The new academic year is starting soon, and it is time to remind students how to protect themselves from data thieves. These data thieves steal personal data and use it for profit. The good thing is, though, there are ways to protect their data from these thieves. Students are often at the mercy of school administrators and teachers who continue to put their data at risk, like using Facebook for classes! Students need to do something about it, but how?
First thing is to compartmentalize. Students must learn how to separate their academic data from their personal data, just like how professionals often separate their work from personal. Students must separate their school email from their personal email. Schools often provide email services via Google or Microsoft - two of the biggest surveillance companies. Do not mix school provided email with personal email.
These is no lack of privacy-preserving email service that offers free tiers. With limited budget, students should be encouraged to ditch their free Gmail and/or Microsoft accounts in favor of privacy-preserving services. Two privacy-preserving email services, Proton.me and Tutanota, both offer a free tier. Both these services also offer their own applications (desktop and mobile), which is great for compartmentalization. Proton.me is closer to the offerings from Google and Microsoft in that it comes bundled with calendar and online storage, and it even comes with a password manager, and a VPN service - all for free.
After email, messaging is the next online tool that is important to students. The gold standard is Signal Messaging app - a **free** cross-platform, fully end-to-end encrypted service that is run by a not-for-profit foundation. Yes, no venture capitalists, no stockholders, no surveillance-based business models! Students might be more familiar with Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, whatever is the flavor of the month from Google, and Telegram, but these are all surveillance based (yep, whilst they may have end-to-end encryption for messages, but the metadata, i.e., who you are chatting with, when, from where, etc., are collected). You also have iMessage, which is like Signal, but is run by Apple, and is only available on Apple devices; and also Threema, which is a paid-service. For messaging, the TL;DR is, use Signal using your preferred alias (so you won't share your mobile phone number). Incidentally, Signal also provides video group chats, an alternative to Google Hangout, Microsoft Teams, or even Zoom.
As for online productivity tools, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 provides students with very little option. The only way to use them is to compartmentalize by using a separate profile (for Safari) or container (for Firefox) for school, and other online activities. For personal use, you can get a free NextCloud account, which offers essentially the same features, and more.
Using browser containers (Firefox) or profiles (Safari) help in separating your school account from your personal account. Notice that Chrome is not recommended - it is one of the primary surveillance tools of Google (Android is another). Stay away from Chrome, and if you can, stay away from Chromium-based browsers as well. If your browser supports add-ons or extensions, get UBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to help protect you.
Lastly, try to avoid mobile applications, specially from surveillance-based social media services, e.g., Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, to name a few. Use your browser to access instead, just make sure that each runs on its own profile or container. The same can be said of other websites, including online shopping sites, which are also notorious for surveillance.
Today, we cannot afford to allow surveillance-based companies to devour our data, use it to train their generative-AI and other AI models, and then profit from it! Protect your data, keep it private - you will thank me in the future.