How To Use The Modern Internet Securely And Privately

There are good alternatives to alot of the services we use online, and it does not take too much technical knowledge in order to set the majority of them up.

The following is a collection of good alternatives to some of the most common web services out there, as well as techniques to aid in using the internet more responsibly.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

When browsing the internet; make sure that you are always connected to a VPN. A VPN will allow you to route all of your internet traffic through a server that is situated in a different geographical location. When connected to a VPN network, you are creating an encrypted tunnel between your internet-connected device and the VPN server. Now no one can know your precise geographical location.

Because a VPN provides you with a closed network that is accessible from anywhere, you can deploy services within this network that can only be accessed by you and anyone else that is connected to your VPN.

There are numerous paid-for VPN services available, but we cannot be sure that the data we send via these third-party VPN services is always secure and private if it is being controlled by for-profit companies.

OpenVPN solves this issue by allowing you to host your own VPN server.

Email

Even though it is common knowledge that our emails are scraped and the data sold to advertisers for targeted advertising, it is still common to use a hosted solution for email. iRedMail takes the complecation out of setting up your own email server.

Web browsing

Stop using Google for searching the web. Google is well known for manipulating your search results and tracking you through the web.

TL;DR

• Setup your own web-server and install your own OpenVPN server. Always be connected to this VPN when using the internet.
• Setup your own email server using iRedMail.
• Use DuckDuckGo for searching the web. It doesn’t “personalise” the search results based on your usage history, and doesn’t track your usage.
• Setup your own Bitwarden server for storing all of your passwords, credit cards, and notes. Also install a browser addon for Bitwarden to populate login information easily. Here’s the addon for Firefox.
• Setup your own file server, harden it, and enable SFTP so that you can easily transfer files to it for backup purposes.

• Use the following browser extensions/addons:

  • Adblock Plus
  • Cookie Autodelete
  • Decentraleyes
  • Firefox Multi-account containers
  • HTTPS everywhere
  • Privacy badger
  • uBlock Origin