Online Safety & Privacy
For many older people, the Internet is a mystery, yet online safety & privacy remain of vital importance.
How to stay safe and secure online, especially when making purchases (concerning one’s end of life plans), need not be complicated.
However, it useful to know how to ensure that your emails remain private and your web browsing (and purchases) are not tracked. Here are a few basic steps that everyone can take to protect themselves online.
VPNs
A Virtual Private Network (or VPN) is the best and easiest way to ensure that your whereabouts (and your data) is encrypted and is not intercepted.
Encryption: Email
An encrypted email address ensures that no one other than the sender and receiver can see the contents of an email. To be effective, however, it needs both parties to use an encrypted email address.
Encryption: Instant Messaging Apps
For many people, instant messaging apps on smart phones have replaced text or SMS messages. ‘WhatsApp’ and ‘Signal’ are the two best-known free, instant messaging apps. Signal is a product of the Signal Foundation, a US non-profit. WhatsApp is owned by Meta.
Tor & Tails
For extra security when browsing the Internet there is something called the Tor Browser.
The Tor Browser will bounce your communication around a network so that nobody knows what websites you visit.
First developed for the US military, Tor is an increasingly popular way of stopping government snooping. With a Tor Browser your Internet habits can never be traced.
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