Back up your computer

Backing up your data is an important step in securing your information, because if your hard drive crashes, chances are you still want access to your files. There are several ways to go about this, you can get an external hard drive and store your data on there (possibly with the help of a backup  utility) or you can use a cloud service like Dropbox and sync just your most important files, or your entire computer if you're willing to cough up some cash. Lets take a look.




Dropbox

Dropbox offers 2 GB free on sign-up, and for $9.99/month, you can get 100 GB, with other plans offering 200 or 500 GB, which is probably plenty for most people. The advantages here are that you can download an app that will sync the contents of a folder from your computer to the cloud, the bonus being that you can access them anywhere. Best of all, it encrypts your data for extra security.



External Hard Drive

If you go the external hard drive route,  you probably want to use a back-up utility to handle backups for you & help keep you sane. On Mac you can use the built in Time Machine tool to manage backups, if you're running Windows, then Crashplan is for you! It comes in both free and paid flavors.





Another important thing to remember about backups is to have one off-site that way if your house burns down and everything is destroyed, your data is safe on the hard drive you keep at work, or in the cloud.

Password Managers

A good password should be at least 8 characters long, be alphanumeric, use special characters, not written down on a post-it, and of course you should never use the same password for more than one site. Most of us have no doubt heard this advice before, but how many actually follow it? The good news is that you can make it much easier to create and store secure passwords by installing a password manager add-on to your web browser. 

What these managers feature is secure password generation so you can easily replace all your insecure passwords with secure ones. All your passwords are stored in an encrypted "vault" which you open using the one and only password you have to remember now, the password to your password manager of choice. These add-ons can also help you fill out forms and securely store credit card numbers and other information if you so choose.

 Here are two quick options for password managers:

Lastpass: Avalibe as an add-on compatible with all major web browsers and operating systems, including iOS and Android. It comes in both free and paid flavors.

1password: This one is a sandalone  application for Windows & Mac as well as Android & iOS. It has a 30-day free trial or you can buy it upfront.

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.

Encrypt your hard drive

As Edward Snowden confirmed, encrypting your hard drive is an effective way to keep people from easily reading your files if they manage to get a hold of them. Lets look at some tools for encrypting your hard drive.

Mac users are in luck, as OS X has a built in solution called FileVault which can be turned on in the system preferences. When you go through the set up you will be given a recovery key which will let you decrypt your data if you ever forget your password, you should record somewhere safe. Once this set-up is complete, you can use your computer as normal while it encrypts your hard drive in the background. All files saved on your drive from now on will be automatically encrypted. For full instructions, here's a step-by step guide. One of the downsides is that a small handful of programs are not compatible with FileVault, Diablo III being one example.

Windows users can download TrueCrypt, a free disk encryption utility that is a bit more robust than FileVault, in additon to encrypting you drive, it enables you to create hidden disk partitions and encrypt them to further increase security. Unfortunately I can't vouch for how well TrueCrypt works as I have not used it, but here are instructions for setting it upon your machine. (Alternatively you can use Bitlocker.)

Alternatives to Google & Yahoo search

 Word is that the NSA was getting it's data from a slew of tech companies, limiting your use of their services is on sure-fire way to ensure they don't have a much data to hand over should it be requested, so what are the alternatives to doing a Google/Yahoo! search?

Duckduckgo started in 2008, and as a privacy-minded search engine, it doesn't track your IP, forward you search query to the sites you click on, install cookies, or otherwise track you or your searches, and its default is the more secure HTTPS. it does however compile the results of 50+ search engines, and filters out content mills designed to rank high in Google search rankings.

Startpage has been protecting users privacy since 2006, and enhanced its privacy procedures in 2009. It doesn't log IP addresses, set cookies, or otherwise track its users. In addition it has the European Privacy Seal for data protection. It also uses HTTPS to increase security, and unlike Duckduckgo, it offers image and video search.  

Using either of these two options will increase your online privacy instantly.

Fake identities for websites that dont matter

Fake Name Generator does exactly what you'd think, it generates made-up names complete with addresses, emails, job titles, height & weight, even (invalid) credit card numbers and national identity numbers (depending on the country you choose). Apart from the obvious use of coming up with your secret Alter-Ego's identity, the information generated can be used to gain access to overseas websites that are meant for only local traffic, or filling out forms for websites you don’t trust with your real information, such as those on the sketchier side of the web. There are fun uses for it too, as it can generate hobbit, ninja, and Latin names, as well as the names & information for an entire family, or you can generate identities in bulk. Of course any use of the information generated for nefarious purposes is illegal.

Other sites by the same company offer a Fake Music Generator (complete with album art, & downloadable tracks), and a Fake Mail Generator (that you can actually send mail to).

Discover your new identity here.

DNSCrypt

DNSCrypt (developed by OpenDNS), though technically a preview release, is an application that encrypts your DNS requests. DNS requests are your computer communicating with a DNS server asking it to translate your human-readable urls into machine-readable urls, for example, duckduckgo.com becomes 50.18.192.250. Encrypting these requests prevents snoopers from knowing what websites you’re visiting, spoofing a url and presenting you with a false page, or from mucking around with your packets in general. This program may accidentally break your connection if it can't access its servers, if you want more reliability, open up the preferences and check the option "fall back on insecure DNS", and yes, this is another install-it-and-forget-it application.

DNSCrypt for Windows & Mac can be downloaded here.