Sitting in a comfy chair in your own home, checking social media and surfing the web, you may feel you’re in a quiet, private place. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any time you’re online, your privacy is under siege by data brokers, trackers, and hackers. It’s not like having your wallet stolen. You won’t notice right away. But if you don’t keep a lid on your private data you could suffer consequences ranging from receiving annoying spam messages to full-on identity theft.
It’s nearly impossible to maintain total anonymity and still connect to the internet, but there are things you can do to limit your exposure, from connecting through a VPN to hiring a service that deletes your data from legitimate data aggregators. We’ve collected products and services that take many different approaches to privacy protection. Check out our reviews, then choose one or even more to defend your privacy. And when you’ve perused our choices, read on for a deeper dive into privacy problems and their solutions.
Your subscription to IronVest (the successor to Abine Blur) brings a veritable smorgasbord of privacy-enhancing features and services. Its masked emails feature automates the process of using a different disposable email address for every transaction. If one of those masked emails starts getting spam, you can just delete it, and you know which merchant sold you out.
What’s the use in masking your email when you’re giving the merchant something even more sensitive—your credit card number? IronVest masks card numbers, too, and each masked card only has enough value to pay the particular transaction. No shady merchant can charge you extra, or fake another transaction on your card.
You can have all the masked emails you want, but masked cards require a small payment, because IronVest expends resources processing the payment. Masked phone numbers are still more limited; you get just one. But when you use that masked phone number, you can be sure your contact won’t benefit by selling it to robocallers or text spammers. A new Passcode Protection feature captures SMS passcodes sent to the masked number and fills them for you automatically.
It’s a small step from tracking your disposable email addresses to tracking your logins for all those websites. IronVest includes a complete, if basic, password manager. It also fills personal data in web forms, letting you use data you’ve entered, masked versions of your data, or a mix of the two.
IronVest securely syncs your password and payment data across all your PCs, Macs, and mobile devices. Its browser extensions offer full access to program features and include an active Do Not Track component that foils advertisers and other trackers. On top of all that, IronVest spells out how it handles your data in clear, simple detail. It’s a cornucopia of privacy protection.
Even when you’re careful about how much you reveal online, you can’t help but leave traces. Companies you send email to have your email account. Online merchants have your physical address. Your purchase of real estate is a matter of public record. And so on. Data brokers hoover up all this information, snap related items together, and come up with a profile of you that they can sell, use, or abuse. Collecting public information is legal, but the collectors also are legally bound to remove your info if you ask. Optery finds your data profiles online and either handles removal for you or gives you the tools to do the job yourself.
If you go the DIY route, Optery is totally free—it doesn’t even request a credit card. For a better experience, you can subscribe at three pricing tiers, up to the Ultimate tier where Optery handles opting you out from hundreds of brokers. Its unique system shows you exactly what the brokers have on you and, when possible, gives you a direct link to your profile. After removal is complete. Optery reports on its work, including links to verify the data is gone.
You may not think your life is interesting, but online data brokers find the little details totally fascinating. They gather and combine everything they can find into a profile that they can sell. The purchaser of your profile can use it to target ads, or to launch a full-on identity theft attack. Privacy Bee searches out brokers that have your data and tells them to erase it—and the brokers must comply.
Personal data protection isn’t the only thing you get from Privacy Bee. It includes a browser extension that blocks tracking ads and other trackers on websites. You can use it to set your privacy preferences at thousands of companies. It can opt you out of lists that contribute to spam, credit card prequalification offers, and more. It’s quite expensive, though, and its free tier doesn’t give you the extensive DIY tools found in Optery.
Advertisers really care what you do online. The better they can profile you, the more they can target ads. A nice juicy personal profile is also a commodity they can sell. With the proliferation of active Do Not Track systems, some trackers have switched to a technique called browser fingerprinting. And Avast AntiTrack stands square in their way, ensuring that your browser does its job without painting a target on your back.
Every time you visit a website, your browser sends a ton of information. It has to send your IP address, to receive the requested pages. But it also sends the browser version, OS details, even the fonts installed on your PC. Nominally, this information helps the website fine-tune your browsing experience. But there’s so much data spewing from the browser that trackers can easily create a unique fingerprint, and thereby recognize you when you visit a different site.
AntiTrack doesn’t suppress the info coming from your browser, as that could cause problems with some sites. It just mixes things up a little, presenting a slightly different fingerprint to each website. It does cost $49.95 per year, but that’s fine for some tracking-sensitive souls.
Abine DeleteMe
Some DEA services require you to create a new, pristine email account to receive the mail from your disposable addresses, while others feed directly into your existing inbox. The latter approach is more convenient, but it comes with a problem. Your email address, along with other personal information, is already scattered across the interwebs. Completely wiping that information from the web is impossible, but Abine DeleteMe does everything that is possible to minimize your exposure.
DeleteMe scans websites for dozens of information aggregating websites. These sites legally collect public information and make it easy to find. They also legally must remove your info if you so request. DeleteMe automates the opt-out process as much as possible. However, automation isn’t possible in some cases, so Abine retains a staff of human operators to handle those. Every six months, you get a report of what DeleteMe found, and what was removed.
The first thing you do after installing Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is fill in forms with your personal, financial, and medical information. The product combs the dark web for breaches where any of your information appeared, but it goes deeper than most similar scans. It also turns up exposures that might be your personal information. As you verify or discard these, it refines the search.
The app also seeks your personal data on legitimate data aggregator sites, though it doesn’t attempt automated opt-out the way some competing products do.
The last thing you want is some hacker impersonating you on your favorite social media site, trolling your friends and trying to install malware. Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection doesn’t ask for access to your profiles. Rather, it scans dozens of social sites for profiles that seem connected with you. Once you claim your actual profiles, any remaining ones may be impersonators.
You might think your perambulations around the web are private. You’d think wrong. Advertisers and others can track your activity quite thoroughly using cookies and other tech. Ghostery Privacy Suite adds an extension to your browsers that lets you surf wherever you want without being tracked. It even foils trackers that use browser fingerprinting by stripping out some of the data that goes into a fingerprint. The browser extension also serves as an ad blocker.
By using the Ghostery Glow private search engine, you can find the information you want without giving any information to Google or other major search engines. The Ghostery Dawn browser, which has Ghostery’s other components built in, resists tampering using a collection of high-end techniques that leave no visible trace. And the Ghostery Insights system gives you more information that you need about the sites that are tracking you.
Ghostery Privacy Suite isn’t expensive, and the lion’s share of its security features are available for free. Paying customers get Ghostery Insights, enhanced support, and a few features that you probably don’t need.
You may not think your internet wanderings are of interest to anybody, but advertisers and other trackers follow your path closely. They use the gathered data to target ads, or sell “you” to others. Some trackers may even have identity theft in mind. Norton AntiTrack heads off these tracking attempts, both traditional cookie-based systems and modern browser fingerprint analysis.
Once you’ve installed its browser extensions in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, you’re golden. You can bring up the app to view statistics, if you like. For each page you visit, AntiTrack reports how many trackers it blocked, and lets you view full details. Unlike most active Do Not Track systems, it has the ability to feed false information to traditional trackers without totally blocking their activities. Note, though, that it doesn’t include any bonus privacy-protection features the way some competitors do.
Safe Me
Safe Me is a free mobile app that takes a threefold approach to improving the privacy and security of your Android or iOS smartphone. It searches for private data exposed on the dark web, directs you to correct any security configuration problems, and walks you through dozens of security awareness courses.
A prominent Safe Me Score represents your progress toward better security. As you work through the dark web exposure incidents, changing compromised passwords and marking the problem as remediated, your score inches upward. Taking the product’s security configuration advice also boosts that score.
Each of the over two dozen security awareness courses consists of a short video (around three minutes) followed by a set of quiz questions, usually four or five. If you miss no more than one answer, you pass. And each passed course ratchets up your score. Any smartphone user can benefit from running through this app’s activities.
Need to submit a receipt for travel expenses? Just snap a photo with your phone and send it along. Want to share your passport details with your partner? Again, a pic is handy. But if you let those pictures remain on your phone, they represent a potential loss of private information. SafePic, an iOS app from Norton Labs, aims to protect those sensitive images from prying eyes, while keeping them available for you, the authorized owner.
SafePic analyzes all the photos on your phone and flags those that seem to contain sensitive data. It places the found photos in encrypted storage, replacing them with a blurred version. By authenticating with a system like Face ID or Touch ID, you can temporarily un-blur the image for viewing. Best of all, it’s free.
The Email Nightmare, Part 1
Like the internet itself, email was invented by optimists and academics who never dreamed that anyone would misuse it. Read someone else’s mail? How rude! Fill up inboxes with unwanted junk mail? They had no idea what was coming.
Encrypting your email is one obvious way to protect the privacy of your messages. It’s a significant and effective technique, one that merits its own, separate roundup, The Best Email Encryption. See that article for a deeper dive into these snoop-fighters. Here’s a brief summary.
Preveil, Private-Mail, ProtonMail, and StartMail let you lock down your communications using a technique called public-key cryptography. All but Preveil use a protocol called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to generate a pair of keys—one public, one private. To send me a secure message, you encrypt it with my public key, and I decrypt it with my private key. Simple!
Using Preveil is even simpler, though. A high-tech system involving what the company calls wrapped keys means you never deal with a key, public or private. It does also mean you can’t connect with users of other PGP-based services, but few consumers know how to set that up. Skiff is another excellent free solution that hides the complexity of its powerful encryption system, and Skiff comes with the additional benefit of encrypted file storage, collaboration, and calendar management.
It’s Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
This public key technology also lets me send you a message that’s digitally signed, guaranteeing it came from me, with no tampering. I simply encrypt the message with my private key. The fact that you can decrypt it using my public key means it’s totally legit. ProtonMail and StartMail automate the key exchange process with other users of the same service, while Private-Mail requires that you perform the exchange yourself. With any of these, you can exchange secure messages with anybody who provides a public key.
Of course, not everyone has embraced public key cryptography for their email. With Tutanota, StartMail, and ProtonMail, you can send encrypted messages to non-users, though you don’t get the same level of open-source security. The service encrypts the message using a simple password, and you transmit the password via some avenue other than email, perhaps a secure messaging app.
Virtru offers email encryption for free, but only if you use Gmail, and only in Chrome. Like Preveil, it handles key management internally, though it doesn’t use public-key cryptography. You send an encrypted message, and the recipient clicks a button to read it—without either of you entering a password. SecureMyEmail is likewise free if you use it to protect a single Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft account. ProtonMail offers a free tier, but with some limitations.
These tools have their own dedicated roundup, so we’ve removed them from this article’s product lineup.
Identity Theft: The Ultimate Invasion of Privacy
How would you like to wake up and find that you’re wanted for crimes in another state, or that your home’s title doesn’t belong to you anymore? Full-blown identity theft can ruin your life in many ways. You can obtain services that watch for incipient identity theft and help you recover if necessary, but they tend to be expensive. We recommend choosing a service that combines identity theft protection with a more traditional security solution.
To give these comprehensive identity and security solutions full coverage, we’ve created a separate roundup of our top picks for identity theft protection. If you feel identity theft protection might be something you want, we can help.
Four of the seven products we chose come from names you already know: Avast One Platinum, Norton 360 with LifeLock, McAfee Total Protection, and Bitdefender Ultimate Security. A fifth, IDShield, bundles Trend Micro Maximum Security. IDX Complete opts to offer security software that’s not the traditional security suite. All of them track your private data for signs of abuse, monitor your credit, and keep watch on a variety of other factors from criminal proceedings to misuse of your SSN.
These services aim to prevent identity theft from ever happening, but they’re also prepared to help in the event it does. You get a caseworker to help with all the paperwork, and they all back up their work with a guarantee to spend up to a million dollars if needed to remediate your situation. Since we’ve given these products their own roundup, we’re not including them here.
The Email Nightmare, Part 2
With the contents of your email conversations encrypted, no hacker can sniff out just what you’re saying. However, your email address itself is exposed any time you send a message, buy a product online, or sign up for any kind of internet-based service. That might not sound problematic, but your email address is typically your user ID for many sites. A hacker who finds your email and guesses your weak password now owns the account. And, of course, having your email address floating promiscuously around the web just invites spam.
But how can you communicate without giving a merchant or service your email? The solution lies in a simple technology that lets you communicate using a temporary email address. (sometimes called a disposable email address, or DEA). The recipient sees only the temporary email, but the communication comes to your standard inbox. Most such products let you reply in such a way that your replies seem to come from the DEA. Bulc Club is an exception, in that it doesn’t permit replies. If you’re done dealing with a particular merchant, or if one of your DEAs starts receiving spam, you just destroy it.
Burner Mail, IronVest, and ManyMe are among the services offering DEA management. ManyMe is unusual in a couple of ways. Like Bulc Club, it’s free, which is uncommon. And unlike most such services it doesn’t make you register a new FlyBy email (as it calls them) before using it. Say someone at a cocktail party asks for your email. You can make up a FlyBy address on the spot, without giving your actual email away. SimpleLogin also lets you make up DEAs on the fly.
IronVest takes the concept of masking your actual identity online to the next level. Besides masking your email address, it offers masked credit card numbers, different for each transaction. You load the masked card with exactly the amount of the transaction, so a sleazy merchant can’t overcharge you or use the card again. It even lets you chat on the phone without giving your actual number.
It’s worth noting that Private-Mail and StartMail also offer a modicum of DEA management. StartMail lets you manage up to 10 permanent DEAs, and an unlimited number of DEAs set to expire within two weeks or less. Private-Mail offers five alternate email identities, without full DEA management. Tutanota’s email aliases are even more limited.
As noted, these temporary email services now have their own, separate roundup. That being the case, we’re no longer including them here.
Throw the Trackers Off the Scent
If you’re not paying for online conveniences, then you are the product, not the customer. You can surf the internet endlessly without paying a fee to visit specific sites, but those sites still work hard to monetize your visits. Advertising trackers plant cookies on your system, taking note when a tracker from an ad on a different website encounters that same cookie. Through this and other tracking methods, they form a profile of your online activity, a profile that others are willing to pay for.
Some years ago, the Internet’s Powers That Be, recognizing that many users prefer not to be tracked, ginned up a simple Do Not Track message to be sent by the browser. This DNT system never became a standard, but all the top browsers adopted it anyway. It had no effect because websites were and are free to ignore the header.
In place of the ineffectual DNT header, many security companies started devising active systems to identify and block ad trackers and other trackers. You’ll find this feature as a bonus in many security suites and some privacy-specific products. IronVest and Ghostery Privacy Suite are among the privacy tools that offer active DNT.
The trackers, in turn, invented a different technique for identifying individuals across different websites, relying on the ridiculous amount of information supplied to each site by your browser. This ranges from your IP address and browser version down to minutiae like the fonts installed on your system. There’s so much information that trackers can create a fingerprint that’s almost sure to identify you, and only you.
So, what can you do? Make a liar out of your browser, that’s what. Avast AntiTrack mixes up the data sent from your browser so it’s different for each website. Important info still reaches the site, but not in a consistent way that could be fingerprinted. Norton AntiTrack does something similar, and, like Avast AntiTrack, it also thwarts traditional trackers.
Nope, Passwords Aren’t Going Anywhere
Passwords are terrible, but we don’t yet have a universal replacement. Passkeys are an interesting development, but it’s still early days for this idea. For security, you must use a different non-guessable strong password for every secure site. The only way anybody can accomplish that feat is by relying on a password manager. Unless you use a different strong password for every website, a data breach on one site could expose dozens of your other accounts.
Simple Tricks to Remember Insanely Secure Passwords
In a perfect world, you already have an effective password manager in place, and you’ve taken the opportunity to fix any weak or duplicate passwords. On the chance you aren’t already equipped, some privacy products have taken to including password management as a bonus feature. IronVest, for one, offers a complete, if basic, password manager. You may prefer separate installation of a top-notch free password manager.
Is My Data Exposed?
The first sign that your privacy is in danger may be the appearance of your private data on the dark web. Hackers who breach online data troves are quick to put what they’ve found on the market. The free Safe Me mobile app scans the dark web and reports any exposures of your email address, along with breached passwords and other personal data. As you work through the report, updating compromised passwords, you raise your privacy score. Configuring your device’s security properly also raises the score, as does working through dozens of short security awareness courses.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection also scans the seamy side of the web for your private information, but it goes deeper with its searching than Safe Me. It uses connections between found data to come up with data that might relate to you. As you review these possible exposures and either verify or discard them, it fine-tunes its dark web search.
As noted, we’ve separately identified the best services that combine traditional security with identity theft protection. All of these trawl the dark web for signs of breach or exposure, and also track many different indicators that could flag early attempts at stealing your identity.
What Do Data Brokers Know About Me?
The malefactors who trade stolen information on the dark web are criminals. Others have found ways to monetize your personal information without breaking the law. By combing through publicly available information and snapping together things that match, data brokers create profiles of individual consumers, profiles that they can sell to advertisers, or to less savory customers. But the law also says they must remove your data if you ask. The problem is knowing just who to ask, and how.
Abine DeleteMe is a pioneer in the field of personal data removal services. When you subscribe, it searches dozens of data broker sites for your data. Wherever it finds you, it sends an opt-out request to remove your data. This process can’t be fully automated, so DeleteMe is relatively expensive.
DeleteMe was a pioneer, sure, but it’s been superseded by more modern services. Optery and Privacy Bee both track hundreds of brokers, vastly more than DeleteMe. Privacy Bee is more expensive than DeleteMe, and Optery’s most expensive tier is still higher in price. But both have informative free tiers. Optery in particular provides detailed information to help you submit and track your own opt-out requests. Privacy Bee expands on basic services with an ad-blocking browser extension and a system to make your privacy preferences known to thousands of companies; it also manages some useful industry-wide opt-outs.
What Other Privacy Options Do I Have?
Just as your private data can be exposed in many ways, software companies find a variety of ways to protect it. If a malefactor steals your laptop or otherwise gains access to your PC, your private data could still be safe—if you’ve encrypted it. We’ve covered numerous products solely devoted to encrypting files, folders, or whole drives. Some privacy products broaden their protection by including encryption.
SafePic, a free iOS app from Norton Labs, aims to protect sensitive data found in images, things like pictures of receipts, passports, or other sensitive documents. It gathers up such images, puts them into encrypted storage, and replaces them with a blurred placeholder that only you can un-blur.
Private-Mail goes beyond the usual features of encrypted email by giving you an online area to store encrypted files. You can encrypt files using PGP or using a simple password, and you can even share your encrypted files with others. ProtonMail’s Proton Drive also lets you share encrypted files.
With Preveil, storing essential files in your encrypted cloud is a snap. You just treat that cloud like any other folder. Sharing with other Preveil users is also easy. The same is true of Skiff, which focuses on secure, encrypted collaboration.
Virtru doesn’t offer cloud storage, but it gives you unusual control over your messages and attachments. You can set messages to expire, disable secure forwarding, and add a watermark to some kinds of attachments. You can also convert attachments into a protected form that only the recipient can view, just like a Virtru message.
One unusual feature in Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is detection of social media impersonators. This tool doesn’t ask for your social logins or require you to install a special app. Rather, it scours dozens of social media sites looking for profiles that are either yours or pretending to be you. Once you claim your actual accounts, any that remain must be impersonators.
Who Protects the Protectors?
When you set up an encrypted email system or a disposable email address manager, your account password is a potential weakness. If you use an easily guessed password, or if a stranger shoulder-surfs your login, you could lose control of your privacy protection. That’s where multi-factor authentication comes in.
The concept is simple. With multi-factor authentication, logging in requires at least two of the following: something you know (such as a password); something you have (such as an authentication app); or something you are (such as a fingerprint). Quite a few of the privacy tools examined here offer a multi-factor option, specifically IronVest, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection, Burner Mail, Private-Mail, SimpleLogin, Skiff, StartMail, and Tutanota.
All these products work with Google Authenticator or another time-based one-time password generator. To get started, you use your authenticator mobile app to snap a QR code provided by the privacy program. Enter the code generated by the app and you’re done. Now, your password alone doesn’t grant access to the privacy program. A password thief won’t be able to enter the code from your authenticator app, hence it won’t get in. SimpleLogin and Tutanota also support using a Yubikey or other U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) authentication key.
What Is Two-Factor Authentication?
Preveil also provides a degree of multi-factor authentication by the very nature of its encryption. Connecting to your encrypted mail is easy and automatic if you have access to both the email account and to a trusted device. An evildoer who cracks your email account still won’t gain access to your encrypted mail and files. And if you lose a trusted device, you can cancel your trust.
As for Virtru, it doesn’t require a password and doesn’t offer multi-factor authentication. You prove your identity by logging into your Gmail account. That being the case, you’d do well to protect that Gmail account using multi-factor authentication.
These aren’t the only programs for protecting your privacy, and this isn’t an exhaustive list of privacy-cloaking techniques. However, all these programs do their best to keep you safe from advertisers, spies, and creeps online.
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