We all love our parents and grandparents but most of the times they have really poor internet hygiene. We can’t blame them to be honest as they did not have most of the technologies we have now back then. Take mobile phones for example, 15 years back they were just solid bricks you can sometimes use as paperweights or even hammer a nail to the wall and you were also able to use it to make calls and send messages. But now, they are like mini computers and they can literally do most of the things we do with our personal computers.
There have been many situations where I have seen what my mum does with technology and cued the “Oh No!” music (the one from Instagram posts that is quite popular these days) in my mind. Finally, I took it up on myself to do some spring cleaning with her PC and mobile and install few things that makes her more (if not the most) secure and private in the digital world.
Lets face it everyone browses a lot these days. If we see something or hear something our curiosity wins out and makes us browse for it and that’s why I chose to do browser extensions first. Here’s a list of the extensions I have made my mum use and would also recommend to my friends. Keep in mind the ones listed below are done so with FireFox in mind, and most of them are available for other browsers as well or if not the exact same add-on at least something that does a similar job. Also, I am in no way promoting these extensions and these are just my suggestions based on my personal experience using them.
1. LastPass:
Password managers are generally the first thing I recommend someone use, mainly because we are humans and we are lazy (if you argue that you are not you should still use a password manager). We tend to use almost in many cases not so strong passwords and do also repeat passwords for many accounts. Having a password manager helps us generate new passwords that are long and strong, store them and also syncs them across all our devices. I have liked using LastPass for a while and I think that it is a very good password manager which is easy to use, has a good UI, and many other features.
2. HTTPs Everywhere:
HTTP is old, unencrypted and everything is clear text. Hence, we use HTTPs and there are some sites that still use or offer an insecure HTTP version of their website. This extension forces the sites to use HTTPs, simple as that.
3. No Script:
Well this extension blocks all the scripts in a website and prevents them from executing. This means if there are any spam links or anything malicious it won’t get executed. The downside here is websites now generally use a lot scripts to make them look stunning and function properly, so this extension may cause some sites that rely heavily on scripts to look different or even break them until you allow the scripts to run on these sites (do it only if you absolutely trust the site). So yeah! using this extension increases security and as the saying goes ‘with increased security comes decreased or pain in the you-know-what levels of usability’.
4. Ghostery and Adblocker Ultimate:
Ads are the revenue stream for almost all the websites out there and most of them are staying alive because of the revenue they get from ads. But they can be a huge hindrance for our browsing experience and some ads are just excuses to get an adware or other type of malwares installed on your device. That is exactly why I use not one but two ad-blockers, Ghostery and Adblocker Ultimate. Initially Adblocker Ultimate was performing well but I noticed that it doesn’t always block all the ads and adding Ghostery on top of it fixes that for me (in this case my mum). Additionally, Ghostery even blocks all those trackers the websites have to track your browsing habits to offer the so called ‘Tailored browsing experience’.
5. Multi-Account Containers:
This is the best extension on this list in my opinion, what it does is generally allow you to create small containers and you can categorize your browser tabs with these containers. Since the tabs are container-ed, any cookies, sessions and other tab activity are segmented from the other tabs in other containers. Isn’t that wonderful? You can find more about it on the official page.
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This is just a small list of extensions which I would say are a bare minimum of add-ons to keep you and your folks as safe as possible in the huge universe called the internet. Plus I also did not in anyway try to include five extensions on the dot, it just happened. Safe browsing!
