ESSENTIAL APPS FOR IRONCLAD ONLINE PRIVACY

Another day, another data breach. Sidestepping trackers and protecting your personal information might seem like a hopeless task, but these top privacy apps can really make a difference.

- NEIL J. RUBENKING

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, or so goes the old joke. But these days, they not only know you’re a dog, they also know what breed you are, when you last got wormed, and your favorite treat. Trackers and advertisers follow your web surfing, data brokers scrape public records to create detailed (and saleable) personal profiles, and hackers do their best to parlay small lapses in privacy practices into full-blown 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 simply 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.

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? Never! They had no idea what was coming.

Encrypting your email is one obvious way to protect the privacy of your messages. 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!