On Post-It Notes, DuckDuckGo, and Other Simple Solutions

 Post-It Notes           

Think of that opaque little eye on your laptop’s forehead, its webcam, and think of everything it has seen. Did you know hackers can throw a spell over that lens from a distance and peer out of it? That, if they want, they can record what they see, and blackmail you?

Think of what that eye has seen: appreciate the snitch’s sway it suddenly holds over you. You could pluck it out this minute and throw it in the garbage disposal; you could roll over your entire laptop with your car, and it won’t matter. If you were targeted, your webcam has already told the things it’s seen. 

I see your memory working, Average Person; ha, you're blushing crimson! I wager an image of yourself just rose before you, or several.

You’re in bed with your partner, on your birthday, while your laptop’s silent eye watches from where you placed it on your dresser…

You’re checking your email before you hop in the shower, bending across your desk chair, not even wearing a towel…

Or maybe all you did was smoke a bowl at your desk, watching clips of the Simpsons on YouTube, giggling nostalgically...

Now imagine a man in a trench coat opens his briefcase and throws prints of these things at your feet. He says, “You have till midnight. Pay up, or the world sees everything.”

What I’m trying to say is, can you really, you Average Man or Woman, who are not a terrorist or criminal, a political dissident under a paranoid regime, not an investigative journalist prying into corporate sins, but just regular, average, well-meaning you, who pays taxes and votes and occasionally brings reusable bags to the grocery store, can you really tell me now that you have nothing to hide?

Even a monk or a nun has a naked body hidden under their habit. And think of the rest of us, who haven’t made vows to Heaven; we’re hiding more than our bodies.

So put a Post-It over your webcam.

Which is basically what today’s blog is about: low cost, easy options for safeguarding yourself online. Because if a piece of tape, if a mere Post-It note, is enough in itself to keep certain blackmailers away from their blackmail, well, what other simple safeguards exist that we are neglecting? And, on the other hand, what safeguards are we employing that actually do very little?

DuckDuckGo

You might want to consider using DuckDuckGo. It’s a search engine that doesn’t track your searches and therefore does not, because it cannot, sell your data to the highest bidder. And it doesn’t tailor search results based on your browsing and therefore doesn’t contribute to the medieval towers which Google and Facebook, for instance, as well as, and perhaps especially YouTube, build around us. Towers in which we are lucky enough to find ourselves toadied to like Kings and Queens, always right and infallible, with infinite evidence to support our nonsense. Towers in which our friends all agree with us and speak for us, and outside of which, as we observe through the embrasures, when we stick our bows out to pick off the enemy, the world is made up of armies of brainwashed fools, who are entirely wrong in everything they think and say.

History:
DuckDuckGo, named after the children's game, was founded in 2008 by one Mr. Gabriel Weinberg. It was self-funded, via ads (which users can disable), until 2011, when it attracted several major investors.
By 2012 it was running over a million searches a day.
In 2014, it became a search option on Firefox.
And just this year Google added it as a default search engine option in Chrome.

PROs:
-doesn't track your searches
-or tailor your results, contributing to the filter bubble
-you can disable ads
-your data is not sold, as it is not collected
-gives the same results to all people (doesn't profile)

CONs:
(Honestly, there aren't many, but here I go:)
-slightly odd to use it, at first, if you're used to Google. (Very slightly)
-I can imagine someone, somewhere, will be annoyed to not have their search results curated for them.
-that's all I have

"Misinformation"

On the topic of tailored searches, of data collection, of ads that haunt your travels across the web, pressing their imploring faces to every window, we should mention the tactic of misinformation. I learned about it here, and there are a few other tactics on that page you might want to familiarize yourself with.

Essentially you lead the trackers on at random. For each real search, throw in something bizarre and unlike you. Watch a video or two on something you find boring; in Maps, choose a place you have no intention of driving to. You don’t actually drive there, of course; the point is, you have so polluted your data stream that anyone attempting to model your personality from it will conclude you have schizophrenia. Consequently, the targeted ads following you around the internet will begin to display their own amusing variety of illness. Half of mine are in Spanish.

Incognito or "Private" Tabs

One thing I want to caution against. Your incognito window, or private tab, whatever your preferred browser calls that “secret” window: it’s not all that secret. It does the trick if you’re, say, a fourteen-year-old boy discovering, for the first time, the web’s redlight districts. It can be handy if you want to keep two Google accounts open at the same time. It doesn’t store your browsing history and it typically deletes cookies. But it does nothing to prevent your ISP from knowing everything you do, as well as the NSA, as well as, honestly, anyone who puts a little effort into it. You’d be better off with a VPN.

And there you go, a few lo-tech measures you may employ to keep yourself secure online.