I just filled out a survey for Best Buy after buying a camera and if I wanted a chance to win $5,000, I had to give information like name, address and email which they already had. For phone number I put down 123-456-7890. It was accepted. I have but one credit card. I see no need for more.
I got one of those last week, just spam in a can. I stop using paypal over 6 years ago when they started telling me who I could pay. About that image if you don't know about it, use the windows snipping tool which is not shown in menus. Just type snipping tool into the start box and then make a short cut for your taskbar. You could go into windows and find the exe and short cut that. A very handy tool especially for those pesky images online that give you a browser tag when you try to copy and paste an image. Snipping Tool don't care ! it will grab the image. If you like to grab audio files then use Audacity, it is free and you can record anything your computer processes and outputs as audio.
Which ones are good to have? I have Firefox I think it is my granddaughter set it up for me when she was here. I also tried to change my browser but it didn't work. I was going to use DuckDuck Go.
I haven't tried a VPN in several years, so I don't know. I don't personally like Firefox but that's only because it had become very bloated from what it started out to be. DuckDuckGo is not a browser - it's a privacy metasearch engine and a browser application. Its meta-search engine uses results from Google and other search sources, but without the tracking. More info about search engines here. A VPN might be a good idea but the last time I used a VPN, there were some sites I couldn't connect to or couldn't connect to reliably. I don't remember, but it was more trouble than I thought it was worth at the time. The technology may have improved since then, but, since it adds a few levels of complication to your connection, it's probably fair to assume that there would be some effect on performance. If I were trading in state secrets, selling drugs online, or trading in child pornography, I might use a VPN. While it adds a few levels of complication to your connection, that would also be true for anyone trying to track you, so it's not necessarily a bad idea.
What is your main concern? Someone tracking your searches? Someone tracking the sites you visit online? Someone getting your personal information? Something else? A lot of that is available through Opera, including VPN. My wife uses the Brave browser, but, although I've tried it, I don't know much about it.
Personal info I guess. I meant to ask daughter when she was here Thanksgiving but didn't get online and forgot.
I use several search engines and browsers. I use DuckDuckGo within Brave (browser) as my main tool, but I also have Firefox with Startpage, and I have Edge. I also have a VPN (Surfshark) that I use whenever I don't go onto banking or government sites. I use Surfshark in part because it is easy to turn off and on. Brave allows you to control the sale of you own info and you can get paid somehow for allowing them to sell your info. I have the rewards program turned off. I also clear trackers and cookies almost daily.
To my understanding, personal information is usually obtained through online stores or large websites that people log into, creating accounts, and giving all of their personal information, such as addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, debit and credit card numbers, and so on. With that information, someone who does that kind of thing for a living is well on the way to getting anything else they might need. Although it's possible that some people may set up online stores in order to collect that information, I think most of it is obtained by hackers who routinely hack into the websites of the largest companies in the world. I am not overly concerned with identity theft, but I do try to limit the number of websites that have such information. For that reason, I have closed my accounts on most of the online stores where I have made purchases. I buy most of what I need online from Amazon, not because I have such faith in Amazon but because I can get almost everything I need through Amazon, which limits my exposure. If I find a need to make purchases from other online stores in the future, I'll use a prepaid Green Dot card or something similar.
I goggled it and it said it can also slow down your system, mine is slow enough already, and lately I don't feel like learning anything new.
I purge all the trackers on my computer every day, so I get suggestions there all day, but they are gone the next day. One interesting thing happened when I was viewing something using DuckDuckGo and a notification popped up the DDG had blocked Facebook from tracking me. I don't have a Facebook account, but my wife does and the link is on the computer, but neither Facebook nor any Meta program was open. I found it interesting that it was trying to track me even when Facebook was not open. A bit scary though.
I see Facebook's spiders in the forum from time to time. I know they will come when anyone posts a link to one of our threads on Facebook because I've done that sometimes. I don't do it much anymore because I'm rarely on Facebook and I don't think anyone has ever joined the forum after following a link here. When Facebook responds to a link posted on their site, they will send from 5-10 spiders here, but I have also seen the random Facebook spider here, so perhaps they follow people who come here after being on Facebook, as well.
Tracking on line is ubiquitous. I use Brave browser as well as Safari. Brave has a display on its blank page and look how much BS it has blocked over the past few years.