I wouldn’t want you to risk getting tracked by companies, so please use these extensions on your browser before clicking to link that I provides here.

No Script, Privacy Badger & uBlock Origin.

This is the era of the Big Data Company. Companies that make millions of dollars every day. With all of that earnings, what do they want? They want full control of your data. How are they doing it? By tracking all of your activities on the internet. Not only that, they’re invading your privacy, they’re also trying to make your life miserable by basically giving you endless streams of content (e.g. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.).

In this article, I will be talking about why these things happened, possible causes, and many more. Starting with privacy, a big data company, digital illiteracy, psychological effects, and how to overcome it. I don’t consider myself an expert with this stuff, and if you want proof of why I’m brave enough to talk about it; I’ve graduated vocational high school as a Software Engineer.

Hopefully you could find this article to be in some kind of use,  one way or another.

- Anugerah

A Brief History of the Internet

We are exposed to the internet a lot more than we have, or are we? Let’s take a look at the brief history of the internet by putting on our Retrospective glasses.

The internet was a wonderful place, now, it has come to an end. Many of the early adopters of the internet would argue something along that line. How come? Because the idea, the sole idea of the internet was supposed to be a place of freedom - no more censorship from the government, gone are the days where we only have 3 or 5 news media and gone are the day where we are all disconnected with each other. It was a place of hope, a place of the people. People would create their own homepages, and blogs, and share their knowledge with each other, without any other agenda than to share information and knowledge. It was not all about clicks and monetization, it was all about trying to make your own comfortable place, or even a place of community, a forum; now almost abandoned. But it was all over, people are now limited to what they could do on the internet, and the government have raped the internet out of its mind, for the exchange of power.

Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other big data company were, us, the people, but now, they’re puppets for the government. No more door on our ends, walls, and roofs are no more, we are naked, and the government laughs and monitor every nook and cranny of our house; our body. I’m not joking when I said that, it is factually there, government could actually ask one of the big data companies to give information about us, through the collections of data that they have. Everything is no more, websites are full of things written just to appeal to Google Search Engine, for clicks; and some argued that the top search results yielded from these search engines are written to do just that, to be at the top, and to do that? AI Read the Dead Internet Theory.

Sorry for all of that romanticism, but it was all factual! One thing is for sure, I want to talk about the real reason why the internet exists (e.g. websites, web pages).

In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was working as a software engineer at CERN. One problem that occurred to him was the complex way of sharing information. Back then, especially for companies, people access information (e.g. files, documents, etc.), through other people’s computers P2P. He then proposed a vision for the web in a document called Information Management: A Proposal. Here he’d laid out ideas for HTML, URI, and HTTP. The web was freedom, Tim was ensuring CERN made the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. That is the reason why we see many cool websites, people connecting to each other, and creativity sparks.

That was a little historical story about the coming of the world wide web. From my romanticism before, lays a fact. Here are revolutionary ideas that were produced by the early web community:

  • Decentralisation
  • Non-discrimination
  • Bottom-up design
  • Universality
  • Consensus

Big Data Company

We’re not strangers when I say words like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, TikTok, and many other well-known companies. We call these companies, the big data company. They’re called that because they are companies that store big data (information) about their users. These companies store bundles of our data and make money out of it by selling it to other third-party companies, even money is not enough for them. Power, absolute power over their consumers/users.

When we have a lot of money, we don’t buy foods to replenish our hunger. It is much more than that.

Willingly or unwillingly, your data is at risk, and your privacy is at risk! For “FREE” entertainment you just have to sell your data, your body to the company. Oh, you want to watch a video, we have to give you ads, because it’ll keep our company running, and it’ll also support the content creators. As if our data is not enough.

These are power-hungry companies, take, for example, Apple. It’s a hot topic issue right now, the rights to repair. Imagine owning something, and then not having the rights to repair that said product. It’s a known fact that Apple has made a ridiculous amount of unnecessary changes to their devices, removing important things, and then selling them as a separate product, for an expensive amount of money.

It is safe to say that in this day and age, the age of the internet, data is the most important thing for companies. They will have the ability to know about your information, what you like, what gender you are, what did you search on your browser, and where you lived, yes, all of these are true. So how are they doing this? They are using some kind of tracker to identify you, uniquely identify you. On most websites, well-known websites, there will be trackers, especially if the websites contain some kind of ad placement. Tracking services that they use are coming from big data companies like Google, Meta, and many more. These data are not collected only for them, but they are outsourced to other third-party companies. They call this Piggybacking

How are People Falling for These?

The easy answer, and to put it bluntly, is because they are trendy, and up to date. These services, (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and another popular services) are increasingly popular because of the reason why they are using it, popularity. As the youngsters call it, it is hip, it is the things. For what price? Their privacy. I have to argue that the reason why they would rather use these services, is because they don’t know that there are alternatives out there. I can’t blame all of them, for the people who are doing activities in a mainstream environment (college, workspace), some of these services are used by their environment, and they are forced to adapt to these privacy-threatening services.

What I hope to achieve is that these kinds of environments are educated about privacy, the internet, digital, and technology privacy. Tell me, how much information about internet privacy do you have? Some of them are, maybe: don’t trust people on the internet (be aware), viruses, malware, and trojan. But these are just surface levels of knowledge on internet privacy, it’s like knowing different types of thieves, and then not having the ability to know how to stop them.

Digital illiteracy & Psychological Effects

Keep in mind that these people would pay to use these services, millions of dollars, because they are a bunch of illiterate people, yes. If you don’t know about the internet, though luck, you don’t know how to read a book.

Attention span is the most popular one to talk about in this chapter. It is essentially the most profound thing that has an impact. Being lazy is not the right word, they call them procrastinating. Why did it happen? Because of the form of content that these companies give. Short form of content, [[Byte-Sized content]], sprint through their homepages. Looking everywhere, you’ll see people mindlessly scrolling through it, consuming it, endeavoring it, and complaining about it, but alas they still did it.

People, academia, educators, and political figures, like to talk about the new society, the 5.0 Society Era. Everyone should know these and that, but oh, oh the HYPOCRACY! If they are what they said they were, asked them, asked them about how GitHub works, how repositories work, how a server works, what are programming languages, and many things. They will not know! These are essentials, we’ve come so far to the point of 5.0, and they’re still stuck on some kind of QA testing phase. To add fire to the burn, they have the audacity to show us the most basic things, education about the internet, fake URLs, viruses, etc. Without even expanding upon it, I’m talking about education, they don’t care, they did their job, and they got paid.

Enough said, we need to break boundaries on educating people about the internet and technology, don’t use the same old shit.

How to Overcome it!

Know the Fundamental!

Internet is freedom, and privacy is important, be cautious! When you want to visit a website and use a service, make sure to reflect upon yourselves, are these companies leeches?

That’s all you need to know.

How These Companies Track You

Generally, when you visit a website using your browser, it’ll make a “request” for the site that you’re visiting. In the background, advertising code, and invisible trackers on that site might also cause your browser to make dozens or even hundreds of requests to other hidden third parties. Each request contains several pieces of information about your browser and about you, from your time zone to your browser settings to what versions of software you have installed.

It might look like the data that they collected are useless at first glance. Trust me, when it is compiled together, they can reveal a detailed behavioral profile of your online activity, from political affiliation to education level to income bracket. Know that ad networks primarily rely on two methods to maintain this link of obtaining data:

  1. Cookie Tracking → Small chunks of information that websites store in your browser
  2. Browser Fingerprinting → A digital fingerprint is essentially a list of characteristics that are unique to a single user, their browser, and their particular hardware setup.

Also, if you are on a popular social media like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, they will also track you by link. You know link, texts that redirects you to a website. These companies are sneaky, take Twitter for example, when you or someone made a tweet and then they embed a link, when you click on them, it will be shortened using Twitter’s link shortener. What is shitty is that they don’t immediately redirect you to the website, it will redirect you to 3 websites (trackers) without you knowing because it is too fast to notice. Still, thinking of using these platforms?

Alternatives & Tools to Help You!

This will be interesting because you’ll be experiencing freedom and full control of your privacy as never before!

  1. Invidious (YouTube, Website) Invidious is a YouTube alternative, you’re essentially watching YouTube but using another client. It is a website, and you could watch YouTube free of ads and distractions, not only that, you’ll be guaranteed privacy. YouTube has got so many disadvantages, it loads too long, it collects your data, and it’ll try to get you addicted by offering you new content, which resulted in an endless scrolling of content. With Invidious you don’t need to log in using a Google account, or with any accounts to watch video! What if I want to get notifications from my subscribers? Well, you’re in luck! There is a guide on how to import your YouTube subscriptions into Invidious, it is easy! By the way, you can still subscribe to other YouTube channels there.

No more giving up your data to Google. You, 1. Google, 0.

  1. Newpipe (YouTube, Android App, Website) Newpipe is a popular client for Android. It has the same premise as Invidious, but now it is portable and you can bring it everywhere. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but Invidious has the option to download a video, and this one has it too!

  2. Mastodon (Social Media, Twitter) Mastodon is generally a well-known Decentralized Social Network platform. Since Twitter is crazed with Elon Musk taking over, people are becoming paranoid about their privacy, wow, just now? Somehow they found out about Mastodon, a decentralized social network platform built for privacy!

  3. Signal (Messenger App, WhatsApp) Signal is a privacy-focused messaging app. It is literally one of the best alternatives to WhatsApp, it is an end-to-end encrypted messenger, meaning that they don’t have your data or messages. But WhatsApp did that too! Yeah, but they don’t value users’ privacy. In Signal, the user’s data is 100% private, the developer, and the people from Signal will not know your crucial pieces of information like name, date of birth, etc. But they store the date of your account creation.

Tools/Programs for Desktop

  1. Libreoffice (Alternative to MSOffice)
  2. BleachBit (Alternative to Ccleaner)
  3. OBS (Open-Source recording software)
  4. GIMP (Alternative to Photoshop, Ai. Extensive with plugins)
  5. TiddlyWiki (A personal wiki for creating your own private notes)
  6. Farbar Recovery Tool (Indepth malware remover)
  7. Win10 & Win11 Debloater (Removes unecessary things that slows down your computer)

Librewolf

Librewolf is a fork of Mozilla Firefox, and it is made for privacy. It is so important that I gave it its own chapter. When you’re using Chrome, you’re privacy is gone right away, you know it’s Google, smh. Firefox? Yes, that too. When you use Firefox, it’ll give you Google as its default search engine, as if it’s not obvious, and it also has this annoying third parties thingy called Pocket. Librewolf removes all of that in return for your privacy.

Some of the ways of improving its users’ privacy are:

  1. Not having Google as a default search engine

  2. Disable WebGL, as it is a strong fingerprinting vector.

  3. Prevent access to the location services of the OS, and use Mozilla’s location API instead of Google’s API.

  4. Limit ICE candidates generation to a single interface when sharing video or audio during a videoconference.

  5. Force DNS and WebRTC inside the proxy, when one is being used.

Get Started with Librewolf

  1. Download here
  2. Go to Menu > Settings > Search > Default Search Engine > SearXNG
  3. Install Add-ons, No Script, Privacy Badger

There, you are set!

A little bit about SearXNG. It is different that you’re an ordinary search engine, it is a Metasearch Engine. A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users. Basically it will yields results from many search engines without the user directly interacting with it, so it will protect you from other search engines collecting your search data. I have to argue that this search method, will give you more detailed information about what you’re trying to search.

Conclusion

There are so many things to write on internet privacy, but this is all I’ve got for now. I will be writing more.

I hope you will engulf and obsess yourself with your privacy because it is important, and you don’t want to be taken advantage of. If you have any recommendations of things that you want to say, that correlate to this topic, please say so in the comment section below!

References, Further Readings & Useful Websites

  1. https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
  2. https://www.w3.org/
  3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Common_questions/Web_mechanics/Pages_sites_servers_and_search_engines
  4. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/learn
  5. https://github.com/bebasid/bebasid
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination
  7. https://repair.eu/news/apples-self-repair-programme-is-not-the-right-to-repair-we-need/
  8. https://searx.thegpm.org/
  9. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/index/

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