Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

I am often asked by individuals how they can better implement Data and Digital Sovereignty in their home and whānau lives. Here are some immediate steps you can take that will protect your privacy and save you money.

Primary audience is non-technically literate people using a Windows computer, who want to save money and increase significantly privacy.

1. Download and install FireFox internet browner https://www.firefox.com/en-US/download/windows/ .Import all of your bookmarks and feeds into it. You can create an account to sign into, but I recommend that you don’t. The account details are stored in America. Or you could use Brave https://brave.com/download/ I find that FireFox looks very similar to Chrome.
2. Select DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. It is much more private than Chrome and others.
3. Remove Google Chrome (or your old browser) once you have FireFox installed and working well.
4. Use the mask image on the right hand side of FireFox, select it to have anonymous browsing.
5. Stop using Gmail and other free emails. If you can not afford to register your own domain name and use a New Zealand web host, the I would suggest using http://www.protonmail.com
6. If you use Google services, use the Privacy Check tools and disestablish access to accounts you no longer use.
7. If you pay for a Microsoft Office, you can use a free alternative called Open Office. Once you are familiar with Open Office, you can cancel your subscription with Microsoft.
8. Turn off OneDrive so that your files do not automatically get synced to servers around the world. Then consider an offline back up system.
9. Delete all files from online storage such as Google.
10. Delete all files and your personal information you are not comfortable being public from social media.