Digital Stealth- Big Tech and Privacy Alternatives
What Is Digital Stealth?
This is the ability to have agency and privacy on the internet. Knowing and using the tools of stealth that protect you from being tracked, and your data collected. Why would you want to do this? If people track your data, that’s one thing, but the problem is that you don’t have control of the character of the people who are tracking it, or what they will do with it. You want to protect your data to have autonomy, and to be able to create freely.
Issues With Big Tech
Google is a well know company that almost everyone uses. It consists of about 92% of the search engine results. Google, unfortunately, google is a surveillance company. They primarily make their money through advertising. Google collects data on people in order to do this. They use three primary tactics: surveillance, censorship, and manipulation. The surveillance piece is how they collect the data on you. Every google tool does this. Whether it’s the search engine, Gmail, or google calendar. Censorship refers to censoring certain information, while keeping others. Manipulation refers to a variety of tactics. Some of them are changing the suggested searches, changing the order of listed searches, and manipulating voting data.
1. Gmail
When you use Gmail, every email you send, and receive is permanently stored in google. This information is stored, and added to your profile. With Gmail, your inbox is also used for ads, and marketing. The best alternative to this is protonmail. Protonmail is a company that is based in Switzerland, and has strict privacy laws. The company uses encryption messaging, so there is maximum privacy. The only people that can read your messages is you, and the person you send it to. Not even protonmail can read them.
2. Search engines
Google is a surveillance tool. Every search you have ever done on google is stored in your profile. It also manipulates the searches, so you mind is shifted without you even knowing it. Here is the information being collected by some of the larger search engines:
- Source IP address
- User agent
- Location
- Unique identifier
- Search queries
Brave is a great search engine, as well as a browser, that has it’s own index, so is completely independent. There is no tracking, or data mining. Duckduckgo is another great alternative, but gets it’s search results form Bing.
3. Remove chrome
Google chrome is a browser that tracks all your searches, and what you do on the pages. Brave is the best alternative. It is a private browser, and blocks all ads. It’s also faster than chrome. Brave has a built in crypto currency feature. If you decide to watch ads in brave you will get payed with crypto currency. You get 70% of the pro seeds.
Tor Browser
The Tor Browser, or onion router, started in 2006 as freedom and an uncensored internet being the drive behind it. It’s a totally encrypted browser. It’s used by some whistle blowers, journalists, and others who want to protect their privacy online. The Brave browser also has an integration with Tor.
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