An IP Address is a unique address assigned to a computing device such as a computer, tablet, or smartphone. An IP address is analogous to the postal address of a house (or the phone number of your smartphone), where two houses cannot have the same address as a mailman will be confused about where to deliver the mail.

The issue of online privacy or better said, the lack of it, has become one of the hottest topics on the Internet over the past few years. While there are certain initiatives and actions to introduce dedicated and separate privacy laws, all of this is still in its early stages. In light of this, here are ten quick tips on how to maintain online privacy going into 2020.

When we speak about online privacy, we constantly make references to the VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and completely secures traffic by using point-to-point encryption. VPN maintains anonymity by hiding your IP address. However, the VPN provider would be able to know your real IP address as they are the ones who will mask your real IP with a virtual IP.

Most smartphone users may not know this, but Google has been tracking your locations and routes you took to go place to place. Unless you have intentionally turned off the location history settings, Google has been keeping track of your locations from the moment you own your smartphone. It may be mind-boggling for some users, but Google advertises it as a free service offered you to help track your location history. The service is available on both desktop and mobile users, and you can edit, delete or disable location history in your timeline. Your location timeline is private, so only you can view it after logging into Google account. To view your location history, you may visit

A virtual private network (VPN) is a network technology used to extend two or more private networks over a public network (i.e. Internet). It accomplishes this by creating a secure connection between two endpoints where all of the data shared between these two are encrypted. This disallows a third-party from tampering with the data trespassing through the public network. It also means that the IP addresses of both devices on either side of the tunnel is secure from the public. This is because the IP address used on both endpoints are only used as internal IP, and they are assigned a new public IP address outside of the tunnel.

Spyware is a type of malware which monitors a person's system and steal user's sensitive information. While monitoring the system, the software will amass a plethora of information about the system and its users and then send them to another system with or without the users' consent. Because of this, it is typically used by nefarious actors to steal a person's information which can include their browsing habits as well as their sensitive private information. In some cases, spyware have also been known to redirect a user's browsing or to seal them off from certain files.

Incognito mode, or sometimes called private mode by various browsers, is basically a means to provide some level of anonymity for users while browsing the Internet. These browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari accomplish this by making sure all of the information that you are viewing and entering onto the website is not stored on your machine. Essentially, running in incognito mode disables storing of browsing history, cookies, site data and forms you've filled. This way, the user ensures that whatever content they are viewing cannot be later found from searching on the same machine they're using.

Today, the Internet is a very dominant tool used by countless people to gather information, communicate, and use for entertainment purpose. What some people may not realize is that while using the internet, it catalogs a plethora of information on their actions making quite a lengthy and scarily accurate digital trail of their time on the internet. This information can then be used for a lot of things which they may not be aware of; such as lead generation, which is the act of a company purchasing your information (or paying for a service which uses your information) to swarm you with advertisements, or the act of even tracking your habits and communications through the activities your IP Address does on a regular basis.

To first understand what is vishing, we must first have an understanding of >a href="/phishing">phishing. At its core, phishing is a nefarious method to trick a person through some means of deceit. This can be achieved through either making the victim download malicious software or through tricking them with social engineering tactics.

To understand what anti-virus software is, we must first have an understanding of what a computer virus is and how they threaten our privacy. The main goal of antivirus software is to counter virus programs. At the core, a virus is nothing more than a program which continuously duplicates itself on a person's system. These programs typically either allow an unwanted user to gain access to the affected system or performs some unwanted action on the affected system. As such, viruses are almost always used for nefarious reasons by malicious programs, and as I've mentioned before; antivirus software came about to counter such programs.