Personal Privacy Concerns

[Chuckanut]

There is a program that is designed to help improve you personal privacy while on the internet. It tells organizations that you do business with not to share or sell your information unless you have permitted it. It’s called the Global Privacy Control and several browsers have already built it in. The DuckDuckGo browser has it on by default. Firefox requires that you turn it on. Others require you to download an extension to have it working on the browser. Chrome for example requires an extension.

Go to https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ to see if you have it running. If the privacy control is active you will see at the top of your screen a green dot lit up. The website also offers information on how to get it for your browser.

About six states have passed laws requiring companies to comply with your choice if you turn on Global Privacy Control - California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and Connecticut. There may be more but those were the only one mentioned when I read about it. Of course, without compliance laws and enforcement not much will happen.

If you want to go deeper into the weeds on the subject of GPC, below is Steve Gibson’s discussion of it. GPC is in the last third of the podcast notes.

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-934-notes.pdf

 

[erkevin]

VPN for me.

 

[Chuckanut]

VPN for me.

VPNs are great. I use one myself. But, it does not tell a business to NOT share or sell the data they have gathered on you. GPC is a different tool for a different abuse of your information.

 

[pacergal]

I use DuckDuckGO, Safari, and have a VPN via Xfinity.
My son also showed me the TOR browser, but I have not used it, don't think I need it.

 

[GenXguy]

I have the extension in Chrome and it works (shows the green dot on the webpage). But in my updated Firefox, I used the browser config to enable it, restarted Firefox, still showed red dot. Then I tried the privacy badger extension, and it still showed the red dot. So for whatever reason, it didn't work in my updated Firefox.