Protect Your Privacy

Securing Yourself
Privacy is your ability, nay, RIGHT to limit information about yourself selectively.

Anonymizer - identity protection software

Everybody is clamoring for your personal, surfing and shopping habits. They want to know what you do online, so they can sell and market to you or, even worse, misuse that information for nefarious purposes.

So you have to protect your online identity and privacy, and only give out the bare minimum and essential personal information to legitimate parties.

As initial steps to protect yourself, you should of course always Protect Your PC, Protect Your Internet and Protect Your Data.

Now devise and implement an identity and privacy protection strategy. There are also several good software programs and online services available to assist you with this:

    Play safe
  1. Tweak your internet browser settings to ask you each time a website wants to save a cookie on your computer. Not all websites need to save a cookie on your PC, only those where you shop, bank or transact other legitimate business. Or, websites you visit for leisure, have registered and need to login at (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). In Firefox you'll find this setting under TOOLS > OPTIONS > PRIVACY.
  2. Have a look at your internet browser's other privacy settings. You may want to enable/disable some of those, but take care, as that can impact your browsing experience.
  3. Firefox also has many extensions that can assist you with identity and privacy protection. Have a look here.
  4. There are also great third-party software to help with identity and privacy protection. Some are free, some not. There are excellent privacy and identity protection solutions available from Anonymizer, F-Secure and Acronis, to name but a few. You can also try some of the privacy freeware here.