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.
What’s a 2FA?
Also, thanks for the advice. Never heard of that website that you linked in the second paragraph. Are there any other emails you can use? Otherwise, I do have a Yandex Mail account. I wonder if that works…
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).
OOoohhhh
Yes, I use this.
Nice that’s pretty cool, I feel like I should do more to protect my privacy on the internet but I haven’t really got around to it and also I don’t really know where to start.
Keep in mind that you’re just one needle in a heystack so you should be safe, but it’s always good to be careful.
With the way hackers operate unfortunately, your data is never truly safe. You’re just a row on their excel table, but that’s enough for automated programs to use it and try it on thousands of websites per hour. I’m writing up a post that explains how your hacked data travels on the internet right now!
Understood and thank you.
I’m probably the worst when it comes to online security lol. As you can see I adopted 2FA 5 years too late.
I only hope next I don’t learn Firefox is terrible with your data because I now have everything with them…
You always think you don’t need it, until you do. I made another post about this but my old email was recently compromised on a forum I used once, and I have since noticed two attempts to log into other accounts with it. One of them failed due to 2FA and the other I think was after credit card info which, thankfully, wasn’t registered on that account – they didn’t change the password so I did it myself afterwards.
It’s a pain to go through the list and it’s compounded by the fact that this isn’t even your fault, this is the fault of a website that had a vulnerability in it.
