How to Evade Online Surveillance

Online mass surveillance. We all know about the NSA, the CIA, and other three-letter organizations and their (frankly mostly illegal) spying, but what are we doing to prevent it? Sure, we can sign petitions and lobby for them to stop, but all of this will take time. What can we do right now to protect ourselves from this mass surveillance?

Hide Your IP Address

Hiding your IP address is relatively easy. The easiest and most common way to hide your IP is to use a VPN service. VPN, which stands for "Virtual Private Network", is a network that encrypts all your internet usage ("traffic") and also hides ("cloaks") your IP address with one of theirs. The only way that someone can see your real IP address (considering that you set everything up correctly and are using common sense) is if the VPN provider you're using gives it to them or there is some bug in the VPN's code. You can usually connect to one of these networks by using an application provided by the VPN provider.

There are quite a few free (and mostly secure) providers out there such as Hotspot Shield and Windscribe. If you're willing to dish out some cash for a solid provider (which I recommend you do), then check this list. If you want even more anonymity (at the cost of speed, though) you should go for Tor. Tor (The Onion Router) is an open network which directs your Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network to enable anonymous communication. You can learn more here. Using it together with a VPN is a good idea.

Avoid Social Media Websites

Most of the information that mass surveillance receives is from social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). You should try to avoid these at all cost! If you absolutely must use them (to stay in contact with family and friends), don't post anything and don't use their apps. Facebook has even been known to listen in on your conversations from your phone's microphone if their app is installed on your cellphone. Social media is also known to have many negative health and mental side effects. And if you really think about it, these services are anti-social because they encourage you to stay at home and not go out and socialize (they just want to make money selling your data and information).

Use Secure Email Services

There are quite a few good secure and anonymous email providers out there. Surprisingly for most people, they aren't hard to use and don't spot an ugly design. Recently it has been revealed that Yahoo! had a built-in search engine for the government so that they can search your emails. GMail has been openly reading your emails from the start. Considering that there are many more cases of this, our only other option is to turn to email providers that actually respect our privacy. Protonmail is my personal favourite. It's easy to sign up and they support most platforms. Here is a list of some more. Using PGP encryption on your emails will also help a lot, although it takes quite a bit more effort.

Secure your browser

Most people tend to use Google Chrome, the most popular browser out there. However, it does have a dark side. It does what we call "calling home" which, in essence, means that it sends information to its home server, in this case Google. This is a bad thing if you are trying to evade surveillance, because even if you are using good practices online (using secure email, a VPN, etc.) they can still spy on you.
The best browser for secure and private everyday use is Firefox. Most peoples' excuse for not switching to it is "we don't like how it looks" or "we don't know how to use it". C'mon people. Have you ever even taken a look at it? It's very similar to Chrome in its user interface and other functions. It actually looks much better than Chrome and allows for much more customization and functionality. There's no reason not to switch.
Now, even if you have Firefox installed, you still need to do a few things to secure it. The first thing you should do is to prevent WebRTC leaks, then you should install some privacy addons, and lastly you should "tweak" it a bit. Don't stress, you only need to do this once, and after it's done you can rest assured that your browser probably won't compromise your privacy and security.

Don't give away personal information

I talked extensively about personal information on the internet in my previous post, so I won't spend much time on this topic here. This area mostly relies on your common sense. Don't post your personal information publicly on any forum or give it to anyone unless you really, really need to. This information can be used as a weapon against you, and the goal of surveillance is to collect such information.

Encryption

This I have also pretty much covered in this post. You should aim towards the goal of encrypting all your communications, including messenging, emails, internet traffic, etc. I'll be covering more of this is the final post of my online security series. These posts will overlap a bit, but that's just because securing your online presence depends on you securing every link in that chain (so that everything that something relies on is secure). Encryption is key, people. Don't let your dirty politicians (read: Theresa May and Co) take it away from you. Encryption is the solid foundation that all internet traffic should be built on.

Done! You should now be sufficiently secure against online mass surveillance.

This is the second post of my Online Security series. You can find part one here. Be sure to follow and upvote to stay up to date. Thanks!