Encrypt EVERYTHING

Encryption is the best way to ensure that whatever you are doing online remains private. In short, encryption ensures that if your data ever does get swiped or intercepted, the person stealing it won’t be able to make heads or tails of it. That’s because encryption transforms information into incoherent cryptographic symbols that, when done correctly, can only be decrypted by trusted parties.

But what to encrypt? Well, whatever you can.

To start, encrypted email services are always a good idea. You may have to shell out a small amount of money to subscribe, but, in general, it’s worth it. You’ll need to do some of your own research, but there are a number of options: ProtonMail, Tutanota, and Private-Mail are all popular options and good places to start.

Meanwhile, an encrypted chat function is also a good idea. If you want to text someone, just use Signal. For the most part, it’s hard to find anything to complain about when it comes to Signal. The end-to-end encrypted messaging service has been shown to be super effective at keeping communications private and secure, and they retain virtually no information about you once you make an account—making it a privacy must.

Finally, you can even encrypt the data on your desktop or laptop, so that if someone does try to steal your data, it’ll pretty much be useless to them. You will need to look up how to do this on your individual device, for example, Apple offers FileVault, which allows you to easily encode the data on your startup disc—making it impossible to view without your login approval.