The best way to stay private and secure is to learn about the technologies you're using. Just getting a bunch of plugins and using a different browser doesn't mean that anything is better, unless you know what it's doing and you're sure it's working then you're just taking it on faith.
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This is a thought experiment don't get you panties in a twist
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Childishly naive.
This is unnecessary
Didn't Snowden say once that he uses like 6 VPN's? lol
VPV was already mentioned I didn't bother.
Stalman dosen't browse the web, he has a server that fetches web pages and mail them to him as text files, lol.
That is pretty hardcore.
Dude please. You are still in the webkit era and pretending to be somekind of expert.
Seems like creating and destroying web browsing VMs an easy way around this.
That only shows basic stuff and uses some outdated data.
If you wanna dig deeper: http://www.browserleaks.com/
To prevent your metadata from being harvested at all, I would say using direct leased lines with strong end to end encryption and an air-gapped connection to the internet at a dedicated site, then you can communicate privately using on-time pad encryption to whoever. Don't use google, facebook, amazon, or apple. The air gapped connection to the internet can be a 4G connection paid for in cash etc...
Getting firefox and some privacy add-ons is not going to protect you, unfortunately. Start thinking at the level of the IP address that you are leasing from your provider. What name is it registered under? Where is the physical hardware? Is it secure? Did you download an ISO file for your operating system or did you compile it yourself? Just some food for thought.
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Uhm. How will some specific routing/connection/hardware/whatever prevent metadata from being harvested dude? What difference will it make where the data is coming out from when it is full of your metadata? Your advice is to start from the opposite direction. "Get a nice proxy but no need to touch your cookies!" If you send a letter with your ID in it, an anonymous mailman wont make it disappear. It is still there.
You're welcome, I'm always happy to help and am passionate about security and privacy so if I can help people secure themselves I'm content
I haven't heard anything bad through out my reading, but due to being google I'd ASSUME (key word there) that it'd be compromised. Being cloud based AND google I think it's only fair to assume since its them and a free service they are taking advantage of it through data mining peoples work.
So with that said, maybe consider LibreOffice if you don't need MS Office for work or something? Its pretty good, nearly a clone even but some things are definitely a bit different - nothing the average user would have an issue with though
I'd like to point out to you and others that he did say things that the AVERAGE user can do (quoted below). So this means things that aren't ridiculously difficult or tedious to configure, starting out just getting people to do the basic things I suggested will be a good start but I agree its definitely not the end all but it is a start and a step in the right direction.
For more advanced privacy and security guys, I'd absolutely love to see a detailed and in depth advanced or even intermediate guide on privacy and security as I would love to learn more and it'd help others too
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Keeping internet organizations from spying on you isn't too bad, but you'd have to use obscure search engines, give up basically every social network, etc. Basically avoid anything you don't host yourself.
It's keeping the NSA out of your hair that's a bigger problem.
And being able to keep everything from tracking you, while also still using a computer for useful tasks, like streaming movies with Netfilx or whatever, is much easier said than done.
Spy agencies like the NSA have tapped deep sea cables and own the backbone of the internet. A faraday cage in your room is irrelevant.
Someone trying to hack your wifi, sure, but a faraday cage isn't touching the pwn the NSA has.
This post is goot.
Knowledge is empowering. It's not power in an absolute sense, and you cannot stay completely private and secure on the internet, so I would personally say the best way to stay more private, and more secure than average .... but indeed, knowledge is empowering.
As far as my recommendations, learn about how computers work, learn networking, the OSI model, TCP/IP, cryptography, the fundamentals of confidentiality, integrity, availability, basically spend a lot of time educating yourself. Once you have knowledge, you can empower yourself in your computing and recognize how to be safer and more private on the internet than the average person.
The rub is, as has been alluded to, you can indeed be secure and private by turning off your computer, digging a hole and burying it, but then you have no availability. Unfortunately there is no such thing as complete privacy and security in the digital age we live in.
Thanks Obama