[Nemesis6]

Since privacy is all the rage these days, I was wondering what steps -- if any -- you guys have taken.

I pretty much use a VPN all the time with the only exception being when I game, and I've switched away from Chrome over to the "Iron", and since then to a firefox variant. I've installed a few addons that messes up referrer tracking, force http everywhere, and self-destruct any cookies unless I've allowed them. So the list basically goes Adblock, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, Referrer Control, and Self-Destructing Cookies, along with a few misc. steps steps like disabling all plugins except flash, and even that much be enabled by me before it loads. A tiny, relatively insignificant step I've taken is spoofing my referrer to that of the Tor Browser, which I also use. All of this is topped off by using a VPN.
The latest step I've taken is mangling my hosts.lm file to redirect any attempt by me to visit google to startpage.com, an alternative search site that does not log user activity. Their sister-site ixquick.com has gotten recognition some recognition by the EU here: https://ixquick.com/eng/press/eu-privacy-seal.html

An alternative to that is DuckDuckGo, but they are apparently based in he United States, and so can be compelled to not only log through the CALEA law, but also to keep quiet about it, lest they be punished under provisions of the latest Patriot Act extension signed by Obama, so I'd say avoid them.

One last thing I've started doing is whenever I sign up to services, I sign up with junk-email accounts.

I've based a lot of this off of this page here: http://ip-check.info/

[Phantom Hoover]

you realise the NSA are accumulating metadata from all of your traffic that they can intercept? if anything doing all these things will make you slightly more prominent on their heuristics, although they still do not give a **** about anything you actually do

[Nemesis6]

you realise the NSA are accumulating metadata from all of your traffic that they can intercept? if anything doing all these things will make you slightly more prominent on their heuristics, although they still do not give a **** about anything you actually do

That is indeed a problem I've also looked a bit at -- For example, initially one would assume that something like referrer spoofing would be a good idea, but if you give your browser a unique referrer like by changing browser version numbers to something out of the ordinary, you've accomplished exactly the opposite of what you're trying to do as you imply.

[Klaustrophobia]

i already used adblock and ghostery.  will continue to use them, although I'm starting to notice that sites are starting to break when using one or both of them more frequently.

[headdie]

if a government agency of any country was interested in me enough to "do something about it" I would be more worried about the police coming to arrest and try or extradite me than "covering my tracks".  I mean hell this is not some conspiracy novel guys, except in a few cases government is not something to be paranoid about, seriously they have more to worry about than to abuse their powers and destroy my insignificant life.

Seriously if you think the NSA is that interested in you then

[deathfun]

I don't particularly care

If the NSA wants to watch me watch porn, good on them
I only recently installed adblocker because ****ing ads are annoying

[Nemesis6]

if a government agency of any country was interested in me enough to "do something about it" I would be more worried about the police coming to arrest and try or extradite me than "covering my tracks".  I mean hell this is not some conspiracy novel guys, except in a few cases government is not something to be paranoid about, seriously they have more to worry about than to abuse their powers and destroy my insignificant life.

Seriously if you think the NSA is that interested in you then
//http://www.stellamaesplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/keep-calm-and-dream-on-219.png

For me it's not really the NSA I worry about, it's just the general idea of preserving what privacy I can. There are indeed some people out there are delusional enough to think that they themselves are targets, but I'm not one of them, thank god. If I really worried that much, I would use stuff like NoScript, but I can't forego that much functionality; There's got to be a balance between functionality and privacy. Rather, it's the mass-surveillance stuff that I take offense to, and that's what I'm responding to, not the idea that black helicopters are coming to take me away at night!

[Phantom Hoover]

If you object to the mass surveillance by the government, I suggest you ditch all this nonsense and just get involved with whatever means of social activism you think will make a difference. It's not a problem that can be solved by technological means. If you want to get away from the day-to-day and up-front tracking of your activities by commercial organisations (which perturbs me far more in my daily life than some far-off stats in the archives of some intelligence agency) then the stuff you're using is a great salve, but don't kid yourself about what it's accomplishing.

[Scotty]

What have I done?

Absolutely nothing.  I don't have anything particularly useful to hide except financial information, and if the government is after that they'll just take it and tell me to shut the **** up.  Porn isn't illegal, talking on the internet isn't illegal, and I go out of my way to buy or otherwise legally acquire everything I consume with regards to digital media.

[Klaustrophobia]

i thought i should further weigh in that my main concern is far more about corporate tracking and data gathering than the government.  i don't like that they collect and store everything everywhere, but i don't think this is a problem to me individually, and the angle to stop this is to make it illegal, not try to shield myself.

[S-99]

I haven't found anything i should do yet other than attempting to preserve online anonymity in some way. Beware which other email account you let your main email use in the event you get locked out. And the oh so evil "login with facebook instead" buttons as opposed to typing in your username and password at other sites.

In other words, you could easily have an email you believe to be anonymous that you didn't quite realize can be traced back to your facebook or other stuff online. In the guise of convenience to "login with facebook" it's a great way to tie faces, name, and information to most places you have an account on the internet.

I'm worrying about this first and will see if i can come up with a good strategy to help mitigate or effectively take care of this issue of the destroying of anonymity on the internet before i worry about the other stuff. In other words, start by staying anonymous first before you go all crazy about this lack of privacy on the internet anymore.

[zookeeper]

if a government agency of any country was interested in me enough to "do something about it" I would be more worried about the police coming to arrest and try or extradite me than "covering my tracks".  I mean hell this is not some conspiracy novel guys, except in a few cases government is not something to be paranoid about, seriously they have more to worry about than to abuse their powers and destroy my insignificant life.

I can't speak for everyone of course, but for me the point is that if something unforeseeable should happen which would lead to me being involved in something that governments and intelligence services are interested in, then having access to all my electronic communications would mean that they'd be much more able to use that information against me and my interests in all sorts of unfair and illegal ways. They don't care about me now, but that doesn't mean that they never will.

[Phantom Hoover]

A lot of you are still conflating the surveillance carried out by intelligence agencies with the corporate trade in data. You can hide yourself from the latter with a bit of effort, but the former is functionally inescapable; the people doing it have direct access to the basic infrastructure and are monitoring it on a very basic level.

[S-99]

This is why i like to say people worrying about privacy haven't put thing into perspective. Internet anonymity is being destroyed. You should all be worried about that (most people won't realize that they do rely on internet anonymity in some form).

The other thing is, the i do no wrong. Let this bull**** keep spying on me. Well, what happens when you do try to do something that's not illegal say like in my country like, owning a gun. You see spying on everyone servers more than one purpose. Spying on people for the sake of spying on people (believing that you have nothing to hide is as equally retarded). There's a reason for spying. People are looking for stuff.

Spying happens for two main reasons. To know what people are doing. And, the main biggie, sizing people up. Doing daily life in your interests sizes you up. Most idiots would like to think this applies to all. Well, it does and it doesn't. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you will be sized up proportionately less than someone who doesn't and buys and owns guns and ammo. That may be an extreme sizing up example, but i present it in that way to show off the difference between people who will be monitored more than the ones who will be monitored less. When you get sized up according to who, what you are, and what you have, you get treated differently. In this case of spying, expect all of that treatment to be in the negative for "national security/bull****".

[mjn.mixael]

I haven't found anything i should do yet other than attempting to preserve online anonymity in some way. Beware which other email account you let your main email use in the event you get locked out. And the oh so evil "login with facebook instead" buttons as opposed to typing in your username and password at other sites.

In other words, you could easily have an email you believe to be anonymous that you didn't quite realize can be traced back to your facebook or other stuff online. In the guise of convenience to "login with facebook" it's a great way to tie faces, name, and information to most places you have an account on the internet.

I'm worrying about this first and will see if i can come up with a good strategy to help mitigate or effectively take care of this issue of the destroying of anonymity on the internet before i worry about the other stuff. In other words, start by staying anonymous first before you go all crazy about this lack of privacy on the internet anymore.

The answer is simple. Baleet Facebook. Can't log in with an account you no longer have!

[Phantom Hoover]

fun fact, if you repeatedly attempt to log into facebook with an email address and an invalid password it will actually show you the account associated with that address and ask you if it's yours, no frills attached

[MP-Ryan]

Online privacy is a myth.

Accept when you connect a computer to the internet that anything you do online - and quite possibly a number of things on your computer - are intercepted and tracked by someone, somewhere, and then realize the chances of that information being used to actually harm you are infinitesimally small.

I have used Adblock, NoScript, and HTTPSEverywhere since I discovered them years ago.  The spying revelations haven't changed any of my behaviour.  I sincerely do look at it this way:  aside from letting my financial logins into the hands of someone who would use it to abuse it, I have literally nothing to hide.  I know popular thought is that I'm supposed to be all up in arms about the spying revelations, but I seriously cannot be bothered.  Every advanced country on the planet has electronic espionage programs that capture every scrap of information they can... the fact that my data gets captured by everyone elses really has no bearing.  It's not like a person actually looks at this stuff - it's all subjected to computerized analysis.

As someone else - Phantom? - said, if anything using elaborate security measures is MORE likely to get your information closely scrutinized than less.  You need to worry about online privacy when it comes to hackers/phishers/scriptkiddies that will try to pry out financial and personal info to USE.  Government programs are pretty much unbeatable, and aren't going to use your information in ways that will harm you anyway - unless you deserve it.

[Grizzly]

What have I done?

Absolutely nothing. 

Unless you are, say, Russian, in which case you find that your rights as, say, a gay person, are getting eroded bit by bit, and then suddenly, you actually do have stuff to hide.

Then again, if you live in a country where stuff like that happens, there's probably nothing you can do about it anyway...

[Scotty]

That, along with the fact that if such a thing occurred, I would happily and without nary a second thought move somewhere less ****ty if it meant selling the shirt off my back to do it.

[S-99]

The answer is simple. Baleet Facebook. Can't log in with an account you no longer have!

Actually, no, the answer is more complicated. Facebook wasn't my only example, there was also email, not to mention the many different ways to attatch a name and face to any kind of internet account.

But, another great way is giving a website your cell number.

Google, yahoo, microsoft, badoo, etc. millions give their cell numbers too. Now, backtracking on people not quite watching what their doing can also be done. Say like joe blow has a youtube account, and he actually let youtube have his number, that number just got associated with youtube (even google). It also got associated with the email address for his youtube/google account. Now, joe blow was smart with his email provider allowing an easy way to reset his account by sending a reset password email to another of his emails. Now, that number is tied to two email addresses, and so on.

This is what i mean by internet anonymity being destroyed on the internet. You can still be anonymous, it's just no where near as easy in the modern day on the net.