Simple steps to stay secure
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Wading through digital security tips can be overwhelming.
- Here are a few places surveillance experts suggest people start:
📲 Use Signal. This is especially important if you're someone who could be a target for surveillance or spyware like a government official, journalist or activist.
💻 Consider Tor or a virtual private network. Browsing history is another ripe source of information for law enforcement investigations and data brokers.
- Tor, a privacy-first browser, and a VPN can help keep your browsing history private.
🔢 Turn on multifactor authentication and use a password manager to add more barriers for malicious actors trying to break into your online accounts.
- Passwords are leaked online every day, and time has proven people are really bad at password hygiene.
🧽 Invest in a data broker deletion service. Sites like DeleteMe will automatically submit requests to data collectors to remove personal details, like home addresses and phone numbers, so they're no longer publicly available.
- However, because someone's data is collected from a variety of sources at all times, these sites can't remove everything.
- It also can take a few months for data deletion requests to process, so it's important to start this process early.
Go deeper: Check out Wired's guide to protecting yourself from government surveillance.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation has its own surveillance self-defense guide.
- The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project has toolkits for protecting against protest surveillance tools and similar topics.
