I figure it’s absolutely impossible to get away from Google and Facebook. Even if you don’t have an account with them, they track you on virtue of other sites using their APIs. And if you have a smartphone, you’ll be tracked by either Apple or Google.

But for trash emails, I just use mailinator.com. You just type any email in it and it takes you to a read-only mailbox. Great when you register on shady sites, or sites you’re not sure you can trust.

On Firefox, I use Disconnect and uBlock Origin - one to block trackers, the other to stop ads. Both of those, last I knew at least, are open-source. A must to know how exactly your data is being used.

Otherwise that’s about it for me. I use thunderbird for my email, and I wish they would update it for 2020 lol. It’s still stuck in 2008, but it works so eh.

I recently started using 2FA on my logins, five years too late lol. It’s still not implemented everywhere despite there being open source APIs for this. But Firefox recently introduced Lockwise, which is an upgrade on their password manager. Now, whenever you register to a website, you can click to use a unique, randomly generate password. It will be saved in their manager (which you can protect with a master password) and if you connect to a Firefox account, you can share your logins with your other devices. That means I have my passwords on my phone if I ever need to login on another website and I don’t remember the PW.

  • @CriticalResist8OPMA
    5•4 years ago

    It stands for two-factor authentication! Your bank probably uses it if you have online banking, or nowadays most websites use it too. In general terms, it means asking you to provide two pieces of information to verify that you’re the account owner. Your password is one, and biometric data is a second for example (like the fingerprint sensor on your smartphone), or a random code they send to you by SMS that refreshes every time you want to log in.

    It’s near hack proof unless the hacker also has access to your email or can see your SMS (which I wouldn’t put past them tbh, something like a man-in-the-middle attack I guess? SMS are not encrypted as far as I’m aware).