Η year ending was marked by successive revelations about personal data leaks and shady collaborations exposed by large companies.
Are you thinking after all that you have heard and read to limit your exposure to the internet as much as possible? If so, see where you can find the necessary settings and how to make your online presence as discreet as possible.
Stop one: Facebook
Assuming you do not want to delete your account but simply restrict the circle of people who will see your posts, you will need to make the relevant changes to your Account Settings and privacy tools. From here you can choose between others whether the page will display the posts of others to which you have been tagged, set who can see your posts and if you want search engines that work outside of Facebook to show those who search for you your page on the social network. Overall Facebook privacy settings are many and you should pay enough attention to them to see what suits you and what does not.
If you are considering deleting from Facebook you should be aware that it may accidentally affect the functionality of other applications that you may be using. For example, if you sign up for an online service using your Facebook account and delete the latter, it is very likely that you will need to re-sign up.
Second stop: Twitter
Twitter has a slightly different mechanism, since all the basic settings are on one page in the "Privacy and Security" section. Here, you can choose if you want to give your location information and if others will tag you in their photos. More interesting is the section entitled "Your Twitter data" where you can find out more or less what Twitter knows about you and which places you have visited, which applications and devices you have used. Stand up, it gets a little scarier. Twitter combines your profile and activity with specific interests, which of course you can control. Finally, there is the area entitled "Personalization and data" with settings for the type of ads you will see on the Twitter platform but also for whether your data will be shared with partner companies. As you can see, you also have a lot of time on Twitter.
Third stop: Google
You will probably need to invest a lot of time and effort here. If you have an account with a Google service such as Gmail, for example, you should go to and check your personal information and data stored by Google from your previous searches, as well as your browsing history . In the same section you will also find out if Google records your voice commands and saves the history of the points you have visited. In the other options, it is a good idea to ensure that you do not share information about your geographical location with other people and determine what personal information other users will see.
Fourth stop: Set up your browser
Because there are so many prying eyes that may have a reason to track your web browsing, you can first set up your browser properly so that the websites and pages you visit do not find you. However, this does not necessarily mean that tracking will stop, because it's the patriotism of each site to satisfy your request.
The VPN solution
An additional protection measure is to confuse anyone who would like to know your internet habits. An opportunity to hide your transactions can be done through the "virtual private networks" also known as Virtual Private Networks or VPN. These are services that are typically provided only to subscribers and show you connecting to the internet from somewhere other than the real thing. So, for example, you may be in the center of Athens but for the rest of the Internet it looks like you are connecting from Prague or Hamburg for example. However, this creates a small problem in online services that judge by your geographical location (or pseudo-location in this case) which may show you pages written in Czech or German, while perhaps the most important problem is that the connection speed you will be reduced.
The choice of Tor
The most advanced solution to protect your privacy so far, which goes beyond previous relatively lenient approaches, is to forget the easy solutions and choose the Tor platform. It is a software solution that promises security, as it encrypts the communication you may have with other users. It is certainly not 100% safe, as there is nothing that guarantees absolute safety, however it offers effective protection from prying eyes.
