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A handful of few tips for any privacy-conscious FReepers:

INTERNET SEARCHING

Don’t use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine that tracks your search results. You might as well be sending data straight to the NSA.

StartPage searches Google on your behalf completely anonymously. In other words, you get the exact same search results as you would with Google, except you keep your privacy.

DuckDuckGo is an independent search engine that also does not track you. Its search results are a bit more hit and miss, but they’re fairly good overall.

BROWSER

There are many excellent tools available for Firefox browser that can assist you in protecting your privacy. Here are a few of my favorites:

-User Agent Overrider: Use this to change your browser’s user agent so as to appear as generic as possible. You can get a list of the most popular user agents here.
-Adblock Edge: Use EasyList to block ads, EasyPrivacy to block trackers. Add the Fanboy social list to block Facebook buttons, etc. Social media sharing buttons track your browsing even if you don’t have an account with them.
-Self-Destructing Cookies: Accepts cookies from Web sites but deletes them automatically when the tab you’re using is closed unless you say otherwise. Fights tracking cookies that this article mentions are used by the NSA.
-HTTPS Everywhere: An extension by the EFF. Enables secure connections whenever possible.
-NoScript: One of the best security and privacy tools that Firefox has to offer. NoScript has a significant learning curve, but if you master it, you can stop most threats cold. For example, try enabling NoScript and then going to Whatismybrowser. You’ll see that it is impossible for that site to get a list of the plugins you have installed.

Keep an eye on MailPile. It’s an up-and-coming browser-based email client that aims to make it dead simple to send and receive encrypted email.

BitMessage is a decentralized, experimental alternative to email. It’s still in its early stages, so if you want to know more, you might have to ask me or a similarly knowledgeable person for help.

The Free Software Foundation has come out with an email encryption guide called “Email Self-Defense:” https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/

ORGANIZATIONS

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of the premiere Internet privacy organizations.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is possibly the most ideologically “pure” technology organization out there. Its purpose it to promote open, peer-reviewed software.

Whether or not you believe “open source” is worth a darn, it’s a fact that the only way to be sure that the NSA hasn’t compromised the software you’re using to be able to see what it’s made of. You can’t do that with software like Windows.