Online privacy isn’t dead. But the tech giants make it a pain in the butt to achieve. With these incremental tweaks to the services we use, we can throw sand in the gears of the surveillance machine and opt out of the ways tech companies attempt to optimize us into advertisement and content viewing machines. We’re also pushing companies to make more privacy-protective defaults the norm, but until that happens, the onus is on all of us to dig into the settings.

Tip 1: Establish Good Digital Hygiene

Both making use of strong passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and two-factor authentication (2FA) for your online accounts can significantly improve your online privacy by making it much harder for your data to fall into the hands of a stranger, malicious or otherwise.

"Using unique passwords for every Web-based login means that if your account information ends up in a data breach, it won’t give bad actors an easy way to unlock your other accounts. Since it’s impossible for all of us to remember a unique password for every login we have, most people will want to use a password manager, which generates and stores those passwords for you."

Personally, I recommend KeePassXC or 1Password (although others exist).

"Two-factor authentication is the second lock on those same accounts. In order to login to, say, Facebook for the first time on a particular computer, you’ll need to provide a password and a “second factor,” usually an always-changing numeric code generated in an app or sent to you on another device. This makes it much harder for someone else to get into your account because it’s less likely they’ll have both a password and the temporary code."

If you're looking for an authenticator app, I recommend Aegis or Authy, rather than Google Authenticator. I also tend to enable 2FA on every Website that caters to it.

Tip 2: Learn What Data Brokers Know About You

Hundreds (possibly thousands) of data brokers of which you’ve never heard are harvesting and selling your personal information. This can include your physical and IP addresses, online activity, financial transactions, relationships, and even your location history. Once sold, your data can be abused by scammers, advertisers, predatory companies, and even law enforcement agencies.

Data brokers build detailed profiles of our lives, but try to keep their own practices hidden. Fortunately, several state privacy laws give you the right to see what information these companies have collected about you. You can exercise this right by submitting a data access request to a data broker. Even if you live in a state without privacy legislation, some data brokers will still respond to your request.

Data brokers have been caught ignoring privacy laws, so there’s a chance you won’t get a response. If you do, you’ll learn what information the data broker has collected about you and the categories of third parties they’ve sold it to. If the results motivate you to take more privacy action, encourage your friends and family to do the same. Don’t let data brokers keep their spying a secret.

You can also ask data brokers to delete your data, with or without an access request. We’ll get to that later this month and explain how to do this with people-search sites, a category of data brokers.

If anything, this will probably end up being a recurring task to be performed every few months.

One thing that might be of help is to not use your real name online, as much as you possibly can. Outside of LinkedIn (which I don't trust much and use sparingly) and job-search sites, I don't use my real name online. I also tend not to use Facebook much. Hopefully, all that makes the task of gathering data about me a little bit more difficult, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it doesn't.