Digital Privacy Salons are skill & knowledge sharing sessions to learn basic ways of protecting people & their data from surveillance.
This session was mostly about browsers and how to use them more securely by using some plugins such as HTTPS Everywhere but also avoiding being tracked by advertisers with Privacy Badger.
To make those concerns more understandable, we also showed how easy it is for a website to identify a browser, without requiring the user to do any actions but also how the advertising companies can track the users of multiple websites with cookies. A few images are also available on CIRCL website.
We also presented Cryptocat a chat software usable directly from the browser and that can be used to communicate securely over Facebook.
The last technical topic was the Tor Browser Bundle that is widely used to protect its identity from marketers and other tracking organisations and contains some of the browser plugins mentioned during the session.
To end the session, Quinn Norton gave a short high level overview explaining why we live in a connected world and that our whole life is a ensemble of network connected together and ultimately why it is very important to understand this point in order to protect his privacy online but also offline.
Between the different workshops we had people asking us more personal questions on how to deal with lost or stolen devices, what to do in case of account hijacking or suspected malware infection.
It was a very intense session, the trainers were very busy and a similar event will be occur again before the end of the year.