Being Slave In Your Own Territory 🥷

The very first nanosecond you enter the internet, you are losing your anonymity 🙃. From the IP address to even the hardware information about your devices are already collected and saved into a server computer which is located in an unknown part of the world. How does this work? 🧐How can a blog page/ read only web page access your hardware information? Do you think that you are safe in the internet world just because you use the latest version of your operating system? How much privacy do you need? Why privacy?🧐 Let’s dig everything here. Stick in….

Why Privacy?

Well, this is a very tough question. Very hard to convince people who think that they don't need privacy at all🤡. Bruh! Privacy is your basic human right in Srilanka. Srilanka is the first among the South Asian countries to pass Comprehensive Privacy Legislation🤓. On March 18th, 2022. How would you refuse to claim your human right? As a human, every citizen in this country has the right to protect their privacy✌️.

Your personal data is like a source code of your life. Or like a password to your personal life. Anyone who has access to those source code can enter into your life and manipulate yourself without the authority or knowledge of yours☻️.

For example: A person is using an android phone. He is so busy with his work during the day. Approximately around 9pm after dinner, he has a habit of reading news, messaging friends and sometimes watching videos. These activities never consume more than 45 minutes for him. He has to sleep early so he can wake up early in the morning to go to work. He is having a normal productive life until Google updated their terms and got permission to collect many of his metadatas🙂. 

Now when he returns tired from his job, Google studies his usage behaviour and sends notification at his relaxing time for a video which was uploaded 10 hours ago. It studies his age, literacy rate, location and recommends videos accordingly. So now he is spending most of the nights watching Youtube continuously so that he cannot get up early for his job😮‍💨. Anyways he is forcefully woken up by his alarm and attending work with only 2 or 3 hours of sleep. This type of routine affects him mentally so bad, that he began to hate waking up in the morning and going to work😐. 

Now he is not worrying about his sleep, all of his worry is his job. He started to hate his job and people out there. So a small problem in the workplace with his employees made him quit his current job😞.

Meanwhile, Google has marketed and sold him a Health Sleep monitor app, Calmful music & animation app, a pillow and a premier membership on a job finding website😵‍💫. 

Ok, have you understood the above example? He was living an average peaceful life. He doesn't even know that he is being manipulated. But Google did it successfully. This kind of mental pressure may lead many lives to an end. They already did. So, this is why you should be aware of your privacy.🤠

Not only Google. Every website you enter, social media apps, games, governments, educational platforms, healthcare apps, literally every internet component collects your data in the backend. You know why. It’s our biggest responsibility to protect our wealth (Data in other words) from these internet monsters👹.

Can Your Password Save You?

Can you trust your password? Well, first of all you have to make sure that your password is a strong one. As we all know, choosing a long password with the combinations of uppercases, lowercases, symbols may be tough for the hacker to crack your password🥱.

A password with 8 standard characters can make up a combination of 209 billion possible passwords. But for a 6 core processor this is nothing.

The following chart shows the time taken to crack your password for a 6 core processor🤓.

Now you may think, using a combination of letters, symbols and numbers can protect your password from being cracked? Simple answer is “No”.

There are many algorithms which over perform those calculations with their inbuilt machine learning algorithms😵‍💫.

For example, algorithms like “HashCat” which uses your computer’s Graphical Processing Unit  to crack passwords. This is more terrifying than the previous CPU cracking. A study states that Nvidia GTX 1060 GPUs were able to generate 669 Million combinations of  passwords per second which is very scary for those who are concerned about their privacy. Honestly, this is a damn scary number. Think of someone using 10 or 20 GPUs combined together to crack your password😱. Yeez, I have nothing to say.

You can simply go to https://tmedweb.tulane.edu/content_open/bfcalc.php and check how safe your password is. That website will output how many combinations can be made with your password. Then, you can simply calculate the longest time to crack your password. But in my opinion, password cracking takes very much less time than the time you can calculate. Because modern algorithms use AI to guess the words and terms relatable to you and execute those files on high priority🥴.

You can also use two steps authentication, google authenticator, password manager and generator. Those steps may slow down the hacker, but I’m not sure how much these steps prevent your password from being cracked😣.

The intention of this chapter is not to explain “How to protect yourself from Brute force attacks”. I’m simply letting you know that your password can be cracked no matter how safe it is, lol.🤣🙂

Free Milo

Pretend you are in a restaurant to have a Milo😊. The restaurant has an open wifi in the name of the restaurant. You may think you can get your Milo money back if you download stuff on the free wifi. I swear to god, don’t touch it😒.  Some devices may automatically connect to the network if it detects any open wireless networks nearby. You should turn them off manually🙂. Anyone under that network can spy on you and collect your unsecured credit card information🤫. Sometimes, the hacker himself uses his laptop as a mobile hotspot by the restaurant’s name and sits back in a corner with a laptop as a cool guy😎. What he does is, spying on you.

If you don’t have any option other than connecting to the restaurant's wifi, use a Chrome/firefox/edge/opera extension called “HTTPS everywhere”. This extension is made with the collaboration of “Tor Project”. This plugin can encrypt your activities in a non HTTPS website. Even though the host cannot spy your activities on websites, he can still watch the ip address you are connecting with(The webpage domain name)🤥. So, using a secured VPN can protect you from him. By using a VPN, everything the hacker can see is your VPN provider’s ip address. I recommend you to use the OpenVPN, which is an open-source project made to provide free tunnelling. This is comparatively slow and you have to watch one or two ads. But this is the cheapest option available. 

So, don’t forget to use a VPN before connecting your devices with open networks.🤑

Who else can read your Emails?

Every email service provider uses applications to scan every email you receive🧐. They claim they scan all of your mails to filter out the spam mails. That clearly states that “We do read your mails” in other words. So it’s very important to encrypt your mails☹️.

You can use encryption services like DES 56 bit encryption. That means, every character of your mail is being encrypted into 56 bits. So, It’s very hard for the middleman to decrypt😴. 

How can your recipient read the mail? Well, encryptions generates two keys. Private key & public key. You use your private key to encrypt the message and anyone with the public key can decrypt them back to text form. The main consideration is, anyhow you have to pass the public key to the recipient securely. For that, you can use open-source E2E projects like Signal and ChatSecure to pass the public key securely😌.

By following these encryption methods, you can protect your sensitive conversations from email service providers and governments😏. 

How do Corporations Spot You?

From the very first moment you started using the internet, there are many profiles being built in your name. No matter how many devices you change😖, how many emails you’ve shifted, your behaviour on the internet still falls under a very small subset of users. This makes corporations to spot everyone individually. You can view your personal profile of google here😶: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en-GB&ref=my-account

The above profiling is the thing that Google is ok sharing with you. There may be hundreds of things google or any other corporations don’t want you to know that they know. Including your medical conditions, mental health, IQ level and sexual interests😶.

Like I said before, a read only website can get your hardware information just by the rendering speed of a 1 pixel image which is displayed in the page. You don't even notice that. But in the backend, it’ll spot your hardware specification and exact model of your device from a large amount of data already collected🥲. Corporations use these techniques to spot each and every user on the internet individually. You may fake a real person by creating a fake id, but not the corporate monsters. But there are some steps you can use to be less visible to the corporations (Private & Governmental )🙂

1. Always use a trustable VPN

2. Use multiple emails as possible : one for work, one for personal, one for educational purposes and so on. This makes you less spotable to corporations.

3. Encrypt all your conversations as possible.

4. Use HTTPS everywhere extension with your browser.

5. Use Tor browser as possible.

6. Try your best to use open-source projects: Thousands of eyes roaming around their source code everyday, so there’s less possibility for data mining.

7. Try to be away from open networks such as open wifis

8. Be aware when clicking suspicious links instantly: It’s a better practice to use Tor browser as your default browser. It prevents you from clicking links accidentally and being vulnerable to attacks.

So make practice of these habits. Yes, it’s much harder than it used to be. I can guarantee you, these steps are never gonna protect you 100%. But making yourself less visible and spotable on the internet will take you away from the herd, that means you can lead a life on your own with less manipulations and disturbances.

The more convenient, more vulnerable. 

Wish you all good luck for a safe browsing experience.

Believe Everything; Trust Nothing