Brushing your Teeth

Currently, one of the easiest ways to get geolocation data on an individual is through data brokers. These companies work to grab as much data about individuals as possible.

Often times this is done though what is called finger printing.

The ads that are served to you through the apps on your phone are often used to help create these finger prints, specifically because they have a unique ID associated with them, your Ad ID. Selling this Ad ID for de-anonymization is technically illegal, but that's never stopped the data brokers from selling it.

When apps and OS are written, they are written by humans and humans are fallible. Often the software developers will inadvertently introduce bugs into the software.

When bugs are found, the software developers release patches to fix the bugs. These patches are introduced in the updated versions of apps.

Keeping apps up to date is especially important after a major version is released, because there may be lots of code changes, and therefore lots of bugs introduced. Some of those bugs may be security vulnerabilities that you want to fix right away.

If someone wants to know who you're friends with, and what sorts of things matter to you, the easiest way is to check out someones instagram. Most of the time, someone looking at your pictures is a friend or family, but nothing is requiring that to be true. Some things to understand:

• All likes on a public post are public.
• All of those following and are followed by a public account are public.
• Public tags are public to everyone.

The more accounts are private, the harder it is for someone to build a profile of your information, and the harder it is for someone to build a profile of information on someone you care about.

A private account is only private if the people who shouldn't have access aren't following you. If you accept every follow request without thinking about it, the friction you're creating for someone creating a profile of your information is minimal. Security through obscurity isn't perfect, but every step helps.

Password managers attempt to solve common problems with passwords:

• Reusing the same password across multiple accounts is not secure, because one site could be breached and your password for other sites would be leaked.
• At the same time, having a different password for multiple sites is hard to remember.
• Strong passwords are even harder for humans to remember than weak passwords, adding to the security problem.

A password manager solves the problem by putting all your passwords in one well-protected place. A password manager may only be accessed on devices you approve, and requires a strong password to open. This way, you only need to memorize one strong password to get to many different strong passwords for all your accounts.

The risk of this one strong password leaking is minimized by only being to access your passwords from approved devices.

Security often refers to factors of authentication as "something you know", "something you have", and "something you are". Something you know might be a password, something you have might be your phone, and something you are might be a FaceID or fingerprint.

If we rely on a single one of these factors, your account may be easily broken into. For example, if a website incorrectly stored your password and it leaked to the public, that factor could be used elsewhere. Similarly, phones with FaceID can be opened by holding the phone up to your face.

When we use more than one factor, an account becomes much more secure. A bad actor might get your password, but if you have an authenticator app, they would need your password and your phone to get into your account. More work for the bad actor means you are more secure.

If a device is ever taken from you, sold, lost, or given away, you'd not want that person to have access to everything that is currently on your device. Encryption means that anyone who has access to the locked version of your device cannot see any of the files that you have.

" If law enforcement have your phone, it is legal for them to unlock your phone using your fingerprint or your face. However, if your phone has a numerical password on it, it is illegal for them to compel you to tell them the code access your phone." - twincities.fyi

Often you hear that this is something to turn on and off when you're at a protest, but law enforcement doesn't only exist at a protest.

If a device is taken, and it has been encrypted, the only way to get into that device is by guessing the password. For a 4 digit pin, there are 10,000 possible guesses, for a 6 digit pin, that number jumps to 1,000,000. Phone companies and hackers are in a perpetual arms race around password cracking, but you never want to make it easy for them, those 2 extra numbers make that guessing process significantly harder.

Every picture you take when you have location data enabled on your camera puts a bit of metadata about where the picture was taken in the photo file.

If someone then finds that picture, even if it's an indoor image with no way of telling visually where you are, that metadata (called exif data) can be used to know exactly where the photo was taken. This could leak

• your address
• your friends addresses
• the fact that you're not near your address
• etc.

If an account has been hacked and either the passwords or password hashes have been leaked, that account can now be compromised by anyone who can find that leaked data.

This is also where password managers come into play. If one account is hacked, and you're using that same password elsewhere, someone can now access more than just that one account. That password manager makes it easy to not have to think about all those different passwords, and makes switching to a new secure password easy.

The web will become significantly less cluttered, allowing you to see what's real and what's an ad more easily.

Privacy badger helps remove the ability for you to be as easily finger printed while using the internet.