Anyone can make proactive choices online to protect personal information. Secure your digital footprints by using privacy-preserving software, adjusting device preferences, and submitting legal data deletion requests.
The strategies below are a starting place to protect your privacy online and mitigate tracking across standard web environments.
Use online privacy tools
You can protect your personal information online by switching from standard web tools to privacy-preserving alternatives built to collect less data.
The easiest place to start is your browser, and it is a change nobody else has to make with you. Roughly seven in ten people browse with Chrome[1] and more than nine in ten searches go to Google[2], both built by an advertising company and designed for tracking.
Being the most popular browser does not make Chrome the best one. On independent privacy testing it is among the weakest of the major browsers, and there are plenty of alternatives worth a look.
Compare all popular browsers at PrivacyTests.org (opens in a new tab)
Optimize privacy settings
Secure software functions best when you update device and app settings to mitigate the sharing of location and background data with hardware manufacturers.
Privacy-default apps
Day-to-day replacements for the tools most people already use, picked because they are built to collect as little about you as possible. Which of them matter depends on what you are protecting, and from whom.
This is a sampling, not a full catalog. Privacy Guides (opens in a new tab) maintains vetted recommendations with the reasoning behind every entry, and Awesome Privacy (opens in a new tab) is a broader directory of privacy-respecting alternatives.
What a VPN can do, and what it cannot
A VPN does not make you anonymous
It changes who can watch you. Your internet provider and the network you are on lose sight of where you are going, and the VPN company gains it. You are moving trust, not removing it.
The distinction matters. A VPN genuinely solves some problems and does nothing at all about others, and the marketing rarely separates the two.
| What a VPN does | What it does NOT do |
|---|---|
| Hides which sites you visit from your internet provider and from the network you are on | Hide them from the VPN company, which now sees all of it instead |
| Replaces your IP address, so sites cannot place you by location or tie separate visits to one household | Make you anonymous to any site you sign in to |
| Protects you on networks you have no reason to trust, like public Wi-Fi | Add encryption that HTTPS is not already providing |
| Lets you appear to be somewhere else, which helps when a service is blocked where you are | Stop browser fingerprinting, cookies, or tracking tied to your accounts |
Because the operator sees everything your provider used to, its honesty is the entire product. That is why free VPNs are so often the worst offenders: running servers costs money, and when a subscription is not paying for them, your browsing is.
Properly auditing a VPN is slow, expensive work, which is why very few earn a recommendation. What to look for:
- Published ownership and jurisdiction, so you know who is actually holding your traffic and which government can ask them for it.
- A no-logs claim an independent auditor has tested, rather than one asserted on a marketing page.
- Signup that never asks who you are, and a way to pay that is not tied to your identity.
- A track record: how the company behaved the last time it was subpoenaed, seized, or breached.
Tor, a volunteer-run alternative
Tor can do some of what a paid VPN does, for free, with no company in the middle. Traffic is relayed through three volunteer-run nodes, and no single one of them knows both who you are and where you are going, so there is no operator holding a log to sell or to be forced to hand over.
Tor comes with honest trade-offs. It is slower, some sites block it outright, exit nodes can be run by anyone including governments, and sophisticated observers can still correlate traffic by timing. It is still a strong option for ordinary private browsing, but not for logging in or shopping: signing in tells the site who you are, and hostile exit nodes have been caught stripping HTTPS to steal what passes through.
Tor works better the more ordinary people use it. Every additional user makes the crowd larger and every individual in it harder to pick out, and that crowd is what protects the journalists, activists, and people escaping abuse who rely on it. Everyday browsing adds to it.
How Tor works, and what it does not protect against (opens in a new tab)
Apple Private Relay, a low-barrier option for millions
On Apple hardware, iCloud+ includes Private Relay, which sends Safari traffic through two separate relays so that neither Apple nor the site you are visiting can see both who you are and what you are loading. It covers Safari only, is an Apple service on Apple's terms, and it is no substitute for Tor if you are genuinely at risk. It is, however, a significant improvement over unprotected Chrome, is already sitting on hundreds of millions of devices, and switching it on takes one toggle.
Organizations defending your privacy
Privacy online is not only a question of which apps you install. These organizations research surveillance, litigate against it, and teach people how to protect themselves.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Litigates and campaigns against surveillance, and publishes Surveillance Self-Defense, a set of how-tos organized around the threats you actually face.
The Tor Project
Builds and maintains the Tor network and Tor Browser, the free anonymity infrastructure that journalists, activists, and people escaping violence rely on.
Ludlow Institute
Research, education, and resources for privacy, autonomy, and dignity online, and the home of NBTV.
Web3Privacy Now
An ecosystem of people, projects, and organizations advancing digital rights, with research, education, and app explorers.
Privacy International
Investigates and challenges surveillance by governments and companies, with a focus on where it lands hardest outside wealthy countries.
noyb
Enforces European data-protection rights in court, which is much of the reason a deletion request has to be honored at all.
More worth knowing:
- Access Now (opens in a new tab): digital rights worldwide, and a 24-hour digital security helpline.
- Freedom of the Press Foundation (opens in a new tab): source protection and digital security training for journalists.
- Security in-a-Box (opens in a new tab): Front Line Defenders' tools and tactics for activists and human rights defenders.
- Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (opens in a new tab): consumer-facing tools and explainers on data rights in the United States.
- Digital Security for Journalists (opens in a new tab): a resource collection from The NewsGuild of New York.
Further reading
- Browser Market Share Worldwide (opens in a new tab) - Statcounter GlobalStats
- Search Engine Market Share Worldwide (opens in a new tab) - Statcounter GlobalStats
- Consumer Reports evaluation of people-search site removal services finds that they are largely ineffective (opens in a new tab) - Consumer Reports, 2024
- Data broker removals (opens in a new tab) - Privacy Guides
