the identities of its users online. It accomplishes this by running a users internet traffic through the Tor network, eventually sending it out to the internet and then routing the response back through the network to the user. These constant reroutings are what provides the anonymity, as it is extemely dificult to track where the traffic travels within the network. Essentially, it protects you from the surveillance of your online activites by third parties. 

Usage case scenarios for this app includes needing to comunicate with others confidentially, avoid surveillance, or being just plain paranoid. Download it or find out more at the Tor website. They also have an android app to privatize your internet traffic while on the go. 

Keep in mind that like Tor, your security depends on having various layers for maximum effectiveness.
 

Antivirus Software

Antivirus software is what rallies the forces once the castle has been stormed, these days antivirus software is a must for anyone connected to the internet, so what are the best antivirus applications for Windows/Mac? Yes, I know Mac users like to think of themselves as immune to viruses, but malware for Mac is on the rise, so it doesn’t hurt to know what your options are (I myself don't use an antivirus for Mac). Since this is a more technical subject, I am deffering to Lifehacker for suggestions of the best antivirus apps.

Windows

Avast! is what Lifehacker recommends as the best antivirus for windows, you can read their article over here, but basically it amounts to its ability to catch viruses, combined with relative ease of use, and the added bonus of being free.


For Mac

Sophos is the recommendation for those who choose to run an antivirus on their Mac, it blocks both Mac and Windows viruses, and is fairly light on system resources. Get the full scoop here.

Prey: Recover your stolen devices

                                        

Prey is an app for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android that helps you get back your lost/stolen devices. Its easy to set up and simple to use, the free version lets you track up to 3 devices, like your phone, laptop, and tablet for example. 

All you have to do is install it, login to your account, and your devices can now be tracked making them easier to find if they get lost/stolen. Prey also offers some other tools to help, such as displaying a message on the screen, sounding an alarm, or remote wiping the device. Overall it's a great tool to have in your tool kit and may get you out of a pinch.

You can get it here.

Online Tracking Blockers

Whenever you visit a site, chances are it installs cookies on you computer, these can be used to track what other sites you visit and beam the information back to the mothership, which can then sell the information to advertisers or use it to serve ads itself, including the kind that seem to follow you around from website to website. Enter tracking blockers. These add-ons for web browsers silently block cookies attempts to track you by preventing them from phoning home to report the data they gather. Here are three easy-to-use options to choose from:


DoNotTrackMe

Made by Abine, this tool is probably the simplest of the three (and meant to be so). The icon shows the number of trackers blocked on any particular site, and the drop-down menu shows a graph displaying the total number of tracking attempts blocked. In addition, there is a small dialogue box at the bottom that prompts you to click and learn more about a particular tracking company. Overall, it's drop-dead simple to use, you can get it here. If you're interested, Abine also has some other privacy tools worth looking into.

Disconnect

Disconnect brings all the same functionality of DNTM and then goes just a bit further, adding the ability to secure your wi-fi connections, and short cuts for enabling/disabling common social networks on a particular site, or white/blacklisting entire sites. Visually it is more streamlined than DNTM, giving it some added appeal. Though it doesn't tally blocked tracking attempts, instead it shows a small graph displaying the amount time & bandwidth saved from using the extension on loading the current page. Currently it is the favourite tracking blocker of this blogger, you can download it for yourself here.

Ghostery

Ghostery may be the most user-friendly of the three...or annoying, depending on how you feel about a pop-up style list of blocked and unblocked trackers on whatever page you just loaded. Mercifully, this can be turned off in the settings. Like DNTM, Ghostery gives you a list of the trackers on the current page and the option to block/unblock them or whitelist the site. Unlike DNTM, it has a one-word description under the name of the tracker telling you if it's an advertiser, beacon, widget, analytics, etc, to help you decide if that element needs to be blocked or not. You can find it here.