Previously on #techdaddythursday™ we’ve had Images for social media and Image size and compression for your website. Today by special request we are going to talk about privacy and for now I am talking about your privacy as a content creator and not privacy for your readers (GDPR). Because some of us need to be anonymous. I don’t because Molly and I are self employed and the children are of an age where they know what we do and have been given the tools to deal with the people who still haven’t grown up. But we are the lucky few.
Some bad news
I am going to start with the bad news. It is impossible to be truly anonymous online. There are lots of things you can do to minimize your risk of exposure but it will never be zero risk. If it really needs to be zero risk then you best stop what you are doing now. Here are some of the many ways that your technology can out you. Many of the young folks these days do all of their webstuff on phones. They use the wordpress app to write and publish blog posts and Tweet and Insta and FB and Tumblr and and and. You may have even tied in some of these apps to your website to autoshare your posts on various networks. Well all of those different networks (some owned by the same company) learn some things about you. Like if you are connected to your home wifi they have a good idea that one person owns all of these different accounts and because they all know your IP address (all devices on any network get an IP address) they have a good idea where you are and if you have multiple twitter accounts on a single device twitter knows that all those various accounts belong to the same person. What increases your risk even more is that they will assume that all traffic from that address is people who know each others and will use that information to start suggesting to other people in your family that they should follow @Ilovesploshingwhilethekidsareatschool. All based on just location data. Facebook and Instagram are the worst at this but Twitter is no slouch either when it come to cross pollinating your details.
Reducing your risk
What can be done to reduce this? Never install any Facebook App on a phone that you use for your Real life and your secret identity. Have a 2nd phone that only connects via Wifi for secret identity work. And get a VPN for that phone! A VPN = Virtual Private Network It masks who and where you are. I suggest a VPN for everyone all the time because you will need it because of Gov intrusion, but maybe you don’t have the money for a VPN But do not despair there is a free one that comes with the Opera browser. On your old phone that only connects by wifi use that browser only to do your online stuff There are lots of fine VPN companies that will for a reasonable fee connect all of your device and keep your social media accounts from knowing anything about each other so if you have the funds I suggest you do that.
I am not going to link any here but a quick google can help you out, but as always remember to read the fine print. Another excellent, but more for the techy type people is to use TOR. I would explain this in detail but 280 characters is a bit tricky so suffice to say it does that thing that they pretend happens on TV crimes shows where the good guys can’t find the bad guys because they are “bouncing the signal all over the world” It isn’t a breeze to setup but there are lots on online guides if you want to give it a try. (It can also get you to the “dark web”)
Domain Privacy and device settings
One thing that new bloggers often miss is domain privacy. When you buy a domain name your personal details are on the web for anyone to see unless you have purchased domain privacy. There is currently a fight about if it will stay this way because of GDPR but my current advice is buy domain privacy unless you are completely cool with people knowing your name, address and phone number. Ooh I almost forgot, on your phone device and PC, make damn sure you have location turned off at the device level as well as for each app you use. I can’t tell you how many times I have DM’d people and told them that I could see there location in tweets or their personal details from whois lookups (website ownership details) I have even had people freak out thinking I was trying to out them instead of trying to help them.
Images
Another security hole is images. Do your images contain location or personal info in the metadata? Many phones and cameras add all of that info by default (and sometimes share it on the “cloud”) make sure all of that info stuff is turned off I have a very security conscious friend who takes the picture, edits the picture and then uses a screenshot to make sure there is no hidden data, smart friend 😉 If you use google be sure to run a privacy checkup to make sure your aren’t sharing more than you mean to myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup…
As a tech geek I often have to login to other peoples email, websites and social media accounts and to keep my data separate from my clients I always use a private browsing window so that I am sure I am doing the right things as the right person. As I said at the beginning you can NEVER be completely safe, and mostly people are too lazy to look too deep. But there are people who will look that deep and some of those people are far more disturbed than I am (shocking I know) so it doesn’t hurt to take the simple steps for basic privacy safety.
This thread by no means covers all the ways you can be outed and with the progression of technology there will be more ways everyday so as I learn new things or people remind me of things I have overlooked I will update my suggestions.
Eroticon Technical Director