Showing posts with label Security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Security. Show all posts

Monday

Worried about Google tracking? Tips to protect your privacy

Posted By: Arin Dey - July 16, 2018
We all love Google, sure their results are awesome, however if you're concerned about privacy follow this post to know how you can modify the data of yourself that Google already has. Google is the number one search engine in the world now. Yes, it is and Google can snoop into your lives, build a huge profile over your connections and sell them. That's how it has amassed a fortune of making Google a top MNC in the world. Literally, Google is almost owning the internet. 

Worried about Google tracking? Tips to protect your privacy
They read/scan your emails, have built a profile based on you by tracking your web usage activities and advertising preferences of yours linked to a unique advertising id and sells them to the highest bidder at a great price. But unknowingly we take risk on losing our important data, ignoring how should we protect sensitive data from loss or theft.

How and where your data hides?
 Go to https://myaccount.google.com and you will find the shit you have done over the internet. You can delete them and disable all the things.

If you actively use Gmail, Google Drive, Google Assistant and what not? They are free because they aren't selling you the product. It's we the consumers who are the victims or so-called products.

In fact, they are making billions out of your crush's romantic messages, your cute kids pictures or even some of the weird and wild imaginary things your searched for on their website. Google maintains huge archives with a mammoth amount of data.

There have been several instances recently based on racial profiling and discriminatory hiring practices. For this, Google has been warned by several privacy and security agencies for alleged snooping into everything out their on the internet as if they own it! European Union has alleged Google a lot of times.

How to prevent security & privacy breach?

Even if you are a great Google lover, there are few steps that can be followed to be safe while using email/search/cloud services over internet by controlling or avoiding few Google products.

· Opt out of advertising based on your preferences.

· Stop using Gmail and switch to Protonmail/Tutanota.

· Avoid Google Drive and instead use Tresorit/SpiderOak. Else use BoxCryptor or other services to pre encrypt your files before uploading to Google Drive etc.

· If you're concerned about privacy switch to DuckDuckGo/StartPage/Qwant immediately.

· In case, you want an alternate safe search engine then switch to Privado (It doesn't store search history or IPs).

· Undoubtedly chrome is a great browser. Install extensions like Ublock origin, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and Disconnect. If not switch to Firefox!

· If you're using an android device do this as soon as possible: Navigate to Settings >Google>Ads and opt out of personalization and reset your advertising id every month.

· Try avoiding apps called Allo/Duo.

Along with the above steps, open the URL https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols and make sure you are signed in to your Google account. Then, make sure all the slider/toggles are to the left ("paused"). If a confirmation box pops up asking you to confirm that you want to pause an activity, confirm it by clicking "Pause". Toggle to pause for Location history, Voice & Audio Activity, YouTube Search & Watch History. Additionally, under "Web & App Activity", uncheck "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services."

There are aspects of Google, both good and bad, that this article hasn't covered because the company is simply too big, and too complicated to comprehend. I'm not anti Google, however being concerned about how our data is used, who uses it and what pros and cons it holds is a consumer right. I am writing this post and sharing my opinion on the basis I learnt and experienced while using several popular products of Google.

Just remember one thing, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product! There is no such thing as a free lunch. I’m not sure how many people are aware of this. But the next time while you’re browsing the internet for finding some information or enjoying a video on YouTube, always remember that Google is watching your every move; because that’s the price you pay for that free service.

I would love to hear from you more on this.

Thursday

Google Gives Better Rank For Secured Websites

Posted By: Arin Dey - August 14, 2014
Webmasters and bloggers do hardly care about making the website secured by HTTPS. But it is the time when all should look into this. Google has officially announced that sites secured with HTTPS and SSL will now get better positions in search rankings. We had speculations about HTTPS being one of the factors in ranking better. But as Google confirmed that it is a good time to switch and grow your sites visibility over net.

Google said, "Over the past few months we've been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal."

Google Gives Better Rank For Secured Websites

It is true that secured factors give websites a little heads up. As per Google, the heads up have an impact about 1% of global search queries that as a whole makes it less important than other major SEO factors such as quality content, back-links etc.

Even though this factor contributes little, still Google thinks it as very important. Also the post added that they "may decide to strengthen" the factor so that more webmasters, bloggers, website owners are encouraged to switch from HTTP to HTTPS and keep everyone safe on the web while browsing.

Here are some useful tips :

Google has been asking website owners since long that it is safe to switch from HTTP to HTTPS but you have to make sure your traffic doesn't get affected in this. It means that you have to update Google that you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS. Google revealed that it will keep releasing more documentation in the future, and as of now here are few tips:
  1. Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
  2. Use 2048-bit key certificates
  3. Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
  4. Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
  5. Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
  6. Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
  7. Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
Now its your turn to switch from HTTP to HTTPS and share your experience. Please leave your comments here after moving to HTTPS.

Saturday

Dangers While Social Networking [Infographic]

Posted By: Poketors - September 21, 2013
Social Media has been the most popular and used media while connecting with people. Various social networking sites are also valuable tools used by many companies and individuals to extend their contacts and deliver marketing messages. 
Dangers While Social Networking [Infographic]
The nature of social networking – having such a massive base of users who are unknown to you – means that using it carries a degree of risk including becoming a target for cyber-criminals. Kaspersky Lab has presented a nice infographic which states the various threats while accessing social networks from different devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops, PCs.

Source : Kaspersky Lab

Thursday

How Safe Is Your Website [Infographic]

Posted By: Poketors - August 15, 2013
Thousands of website owners and bloggers complain about the problem related to site hacking or tampering. But have you ever thought that how many of them are able to protect their blog/website from this issue? Very few because they keep committing mistakes like hosting their sites on a very cheap domain hosting service provider, giving a weak username and password, gaining access to FTP link and several threats to website/blogs.

How Safe Is Your Website [Infographic]


What is the solution for this. There is not a single or one word answer for this. You have to opt for a better and secure hosting, give strong password, verify your website with crawl errors, visibility. We found a very well described infographic which explains how to make your blog safe.

How Safe Is Your Website
Source : WhoIsHostingThis

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