What you do on your computer or tablet feels private, the sites you visit, social feeds you follow, messages you send. The truth is that when you’re online, you might as well be an exhibitionist. Data brokers, trackers, and hackers are all deeply interested in your details for purposes ranging from iffy to nefarious. If you don’t take steps to protect your privacy, you could find yourself troubled by anything from social account takeover to complete identity theft.

Maintaining total anonymity and connecting to the internet is nearly impossible. Still, there are things you can do to limit your exposure, from connecting through a VPN to hiring a service that deletes your data from legitimate data aggregators. We’ve collected products and services that take many different approaches to privacy protection. Check out our reviews, then choose one or even more to defend your privacy. And when you've perused our choices, read on for a deeper dive into privacy problems and their solutions.

Protecting Your Email Messages

Like the internet, email was invented by optimists and academics who never dreamed that anyone would misuse it. Read someone else's mail? Fill up inboxes with unwanted junk mail? How rude! They had no idea what was coming.

Encrypting your email is one obvious way to protect the privacy of your messages. It's a significant and effective technique, one that merits a separate roundup, The Best Email Encryption. See that article for a deeper dive into these snoop-fighters. Here's a summary.

Preveil, Private-Mail, ProtonMail, and StartMail let you lock down your communications using public-key cryptography. All but Preveil use a protocol called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to generate a pair of keys—one public, one private. To send me a secure message, you encrypt it with my public key, and I decrypt it with my private key. Simple!  

Using Preveil is even simpler, though. A high-tech system involving what the company calls wrapped keys means you never deal with a key, public or private. It also means you can't connect with users of other PGP-based services, but few consumers know how to set that up. Skiff is another excellent free solution that hides the complexity of its powerful encryption system, and Skiff comes with the additional benefit of encrypted file storage, collaboration, and calendar management.

This public key technology also lets me send you a digitally signed message, guaranteeing it came from me with no tampering. I simply encrypt the message with my private key. The fact that you can decrypt it using my public key means it's legit. ProtonMail and StartMail automate the key exchange process with other users of the same service, while Private-Mail requires that you perform the exchange yourself. With any of these, you can exchange secure messages with anybody with a public key.

Of course, not everyone has embraced public key cryptography for their email. With Tutanota, StartMail, and ProtonMail, you can send encrypted messages to non-users, though you don't get the same level of open-source security. The service encrypts the message using a simple password, and you transmit the password via some avenue other than email, perhaps a secure messaging app.

Virtru Email Protection for Gmail offers email encryption for free, but only if you use Gmail and that only in Chrome. Like Preveil, it handles key management internally, though it doesn't use public-key cryptography. You send an encrypted message, and the recipient clicks a button to read it—without either of you entering a password. SecureMyEmail is likewise free if you use it to protect a single Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft account. ProtonMail offers a free tier but with some limitations.

These tools have their own dedicated roundup, so we've removed them from this article's product lineup.

Identity Theft: The Ultimate Invasion of Privacy

How would you like to wake up and find that you're wanted for crimes in another state or that your home's title no longer belongs to you? Full-blown identity theft can ruin your life in many ways. You can obtain services that watch for incipient identity theft and help you recover if necessary, but they tend to be expensive. We recommend choosing a service that combines identity theft protection with a more traditional security solution.

We've created a separate roundup of our top picks for identity theft protection to give these comprehensive identity and security solutions full coverage. If you feel identity theft protection might be something you want, we can help.

Four of the seven products we chose come from names you already know: Avast One Platinum, Norton 360 With LifeLock, McAfee Total Protection, and Bitdefender Ultimate Security. A fifth, IDShield, bundles Trend Micro Maximum Security. IDX Complete gives security software that's not the traditional security suite. All of them track your private data for signs of abuse, monitor your credit, and keep watch on a variety of other factors, from criminal proceedings to misuse of your SSN. While Jumbo doesn't offer all the features of the competition, it stands out by being totally free.

These services aim to prevent identity theft from ever happening, but they're also prepared to help in the event it does. You get a caseworker to help with all the paperwork, and they generally back up their work with a guarantee to spend up to a million dollars if needed to remediate your situation. Since we've given these products their own roundup, we're not including them here.

Keeping Your Email Address Private

With the contents of your email conversations encrypted, no hacker can sniff out just what you're saying. However, your email address is exposed whenever you send a message, buy a product online, or sign up for any internet-based service. That might not sound problematic, but your email address is typically your user ID for many sites. A hacker who finds your email and guesses your weak password now owns the account. And, of course, having your email address floating promiscuously around the web invites spam.

But how can you communicate without giving a merchant or service your email? The solution is a simple technology that lets you communicate using a temporary email address. (sometimes called a disposable email address or DEA). The recipient sees only the temporary email, but the communication comes to your standard inbox. Most such products let you reply in such a way that your replies seem to come from the DEA. Bulc Club is an exception in that it doesn't permit replies. If you're done dealing with a particular merchant, or if one of your DEAs starts receiving spam, you just destroy it.

Burner Mail, IronVest, and ManyMe are among the services offering DEA management. ManyMe is unusual in a couple of ways. Like Bulc Club, it's free, which is uncommon. And unlike most such services, it doesn't make you register a new FlyBy email (as it calls them) before using it. Say someone at a cocktail party asks for your email. You can make up a FlyBy address immediately without giving your email away. SimpleLogin also lets you make up DEAs on the fly.

IronVest takes the concept of masking your identity online to the next level. Besides masking your email address, it offers masked credit card numbers, different for each transaction. You load the masked card with exactly the transaction amount, so a sleazy merchant can't overcharge you or use the card again. It even lets you chat on the phone without giving your actual number.

It's worth noting that Private-Mail and StartMail also offer a modicum of DEA management. StartMail lets you manage up to 10 permanent DEAs and an unlimited number of DEAs set to expire within two weeks or less. Private-Mail offers five alternate email identities without full DEA management. Tutanota's email aliases are even more limited.

As noted, these temporary email services now have their own separate roundup. That being the case, we're no longer including them here.

Throw Trackers Off the Scent

If you're not paying for online conveniences, you are the product, not the customer. You can surf the internet endlessly without paying a fee to visit specific sites, but those sites still work hard to monetize your visits. Advertising trackers plant cookies on your system, noting when a tracker from an ad on a different website encounters that same cookie. Through this and other tracking methods, they form a profile of your online activity, a profile that others are willing to pay for.

Some years ago, the Internet's Powers That Be, recognizing that many users prefer not to be tracked, ginned up a simple Do Not Track message to be sent by the browser. This DNT system never became a standard, but all the top browsers adopted it anyway. It had no significant effect because websites are free to ignore the header.

In place of the ineffectual DNT header, many security companies started devising active systems to identify and block ad trackers and other trackers. You'll find this feature as a bonus in many security suites and some privacy-specific products. IronVest and Ghostery Privacy Suite are among the privacy tools that offer active DNT.

The trackers, in turn, invented a different technique for identifying individuals across different websites, relying on the ridiculous amount of information supplied to each site by your browser. This ranges from your IP address and browser version to minutiae like the fonts installed on your system. There's so much information that trackers can create a fingerprint that's almost sure to identify you and only you.

So, what can you do? Make a liar out of your browser, that's what. Avast AntiTrack mixes up the data sent from your browser, so it's different for each website. Important info still reaches the site, but not in a consistent way that could be fingerprinted. Norton AntiTrack does something similar, and, like Avast AntiTrack, it also thwarts traditional trackers.

Nope, Passwords Aren't Going Anywhere

Passwords are terrible, but we don't yet have a universal replacement. Passkeys are an interesting development, but it's still early days for this idea. For security, you must use a different, non-guessable, strong password for every secure site. The only way anybody can accomplish that feat is by relying on a password manager. Unless you use a different strong password for every website, a data breach on one site could expose dozens of your other accounts.

In a perfect world, you already have an effective password manager in place, and you've taken the opportunity to fix any weak or duplicate passwords. On the chance you aren't already equipped, some privacy products have taken to including password management as a bonus feature. IronVest, for one, offers a complete, if basic, password manager. You may prefer a separate installation of a top-notch free password manager.

Is My Data Exposed?

The first sign that your privacy is in danger may be the appearance of your private data on the dark web. Hackers who breach online data troves quickly put what they've found on the market. The free Safe Me mobile app scans the dark web and reports any exposure of your email address, breached passwords, and other personal data. As you work through the report, updating compromised passwords, you raise your privacy score. Configuring your device's security properly raises the score, as does working through dozens of short security awareness courses.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection also scans the seamy side of the web for your private information, but it goes deeper with its searching than Safe Me. It uses connections between found data to identify data that might relate to you. As you review these possible exposures and either verify or discard them, it fine-tunes its dark web search.

As noted, we've separately identified the best services that combine traditional security with identity theft protection. All trawl the dark web for signs of breach or exposure and track many indicators that could flag early attempts at stealing your identity.

What Do Data Brokers Know About Me?

The malefactors who trade stolen information on the dark web are criminals. Others have found ways to monetize your personal information without breaking the law. By combing through publicly available information and snapping together things that match, data brokers create profiles of individual consumers, profiles that they can sell to advertisers or less savory customers. But the law also says they must remove your data if you ask. The problem is knowing just who to ask and how.

Abine DeleteMe is a pioneer in the field of personal data removal services. When you subscribe, it searches dozens of data broker sites for your data. Wherever it finds you, it sends an opt-out request to remove your data. This process can't be fully automated, so DeleteMe is relatively expensive.

DeleteMe was a pioneer, but it's been superseded by more modern services. Optery and Privacy Bee both track hundreds of brokers, vastly more than DeleteMe. Privacy Bee is more expensive than DeleteMe, and Optery's top tier is still more expensive. But both have informative free tiers. Optery, in particular, provides detailed information to help you submit and track your own opt-out requests. Privacy Bee expands on basic services with an ad-blocking browser extension and a system to make your privacy preferences known to thousands of companies; it also manages some useful industry-wide opt-outs.

What Other Privacy Options Do I Have?

Just as your private data can be exposed in many ways, software companies find various ways to protect it. If a malefactor steals your laptop or otherwise gains access to your PC, your private data could still be safe—if you've encrypted it. We've covered numerous products solely devoted to encrypting files, folders, or whole drives. Some privacy products broaden their protection by including encryption.

SafePic, a free iOS app from Norton Labs, aims to protect sensitive data found in images, things like pictures of receipts, passports, or other sensitive documents. It gathers such images, puts them into encrypted storage, and replaces them with a blurred placeholder that only you can un-blur.

Private-Mail goes beyond the usual features of encrypted email by giving you an online area to store encrypted files. You can encrypt files using PGP or a simple password and even share your encrypted files with others. Proton Mail's Proton Drive also lets you share encrypted files.

With Preveil, storing essential files in your encrypted cloud is a snap. You just treat that cloud like any other folder. Sharing with other Preveil users is also easy. The same applies to Skiff, which focuses on secure, encrypted collaboration.

Virtru doesn't offer cloud storage, but it gives you unusual control over your messages and attachments. You can set messages to expire, disable secure forwarding, and add a watermark to some kinds of attachments. You can also convert attachments into a protected form only the recipient can view, just like a Virtru message.

One unusual feature of Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is the detection of social media impersonators. This tool doesn't ask for your social logins or require installing a special app. Rather, it scours dozens of social media sites looking for profiles that are either yours or pretending to be you. Once you claim your actual accounts, any that remain must be impersonators.

Who Protects the Protectors?

When you set up an encrypted email system or a disposable email address manager, your account password is a potential weakness. If you use an easily guessed password, or if a stranger shoulder-surfs your login, you could lose control of your privacy protection. That's where multi-factor authentication comes in.

The concept is simple. With multi-factor authentication, logging in requires at least two of the following: something you know (such as a password), something you have (such as an authentication app), or something you are (such as a fingerprint). Quite a few of the privacy tools examined here offer a multi-factor option, specifically IronVest, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection, Burner Mail, Private-Mail, SimpleLogin, Skiff, StartMail, and Tutanota.

All these products work with Google Authenticator or another time-based one-time password generator. To get started, you use your authenticator mobile app to snap a QR code provided by the privacy program. Enter the code generated by the app, and you're done. Now, your password alone doesn't grant access to the privacy program. A password thief won't be able to enter the code from your authenticator app hence it won't get in. SimpleLogin and Tutanota also support using a Yubikey or other U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) authentication key.

Preveil also provides a degree of multi-factor authentication by the very nature of its encryption. Connecting to your encrypted mail is easy and automatic if you can access both the email account and a trusted device. An evildoer who cracks your email account still won't gain access to your encrypted mail and files. And if you lose a trusted device, you can cancel your trust.

As for Virtru, it doesn't require a password and doesn't offer multi-factor authentication. You prove your identity by logging into your Gmail account. That being the case, you'd do well to protect that Gmail account using multi-factor authentication.

These aren't the only programs for protecting your privacy, and this isn't an exhaustive list of privacy-cloaking techniques. However, all these programs do their best to keep you safe from advertisers, spies, and creeps online.