How can you better protect your own data?

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The use of a mobile phone and a laptop or computer is for many simply “part of the day”. In the morning, check your apps, read the news on the news app and then open the laptop for work … What you are not always aware of is that in all these activities you pass data to the search engines, social media and apps that you’re using. And this data is gold for advertisers. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to better protect your data and privacy.

1. Be careful with social media

To be honest, if you don’t want social media like Facebook and Instagram to keep data about you, then you better not use social media. After all, you cannot choose not to pass on data, this is their income. You can indicate some preferences in the settings, such as whether your profile may be private or public and whether your locations may be tracked. Do you occasionally log in with Facebook? Then it is worth checking with “Apps and websites” in which external parties use your data because you once gave them access. With all social media you use, it is therefore recommended to go through the settings carefully and see what you have ever accepted. Do you think it is time for a social media cleanse? Then you can delete your accounts. According to Facebook, after 90 days all your data has been erased from the servers.

2. Use a VPN

Of course, you can also choose to completely hide your data. This can be done with a VPN. With a VPN you can connect to a server of your choice; your data is encrypted and you surf, as it were, with a different ip address. This ensures that the data that you normally provide, for example by cookies, remains protected. So you can use the internet anonymously on all operating systems with a VPN (Windows 10), MacOS, Linux).

3. Choose a privacy-friendly search engine

Have you ever heard of DuckDuckGo? This is a search engine that does not store personal data of its users, unlike, for example, Google and Bing. You do pay a price for this privacy: the search engine has less money than, for example, Google, which makes money by selling data. This makes the search engine less good.

 

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