The wealthy treat their personal information as something worth protecting, and yours deserves the same consideration.
Siara shares five accessible tools for people who want to become harder to track and more deliberate about who gets access to their lives. Drawing on years of using privacy tools herself, she explains what makes them worth adopting, which features matter, and how to get started without spending a fortune or making your daily life more complicated.
She also revisits a sobering exchange in Congress when Mark Zuckerberg was asked to disclose details about his own private life. It’s a reminder to reconsider how much access we’ve come to accept as the price of being online.
You have more say in that exchange than you might think.
Your personal information is worth protecting, regardless of how much money you have.
Travel is a useful time to review the networks you join, the apps you download, and the permissions you grant.
A VPN can mask your IP address and add protection between your device and the VPN provider, but it doesn’t stop every kind of tracking.
Reusing passwords puts other accounts at risk when one set of credentials leaks. A password generator makes unique passwords easier to maintain.
Look for an encrypted password manager with password generation, autofill, breach alerts, and passkey support.
Email aliases let you receive messages without giving every company your primary address, and you can disable an alias when it starts attracting unwanted mail.
A privacy-focused browser can block known trackers and restrict tracking cookies. Setting it as your default helps make those protections part of your routine.
Incognito mode mainly limits what a browsing session leaves in your local history. Websites can still collect information about your visit.
Data removal services handle requests to covered data brokers and check for returning listings. California residents also have a free state-run option through DROP.
Siara recommends starting with a password manager, then adding tools that address the other ways your information is exposed.
