How to browse the web securely and privately

So you want to browse the web securely and privately? Here’s a hard truth: it’s almost impossible.

It’s not just your internet provider that knows which sites you visit, it’s also the government — and other governments! And when it’s not them, it’s social media sites, ad networks or apps tracking you across the web to serve you specific and targeted ads. Your web browsing history can be highly personal. It can reveal your health concerns, your political beliefs and even your porn habits — you name it. Why should anyone other than you know those things?

Any time you visit a website, you leave a trail of data behind you. You can’t stop it all — that’s just how the internet works. But there are plenty of things that you can do to reduce your footprint.

Here are a few tips to cover most of your bases.

A VPN can help hide your identity, but doesn’t make you anonymous

You might have heard that a VPN — or a virtual private network — might keep your internet traffic safe from snoopers. Well, not really.

A VPN lets you create a dedicated tunnel that all of your internet traffic flows through — usually a VPN server — allowing you to hide your internet traffic from your internet provider. That’s good if you’re in a country where censorship or surveillance is rife or trying to avoid location-based blocking. But otherwise, you’re just sending all of your internet traffic to a VPN provider instead. Essentially, you have to choose who you trust more: your VPN provider or your internet provider. The problem is, most free VPN providers make their money by selling your data or serving you ads — and some are just downright shady. Even if you use a premium VPN provider for privacy, they can connect your payment information to your internet traffic, and many VPN providers don’t even bother to encrypt your data.

Some VPN providers are better than others: tried, tested — and trusted — by security professionals.

Services like WireGuard are highly recommended, and are available on a variety of devices and systems — including iPhones and iPads. We recently profiled the Guardian Mobile Firewall, a smart firewall-type app for your iPhone that securely tunnels your data anonymously so that even its creators don’t know who you are. The app also prevents apps on your phone from tracking you and accessing your data, like your contacts or your geolocation.

As TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet explains, the best VPN providers are the ones that you control yourself. You can create your own Algo VPN server in just a few minutes. Algo is created by Trial of Bits, a highly trusted and respected security company in New York. The source code is available on GitHub, making it far more difficult to covertly insert backdoors into the code.

With your own Algo VPN setup, you c