Who and how are we being monitored? How to turn off location data collection and delete it

Imagine that the walls of your house have become transparent. And everyone around you can see your every step and hear your every word. Represented? Now understand that this is how it really is. And decide how to live with it further.

This summer, an instructive story happened in one of the suburbs of New York. Michelle Catala-no, a housewife and freelance journalist, decided to buy a pressure cooker. And her husband just at that very moment needed a new backpack. They did what probably everyone would do in their place: they started looking for options on the Internet. Michelle searched from home, her husband from work. A short time later, three black minivans drove up to their house. Several groups of armed people walked around the building with different sides, taking aim at windows and doors. After which the unexpected guests invited the hosts to slowly walk out onto the threshold with their hands raised.

The guests turned out to be employees of the counter-terrorism unit. It was not difficult for the intelligence services to find out that simultaneous searches on Google for a pressure cooker and a backpack were carried out, albeit with different computers, but members of the same family. This was enough to send a capture group: a few months earlier there had been explosions in Boston. The organizers of the terrorist attack, the Tsarnaev brothers, made bombs from pressure cookers and carried them to the marathon in backpacks...

Big Brother's Eye

This story is not about the vigilance of the special services, it is about privacy any of us. A life that no longer exists. Any search query, status on a social network or downloaded file is not a secret and sooner or later can be used against us. I asked a friend in a chat where to buy Nurofen without a prescription, he’s a drug addict. I downloaded a song - a computer pirate. In the heat of the moment, he wrote something on Facebook about a careless Tajik janitor—a racist. I decided to surprise my beloved and went to study the website of a sex shop - maniac.

“Dignity does not exist by default; we develop it throughout our lives.”

Edward Snowden's revelations leave no doubt: intelligence agencies know (or can find out) what we say and do on the Internet. The same data can certainly be obtained by large corporations and capable hackers. And if they want, they can all detect what we are protecting from the Internet. Arsenal spyware so large that stealing photos or documents stored there from any computer connected to the Internet is a matter of technology, and no antivirus software will be an obstacle.

And there are also surveillance cameras that are equipped in offices, entrances, and metro stations. Information from them flows to computers also connected to the Internet. And how, in this case, can we be sure that no one is watching us at this very second? By the way, video monitors for monitoring children, which wealthy parents love to install at home, and built-in cameras on laptops can also be used by unknown “well-wishers.” George Orwell's prophecy has come true: Big Brother is watching us. Listens to us, reads, studies correspondence, preferences, contacts. How to live with this?

All-seeing "Prism"

On June 6, 2013, the Guardian and Washington Post published reports about the government's Prism intelligence program. Provided information to journalists former employee Agencies national security USA Edward Snowden. According to already confirmed data, the world's largest companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and YouTube, actively collaborated with the intelligence services. All of them reported information about their users not only in the United States, but also in other countries around the world. Thus, our e-mail messages and publications in in social networks, contact lists, documents stored on your computer, and audio and video files. The Prism program also authorized wiretapping and recording of telephone conversations.

"We do not care"

“Private life is, first of all, the need for one’s own space,” explains clinical psychologist Yakov Kochetkov. – It is inherent not only in humans, but also in many social animals. Even among a troop of monkeys, there are social masks that everyone must wear. It is all the more important to have your own space where you can take off the mask and at least be yourself for a while. Invasion of privacy deprives us of this opportunity and inevitably causes stress.”

The stress was really serious. Western society is indignant, lawsuits have been filed in American courts, President Obama is forced to publicly explain that the US government is not monitoring everyone, but only those suspected of terrorism, but explanations are of little help. It is all the more surprising that in Russia, where Edward Snowden took refuge, his revelations did not cause any particular reaction. The Internet public does not sound the alarm bell, human rights activists do not prepare lawsuits, and sociologists do not measure the degree of citizens' dissatisfaction, since there is nothing to measure. Does this mean that we don't care about privacy?

Not at all, psychoanalyst Tatyana Rebeko is sure. The point is the peculiarities of the national character: we live in constant stress, feeling that our privacy is being violated at every step. And this happens because the “privacy zone” of a Russian person is much wider than, say, that of Americans. “They can freely communicate on almost any topic, except their own intimate life. You see, we are reluctant to even share the names of our favorite films and books with strangers,” notes Tatyana Rebeko. But for this same reason, information about total control over the Internet does not add anything new to our picture of the world.

Another explanation is the history of our country. “In our country, problems of intimate life were discussed at party meetings,” recalls Yakov Kochetkov. – Several generations lived in a totalitarian state that did not allow any private life. Not long ago, a friend of mine bought an apartment, began to renovate it, and discovered “bugs” left over from Soviet times. This did not cause any surprise. We are too used to being watched to worry about confirmation of this fact.”

How to become “opaque”?

Methods to counter computer espionage are well known. Do not open email messages from unfamiliar addresses, do not click on dubious links, do not download files to your computer if you are not 100% sure of their origin and content, create two mailboxes and use one for personal correspondence, and the second for registration on the Internet. But the main thing is not to reveal too much about yourself.

“The information you provide about yourself on the Internet should be treated like a tattoo,” advises psychologist Yakov Kochetkov. – It can look very beautiful on a young body. But it would be nice to think about how the tattoo will look many years later, when the skin and muscles become less elastic. In other words, you need to be mature enough to set privacy boundaries with a clear understanding of possible consequences own openness."

Regain dignity

“We knew that everything was under the hood”, “just think, it’s news”... There is a certain ostentatious cynicism in such a reaction. By resorting to it, we unconsciously deny the value that is grossly violated by the very fact of surveillance. And this value is personal dignity, says psychologist Evgeny Osin: “Dignity does not exist by default. A newborn has no privacy: he is completely dependent on his mother, who wipes his drool and changes his diapers. Dignity develops with age, but only on the condition that parents help the child gradually expand his personal space. And if they continue to wipe his drool at both 10 and 15 years old, they are depriving him of such an opportunity. The same thing happens when the functions of a strict but caring parent are taken over by the state or social group. A person remains a social individual and does not develop further. He plays successfully social role, but has almost no sphere of his own, does not become a person.”

It would seem that young people who have not experienced a totalitarian state should value privacy more. But young Internet users in Russia not only do not go to rallies against surveillance, but with surprising carelessness continue to post information online that should absolutely not be shared. Recently I came across a post on Facebook by a young niece of my friends. Having received new passport, she posted its first page - with photo, number, signature and all other data. Many girls (and even boys) post nude photos of themselves - to increase self-esteem, find a partner, and show off their uninhibitedness. “The dignity of a person does not directly depend on the influence of the environment. And a change in external circumstances does not mean automatic changes in us, states Evgeniy Osin. “The influence of adults, who pass on to the child ways of dealing with the world, is much more significant.”

Respect your shortcomings

But what about the fact that a lot about us is already known? to strangers, with whom we did not intend to “get closer” at all? Give up the Internet altogether? According to the British The Daily Mail (whose information, however, always requires careful verification), 11 million users were deleted in Lately their Accounts on Facebook - precisely because their private life was available to strangers. Well, the next step is to give up your phone (they will be wiretapped) and your computer (they will be hacked). Then hoods, goggles and masks will be used - so that security cameras do not recognize us...

“One should not overestimate the importance of one’s own person,” believes Yakov Kochetkov. - Quantity emails and publications number in the billions, and no intelligence agency reads them all. Algorithms for viewing messages react to keywords. And if you are not planning a terrorist attack or discussing the supply of heroin, your conversations are unlikely to be of interest to the state. Therefore, concern for privacy should not develop into paranoia: no matter how wide the possibilities of surveillance, you cannot always monitor everyone, and there is no point in this.”

Tatyana Rebeko has her own answer to the question of how not to be afraid of invasion of privacy. “Live in such a way that there is nothing to be afraid of,” she believes. No, none of us are angels, but the matter is completely different. “I have often met people who have an inner core,” says Tatyana Rebeko. - Their main secret that they are open to the world and treat themselves with great respect, including their own shortcomings. We are the authors of our lives, and everyone has bad pages in it. The main thing is to recognize that our life is not limited to them. In this case, any revelations of past secrets make the keyhole peepers look stupid, not those they are spying on.”

The penetration of electronics into all areas of our lives haunts everyone more people: they choose “safe” instant messengers, cover up the cameras on their laptops, and when meeting with business partners, they take out the battery from their phones - you never know, they might be wiretapped. Who is watching us, how and for what purpose, Artem Cheranev, general director of the Internet provider INSIS, told the resource.

The other day, WhatsApp messenger told its users: “The messages you send to this chat and calls are now protected by encryption.” “Wow, how great! Now the secret services won’t know anything about me,” apparently, this should have been the response. Artem Cheranev has been working in communications for almost 20 years. He talked about how intelligence services cooperate with operators, who can become the object of total control, and why an ordinary citizen can use any gadgets and any software.

From almost every second acquaintance I periodically hear: “I don’t use this messenger (this device, this email) because it’s easy to hack.” I always say in response: “Darling, you can use everything! Because who needs you?

In fact technical capabilities allow you to hack, listen and track all devices on which the software is installed. I can’t say anything about smartphones, laptops and other gadgets - I don’t know for sure. But, for example, I heard a story: when for one power structure We ordered three UPS (uninterruptible power supply systems) and checked them before installation, it turned out that microphones were soldered into all three “UPES”. Moreover, there is a suspicion that they were soldered there on the assembly line in China, although it would seem, what kind of nonsense...

In general, any printer (provided it has a microphone installed and the required bit is included in the driver code) can collect all voice traffic from your office and forward it somewhere. Technically, all this is feasible.

In addition, there is such a thing called the “system of operational investigative measures” (SORM). Within the framework of SORM, each telecom operator, in order not to lose its license, is obliged to install at its node appropriate equipment that is certified Federal service security and is used by it. This, relatively speaking, is a piece of hardware that exists parallel to the operator’s central routers, through which all traffic passes. I emphasize - all of it: Internet traffic, voice traffic, whatever.

That is, in fact, the special services do not have to connect to every microphone or sit in headphones and listen to all our flood. In order to track something, it is often enough for them to turn to their own “traffic collector” and absolutely freely, in remote access, from their terminals in the conditional basements of Lubyanka on the required feature traffic is isolated and analyzed. It's not difficult at all. Moreover, within the framework of the same SORM, drives are installed that mirror all traffic for a certain period, that is, what is needed can be pulled out not just online, but also from the archives. Accordingly, in order to follow someone, you need to put in much less effort than the average person imagines. No satellites or secret drones are needed for this.

But, on the other hand, all negotiations, correspondence, some photographs begin to be interesting only in two cases: if a person becomes a major media or political figure and the general public wants to see how he lives, what he eats, who he sleeps with. The second moment is when a person begins to imagine some kind of real threat to the state: here we are already talking about terrorism, the distribution of child pornography, extremism or things related to the distribution of drugs or calls for suicide. These are the main parameters that are quite actively monitored by the relevant structures: department “K” in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and IT departments in the FSB. Until a person falls into either the first or the second category, he is of no interest to the FSB, the KGB, the CIA, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or Putin personally. This must be understood.

However, as soon as you approach the categories that are of interest to the intelligence services (I provided an exhaustive list), then at least use a rotary telephone: they will track you, listen to you, and watch you. Let me give you a simple example: in operational filming of operations to uncover gangs of drug dealers, it is clearly visible that these guys use completely ancient push-button phones without Internet access, such as Nokia 3310, constantly change handsets and SIM cards, and communicate with conventional signals. But they are covered.

“If a person comes to the attention of the FSB and Directorate “K” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he can use either an iPhone or a rotary phone - he will be tracked, listened to and monitored.”

There are also, for example, special programs, which are aimed at recognizing specific words. How they are used and with what regularity, of course, no one will tell me. But I know for sure that such technologies exist and, moreover, they recognize not only words, but also intonations and determine a person’s emotional state.

And, of course, intelligence agencies always work closely with telecom operators. In our practice, there have been several requests from law enforcement: they once "developed" a hacker who hacked bank accounts. There was also a case where a distributor of child pornography was caught. Recently they busted a terrorist cell that was calling here, here, for jihad. Such cooperation can be in the most different forms- starting from gaining access to IP addresses and ending with the fact that under the guise of employees of the operator company, imitating some preventive work At the site, intelligence agencies install their equipment.

But all this is done only by official request, there should be regulations for this competent authorities. This doesn’t happen just by calling: “Hey, hello, give me access.” If this suddenly happens and pops up, the operator runs the risk of getting hit in the head so much that it will close and never open again.

I’ve been in this business for 17 years: in my memory, in all such incidents, when we were approached, it was about really bad guys. For someone to say: “But there’s a deputy living there (or, let’s say, mere mortal Ivan Ivanov) - we want to look at him and smell him,” I swear, this has never happened. So all this paranoia that we are constantly being watched is complete bullshit.

Every person on the planet can be subject to government surveillance. Read our article about how and why we are being watched and what methods they use.

Thanks to information received from intelligence officer Edward Snowden, it became known that the US National Security Agency wiretapped the heads of 35 countries.

In addition to government officials, ordinary residents are also subject to wiretapping.

For example, New York resident Michelle Catalano and her husband, who wanted to buy a pressure cooker and a backpack via the Internet, became victims of intelligence surveillance. The seizure service that arrived at the house asked the couple to slowly leave the house, thereby greatly frightening them.

The reason for this behavior on the part of the intelligence services was the terrorist attack in Boston, which happened a few months earlier. The terrorists made bombs using pressure cookers and carried them to the scene of the tragedy in backpacks.

And this case is not the only one that proves that any human actions can easily be tracked by special units.

All anti-terrorism methods, which, in fact, must be properly coordinated, are very chaotic. And innocent people very often fall under surveillance.

According to Edward Snowden, there are a lot of programs designed to spy on people. One of the most famous is Prism, which cooperates with such well-known computer companies as Microsoft, Google and Facebook, and cellular operators.

They listen to conversations, read correspondence, view photos, videos and Internet queries of any person who uses it. In other words, almost every inhabitant of the planet falls under surveillance.

Even if you turn off your phone or computer, special programs will allow you to turn them on remotely and monitor any movements of a person, record his conversations and actions.

It is possible to escape such surveillance only by removing the battery from the phone. But, for example, such a popular phone as the iPhone does not have such a function.

The public organization EPIC has learned that the US NSA has created a list of special words for surveillance.

By typing a query into Google “Drug Enforcement Administration,” the DEA automatically adds the person to the list of those who sell them and begins to pay Special attention all his activities on the Internet.

By asking the question in a chat: “Where can I buy Nurofen without a prescription?”, you can easily get on the list of potential drug addicts.

Being the most harmless person in the world, the employee who wants to identify the attacker in you will do so.

If you want, you can find fault with anything. So the question arises: what to do to avoid surveillance?

What you definitely shouldn’t do is throw your phone and computer from the sixth floor.

You need to try to monitor your behavior on the Internet: what pages you view, to whom and what you write, what files you download.

Of course, you can install special programs, encrypt personal data, surf the Internet under anonymous profiles, but perhaps this will attract the attention of the intelligence services.

Even the most professional hackers fell into the hands of intelligence services, despite their ciphers and codes.

By the way, interesting fact. Edward Snowden once asked Russian President Vladimir Putin whether Russian intelligence services were monitoring their residents. The president's answer was negative.

All Russian services are under the control of the state, and no one will allow them to conduct indiscriminate surveillance in the country.

Take it for yourself and tell your friends!

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Over time, batteries mobile devices lose their effectiveness and fail, but how quickly this happens depends on our approach to their daily use. Are you sure you know how to charge your smartphone correctly? Read on for expert advice on this matter.

Modern smartphones know where their owners are and store data about the places visited. We'll show you how to prevent your device from collecting them.

You may have never thought about it, but if your smartphone is equipped with a GPS module and you have not changed the geolocation settings, then the gadget remembers the places you visit and records them in a special journal. It doesn’t matter whether you use an iPhone or any Android smartphone.

You yourself give permission to collect such statistics by accepting the terms of the user agreement.

Apple and Google explain this behavior by saying that the information collected is used to provide relevant results when working with their services. For example, iOS uses location data for weather reports, directions in maps, and geotagging photos. IN Android history locations helps Google suggest optimal routes and more accurate results search.

How to view your location history

To view a history of recently visited places on iOS, go to Settings → Privacy → Location Services → System Services → Frequently Visited Places. Here, in the “History” section, the places you visit most often will be shown. You can open each entry and view the coordinates on the map.

On Android there are also corresponding statistics. You can view it in the “Location” → “Location History” section.

In addition, the last visited places are displayed in the web version Google Maps no matter what device you use Google services on. More detailed statistics are collected here: places are shown as points on the map, and there is a division by date. If the feature is enabled, you can find out exactly where you were on a given day.

How to turn off location data collection and delete it

Despite companies' assurances that data will be used anonymously, you can prevent this kind of interference in your life. It's quite simple to do this:

• On iOS you need to turn off the “Frequently visited places” toggle switch in the system services section of the same name. There is also a “Clear history” button, which will delete all data.
• On Android the required toggle switch is located in the “Location history” section of the geolocation settings. To erase data, you need to click the “Delete location history” button and confirm the deletion.

After these manipulations, your smartphone will no longer remember where you go and will not store the history of the last places you visited.

The security of computer data and ours, the user's, is measured by the absence of viruses - Trojans, worms and other nasty malicious programs designed to slightly or seriously spoil the lives of you and me. However, the last couple of years have shown that viruses of the past, and even the present, are a child's 8-bit squeak on the Super Mario lawn compared to what really threatens each of us.

Well, what can a virus really do? Force the owner of a computer to download, after parting with his hard-earned fifty dollars, a licensed antivirus? Reinstall operating system? Change passwords on Facebook? Fix a hole in Wi-Fi? Run around to offices engaged in data recovery? Scared! All this can be solved and is not scary.

It’s much worse that all that seemingly harmless information that we share every day with curious friends, boastful colleagues and annoying relatives can end up in the hands of criminals at any moment. Who, how and why is constantly watching us and how to prevent this vile fact - this is what we will talk about today.

Would you like some cookies?

Smartphones can enter the coordinates of the point where the photo was taken into the system fields of a photo file. When publishing a photo on social networks, online resources can automatically match the coordinates and provide the exact address of the shooting location.

Facebook and email have become for many integral part every morning. But think about it for a minute! After all, you and I constantly send so many intimate details to the World Wide Web own life that no spy is needed. It’s enough to record the actions we perform on our devices 24 hours a day: which club and with whom Sveta visited Facebook for the fifth time that night, what size shoes Alexey bought and how much, when Irina is going to a conference in Poland, which kids club Sergei took his son, at which metro station Katya got off, what GPS coordinates Andrey assigned the tag home sweet home.

And who will write down all this seemingly useless nonsense, you ask? There is such a James Bond, and it is also installed on your computer. This is our own carelessness, hiding under the cute name “cookie” or cookies.

“C is for cookies and it’s good enough for me,” sang the cute blue plush Gingerbread Monster in the Sesame Street educational program, not even suspecting that he would serve as an ideological inspiration for the creators of the first “cookies,” Netscape Communications. Old geeks may remember that before Google Chrome, before Internet Explorer, before Opera and, of course, Safari, there was a browser like Netscape Navigator, the “grandfather” of modern Mozilla Firefox, and it was the most common until the mid-90s. It was Netscape that first introduced support for cookies. They were invented in order to collect information about visitors and store it not on the company’s overcrowded servers, but on the hard drives of the visitors themselves. To begin with, the cookies recorded basic information: it checked whether the visitor had already been to the Netscape site or was visiting for the first time. Later, programmers realized that cookies can be trained to record almost any information about the user that he himself wants to leave on the Internet. They gathered, of course, without the knowledge of the peaceful visitors.

Imperceptibly introduced into Netscape Navigator in 1994, and into Internet Explorer in 1995, the “cookies” remained unknown workers until 1996, when they were mentioned, thanks to investigative journalism, the entire respectable Internet public found out, and an international scandal erupted. The public was shocked: the brother, while not very big, but still the brother, it turns out, was watching all the actions every minute and, moreover, recording everything. The creators' statements that all data is stored securely (namely, on each user's own computer) and cannot be used by attackers were little reassuring. But it soon became clear that these statements were not reliable.

As it turned out, when great desire an attacker can intercept a cookie file sent to the site that created this work of computer culinary art, and, pretending to be a user, act on the site at his own discretion. This is how emails, accounts in online stores, banks, etc. are hacked. But, let's admit, this is not so easy to do.

Moreover, despite the declared anonymity of cookies, even marketers themselves admit that the classification of users, that is, you and me, has reached perfection. Need all owners of Safari 25-35 summer age, male, with a Citibank card, graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute, unmarried, suffering from myopia, wearing long hair, fans of the series Star Wars and Nickelback groups, with an annual income of $50-100 thousand, frequent visitors to the Rolling Stone club, living near the Novogireevo metro station? Please, these three people.

Who is buying this information? How will he want to use it? Our paranoia pours herself a glass of something with orange juice and refuses to answer this question. The mass scale of the phenomenon has long gone beyond any acceptable limits.

An experiment conducted by the Wall Street Journal in 2010 found that the 50 most popular websites in America installed their names on test computer 3180 spy files (the “cookies” we have already mentioned and their younger advanced brothers “beacons”, or “beacons”), literally recording everything for serene users. Only less than a third of the files were related to the operation of the sites themselves - recording passwords, remembering the preferred section to start with next time, and so on. The rest existed only to learn more about a particular visitor and sell the information collected about him at a higher price. The only site that did not install a single unpleasant program was Wikipedia.

In addition to cookies, as we have already said, there are also “beacons”. They do not send themselves to users, but are placed directly on the site as a small picture or pixel. “Beacons” are capable of remembering data entered from the keyboard, recognizing the location of the mouse cursor, and much more. Comparing them together with the “cookies”, we get a picture worthy of a paranoid’s nest.

Using the Privacychoice.com service, you can find out exactly who is monitoring your actions, whether only general or also personal information is recorded, how long it is stored and whether its anonymity is guaranteed. Unfortunately, the unpleasant statistics were collected only for the main American sites.

What can this information be used for?

Fig 1. Approved list of words, phrases and expressions, the use of which may entail increased attention to your actions on the Global Network

Intelligencer Mark Zuckerberg

The American public, unlike ours, is not asleep and, having caught wind that the DHS is furiously spying on ordinary people, created an organization opposing this with the modest name EPIC. In one of their counter-investigations, EPIC employees managed to find out that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had developed a certain list of surveillance activating words. You type, say, into Google the innocent phrase “Guadalajara, Mexico.” And the Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately includes you in the list of potential bin Ladens and begins to record all your actions on the Internet, just in case. Suddenly you decide to blow something up, you never know...

A complete list of extremely strange words, many of which we use in online communication every day, can be found on pages 20-23 of this document.

In addition, as EPIC found out, the vast majority of at least some significant domains, such as Facebook, Twitter, news email sites, cooperate with all well-known services security, giving them access to correspondence, personal data, location and even appearance users without a court order. According to one of the MIA employees, for every real suspect there are a dozen suspects on completely unfounded grounds. It is not clear how data transfer occurs in such a situation, how secure it is, and how the received information is disposed of if it is no longer needed.

Another blatant fact of the introduction of Johnsons, Petersons and Sidorsons into computers under the auspices of the fight against piracy was made public in the United States in July of this year. The fact is that the US Recording and Motion Picture Association has developed a project according to which providers will automatically report cases of media piracy. We are, of course, against piracy, but such an initiative means surveillance of users. The punishments seem especially strange: from soul-saving conversations and limiting the speed of the Internet channel to banning access to two hundred major websites in the world.

Even if you have a separate computer for work, from which you, like a decent paranoid person, never access the World Wide Web, we hasten to disappoint you. There are ways to monitor it even bypassing “cookies”, “beacons”, words from terrorist list and so on. After all, you regularly update your antivirus anyway, right? What kind of signatures are sent to your computer? An antivirus creator who is interested (either by the government or by third parties) can, thanks to his program, search for anything on your hard drive. All you have to do is declare it a new virus.

Why is there an antivirus, your GPS, your smartphone, which is about to acquire a fingerprint sensor, Google Street View, programs for recognizing faces in photographs - the limit is the penetration of unauthorized strangers into our daily life simply no. Your supervisor at the FBI or MI6 is aware, they have already been told to him.

Dancing with pigs

But who gave it? We passed it on to you. Look how we treat our own information! Look at your Facebook settings: How many third-party apps have you allowed to use your data? Try installing a new program from Google Play Store on Android and, for a change, read what powers you promise her (access to the phone book? Use the Internet as needed? Make calls to your grandmother?). Take a look at Instagram's user agreement - by signing up, you've given full ownership of all your photos to Facebook! Create an account in the Amazon cloud and ask what you agreed to: Amazon has the right to change, delete the information you upload at its discretion, and also terminate your access to the site.

Computer science guru and Princeton University professor Edward Felten aptly dubbed what was happening “the dancing pig syndrome.” If a friend sent you a link to a program with dancing pigs, you will probably install it, even if license agreement it will be written about the possibility of losing all data, sense of humor, guilt, conscience, reason and average income.

What to do?

1. Make sure your home Wi-Fi have a good password and never use a suspicious Internet connection.

2. Change passwords more often, make them longer and stronger. We remain skeptical of password management programs and are torn between the fear of forgetting our twenty-three-digit alphanumeric password, the fear of email, Facebook, Twitter and other cute sites being hacked, and the fear of someone writing down our passwords if we keep a record of them in specialized program. As they say, here's your poison to choose from. If you choose the latter option, our paranoia recommends RoboForm and Last Pass.

3. Install CCleaner and don’t forget to use it (ideally, every day). If you don’t know where to get it, go to our website www.computerbild.ru and look in the “Download” section.

4. Install anti-tracking plugins in your browser. In Google Chrome, for example, we like the Keep my opt-outs Plugin. It removes data about you from more than 230 sites. After that, install Do not track plus - this plugin prevents “cookies” from sending information about you again. In Chrome, by the way, we recommend using the Incognito function. In this mode, you can only be watched from behind your back, so don’t forget to look around or hang a mirror behind your computer. Joke.

5. Use an anonymous VPN. A good and fast one may cost a little money, but the service is usually worth it. Of the free ones, we like HotSpot Shield.

6. Turn off Google history. To do this, type google.com/history and, using your gmail.com account, delete everything that Google has recorded about you. After this operation, Google will stop recording (probably), unless you ask otherwise.

7. You can also switch to the now popular TOR browser, which uses a volunteer network of computers to achieve maximum anonymity of transmitted encrypted data.

8. If your last name is Navalny or Nemtsov and you need to communicate with friends and colleagues via an unwatchable channel, install an anonymous file sharing program such as GNUnet, Freenet or I2P. In this case, we recommend doing it regularly backups data and store them on different clouds, accessing them through an anonymous VPN.

9. And most importantly, read user agreements installed programs. Before installing the next cats, think carefully about whether you need this program if it undertakes at any time, like a mother-in-law, to use the Internet and telephone on your behalf, check who called you, find out where you are, pay for purchases of your credit card and change your ringtone.

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