“If you really want to get to know someone, take a good hard look at their bookshelf.” A Personal Friend.
If you invite a guest into your home and they take great interest in the books on your bookshelf, you might feel flattered. And their interest provides an opportunity to discuss the wonderful book you just read, instead of railing about politics or the latest reality TV show.
However, if someone broke into your home, cataloged all the books on your bookshelf, used that catalog to develop a personal profile of you, and sold that catalog to hundreds of advertisers, I suspect you would feel deeply offended. And report the home invasion to the police.
Web browsers are commonly used to traverse the Internet and, metaphorically speaking, “read the books” on the World Wide Web. Standard web browsers maintain a great deal of private information about you, including your browsing history, user-ids, and passwords—and autofill information, such as your name and address, and credit card numbers. They store “cookies” and “trackers” on your computer, placed there by the sites that you visit. They can reveal identifying information about your location, system settings, hardware, software and much more. Using “private” or “incognito” mode will not protect you. Web browsers also have large “attack surfaces” and can be compromised by hackers in many ways.
And I regret to say that many common web browsers are highly sophisticated data collection and surveillance applications. Use of these browsers can defeat many other actions you take to protect your privacy online.
If you don’t take steps to protect your privacy while browsing the Internet, a catalog of every website you visit will be cataloged and sold to data brokers and advertisers. What you read on the Internet will be “open book.”
Using a VPN every time you connect to the Internet is a necessary step to take to protect your privacy—necessary but not sufficient. As discussed in the posts on VPNs, a VPN does not provide anonymity when you access a website, or protect your communications between the VPN service and the website servers.
I very strongly recommend that you use a secure and privacy-friendly web browser when you surf the Internet. These browsers, in combination with a VPN, provide excellent security and privacy protections.
In the next post, I recommend two web browsers, discuss options for additional configuration and add-ons, and review the choices made by our friends Alice and Bob.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.