Advisorator Free: Try these privacy tools
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Five cool privacy tools
Ideally, protecting your privacy online should be simple. I don’t think people should have to spend hours of their time or gobs of money managing and deleting all the personal data that’s out there. The more you can protect automatically or proactively, the better.
To that end, here are five tools that can help provide some peace of mind. All of them are free to use, though some have premium versions for certain features.
Delete Google data with Jumbo
Last year, Google introduced a privacy setting that can auto-delete search history and other activity data when it’s more than 18 months old. (The company is also now turning this feature on by default for new users.) It’s a nice PR gesture, but it’s also an empty one. Why can’t you delete your data from Google when it’s just a month old? How about deleting data after just a day, or immediately? Google won’t let you, probably because that recent data is too valuable to advertisers.
Fortunately, a neat little app called Jumbo can clear out Google activity data automatically. It’s available on both iOS and Android, and once you connect it with your Google account, it will scan for searches and remove them from Google’s records, usually within 15 minutes or so. Jumbo doesn’t just work with Google, either. It can also auto-delete your search history from Facebook and even clear out old posts from Facebook or Twitter after specified time periods. The app has been around since last year, but just received a major update.
There are some things I don’t like about Jumbo. It can be cumbersome to set up, and it’s optional warnings about data breaches are more annoying than helpful. I also wish the ability to auto-delete Alexa voice searches wasn’t behind a paywall. Still, it’s worth using just to dial down Google’s data collection alone.
Stop mobile trackers with Lockdown
Tech giants like Google and Facebook aren’t the only ones trying to collect data about you. Many other apps also collect details about your phone, your usage patterns, and possibly your location, then ship it off to analytics firms and advertisers.
Lockdown is a free and simple utility for iOS and Mac that prevents apps from connecting with these data trackers. I’ve had it on my iPhone since January, and in that time it’s blocked more than 1 million tracking attempts in a completely unobtrusive way. (Until sitting down to write this newsletter, I’d forgotten that I’d set it up already.)
Keep in mind that Lockdown is not a VPN, so it’s not routing any of your internet traffic through its own servers to mask your location, but I think that’s mostly a positive, since it doesn’t interfere with connectivity. If you do want VPN service, however, Lockdown sells it as an add-on subscription. (One other note: The app can hinder your ability to log into Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but turning it off while logging in seems to solve the problem.)
Mask your email address with Abine Blur
For marketers that want to track your online behavior, your email address is the ultimate prize. Once you log into a website or app, that site can use tracking cookies to follow you around and associate the data with your email, even after you’ve deleted data from big tech companies like Facebook and Google.
With the free version of Abine Blur, you can set up masked email addresses (such as “lsq9x1tecv1y@opayq.com“) that forward to your real address. Each masked email can have a nickname for remembering what you used it for, and Abine’s website shows you how many emails those addresses have received. If a sender is abusing its privileges, you can turn off forwarding or delete the masked email address outright.
Abine offers a $39 per year premium service that also provides masked credit cards and phone numbers, but there are free alternatives, as I’ll describe below.
Protect your phone number with Google Voice
Next time a business asks for your phone number and you’re not comfortable giving it out, consider handing out a number from Google Voice instead. When you sign up for Google Voice, you claim a phone number from an area code of your choosing. Incoming phone calls and messages to that number will then forward to your real phone number.
Why is this better than handing out your actual number? For one thing, Google Voice has some spam filtering built in (available through Settings > Security), but you can also screen incoming calls, set up do-not-disturb hours, and—if all else fails—switch to a different phone number. Use it as a defensive barrier for any businesses or other entities you don’t fully trust.
Create a locked-down credit card at Privacy.com
Similar to how Google Voice can mask your real phone number, Privacy.com lets you use virtual credit cards for online stores and subscription services. You can then put spending limits on each virtual card, or even designate them as single-use cards, preventing untrustworthy vendors from running off with the card info.
This isn’t just form of payment protection, though. It’s also a privacy tool that prevents credit card companies from tracking and selling your shopping habits. Combine this with a masked phone number and email address, and vendors will have a much tougher time mining that data.
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Until next time,
Jared