Three Easy Ways to Enhance Your Online Privacy (Op-Ed)

As the Internet has exploded with information sharing, it has diluted the privacy that we cherish in our offline lives. Here are three apps that can help you bring privacy to your online life.
Before the information age, our views and personal lives were often enough kept behind closed doors, drawn curtains and confined to our communities. With so many relationships made digital and international, a lot of what we share today is no longer obscure. It is usually a Google search away.
Our personal lives, as we volunteer them to our friends and communities on social media, are stored and mined by corporations such as Facebook and Google. Key identifiers about us such as our email, country, purchasing habits, interests and political views etc., are packaged and sold by advertising agencies to the highest bidder.
Add to that the fact that governments around the world, in particular the U. S., are investing billions to turn the Internet into a the largest spy machine in history, and many are left to conclude that – as the saying goes – privacy is dead.
The Snowden revelations, as shocking as they have been, have left many feeling helpless and thus detached from the issue of privacy, while at the same time angering many activists and IT developers – a feeling reflected in a growing wave of consumer products focused particularly on giving users control over their online presence.
The following three companies offer password and identity manager apps that are as easy to use as any piece of software. They each go a long way toward giving you a level of privacy closer to that of your own home, with the benefits of the internet’s global reach.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-04-28.