How to increase privacy

Health Care -- it -- How to Increase Privacy

The purpose of this paper is to address and ideally solve a problem encountered when using the internet. The problem chosen is the lack of privacy protection on the internet and the ideal solution would be to safeguard privacy that might otherwise be compromised by using the internet. The research for this SLP underscores the problem with seeking and using privacy measures provided online. The first problem is knowing who to trust and since the primary author -- Chiron -- is unknown, one must trust you for recommending the site and whatever links might arise along the way. Then some measures that seemed less intrusive and complicated were followed while others that seemed very intrusive and complicated were saved for employment at another time (maybe).

Body: How to Increase Privacy

The internet presents significant threats to privacy, such as malware, spyware and most certainly a host of other "wares" unknown to this user. Consequently, the preservation of privacy and necessarily security are vital aspects of internet usage. The suggested Gizmo's Freeware site (Gizmo, 2013) was used as a starting point. After simply entering "privacy" in the search bar, the researcher is quickly led to the link for a web page called "How to harden your browser against malware and privacy concerns" (Chiron, 2013), which then led to numerous ways of protecting privacy/security.

This exercise is nerve-wracking because I do not know Chiron and must trust your recommendation of this web page and other links to which it may lead; nevertheless, the exercise was followed. The page addresses privacy problems for many web browsers but the one of particular interest here is "Internet Explorer" due to its primary use. The author notes that while "hardening" the browser is important, increasing security so the computer is not unwittingly communicating with potentially harmful sites is also important (Chiron, 2013). Per the page's instructions, Adobe Flash Player was first addressed. The "Flash Player" was opened and the Storage tab was used to block all sites from storing information on the computer. The problem with making that change is that there is a warning that it might reduce functionality and desired information storage on some sites. After some consideration, the option to block these sites was chosen anyway. If there is a problem with functionality or desired storage in the future, then I know how to modify that storage aspect. In addition, under the Advanced tab, Adobe was allowed to make changes to the computer in order to allow update installations by Adobe. The web page also advised removing Java plugin and separately searching for and removing "npDeployJava1.dll" (Chiron, 2013). The warning about Java's use for exploitation was surprising but the instructions for removal were followed.