Passwords are the keys to the digital kingdom, and these days it seems like every other website or service needs you to make a new account and password to use it.
Here are some tools to help you keep your passwords safe and organized, as well as some tools to help reduce the amount of data that companies can gather about you without your permission.
Password Managers
LastPass
https://it.wisc.edu/services/password-manager-lastpass-enterprise/
Secure cloud-based password manager that lets you save login information, generate hard-to-crack passwords, and remotely log out and shut down access if your device is lost or stolen.
Like most password managers, there have been a few high-profile incidents where hackers compromised their systems, but compared to the alternative (i.e. using the same easy-to-guess password everywhere), it is still a good solution for security.
The campus instance of LastPass Enterprise is NetID-secured and allows you one-stop access for managing all your passwords.
1Password
Similar to LastPass but with local storage and support. Has native Mac and Windows apps, browser extensions for all major browsers, as well as apps for iOS and Android.
No free tier is available, but plans are available for as low as $3/month.
KeePass
A free, open-source password manager. Local password storage only, but works for passwords outside web browsers as well.
Ad-Blocking and Privacy Management
AdBlock Plus
Open-source plugin designed to block intrusive ads (including YouTube pre-roll ads), trackers, and general bad news. You can also block specific elements on a web page from displaying.
By default, AdBlock Plus allows what it calls “Acceptable Ads” and other advertising that it calls unobtrusive, but you can set it to block ALL advertising via ABP’s preferences screen.
Privacy Badger
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
An open-source browser extension that blocks trackers, cookies, and information-aggregation services from using your browsing data without your knowledge.
Gives a clear breakdown of whether each website’s script is a tracker or not, and lets you enable/disable them individually.
10 Minute Mail
Create a temporary email address that expires after 10 minutes (or extend it in increments of 10 minutes as needed). Helpful when a site or service requires you to create an account to use it or try it out but you don’t want to get unwanted email advertisements every 4 days for all of eternity.
Quick Javascript Switcher
Turns off Javascript (aka the source of most of those annoying “You’ve read all of your free articles for the month! Subscribe here!”, “Sign up for our newsletter!” popups, etc.) per site, with the click of a button.
Has the added benefit of disabling most advertising and tracking/surveillance tools that websites use, but can break some websites that need JavaScript to function. Fortunately, you can re-enable JavaScript on any site with a single click.
