What you do on your computer or tablet feels private, the sites you visit, social feeds you follow, messages you send. The truth is that when you’re online, you might as well be an exhibitionist. Data brokers, trackers, and hackers are all deeply interested in your details for purposes ranging from iffy to nefarious. If you don’t take steps to protect your privacy, you could find yourself troubled by anything from social account takeover to complete identity theft.
Maintaining total anonymity and connecting to the internet is nearly impossible. Still, there are things you can do to limit your exposure, from connecting through a VPN to hiring a service that deletes your data from legitimate data aggregators. We’ve collected products and services that take many different approaches to privacy protection. Check out our reviews, then choose one or even more to defend your privacy. And when you've perused our choices, read on for a deeper dive into privacy problems and their solutions.
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Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Buying Guide: 10 Essential Apps for Ironclad Online Privacy in 2026
Encrypt Your Email
Like the internet, email was invented by optimists and academics who never dreamed that anyone would misuse it. Read someone else's mail? Fill up inboxes with unwanted junk mail? How rude! They had no idea what was coming.
Encrypting your email is one obvious way to protect the privacy of your messages. It's a significant and effective technique, one that merits a separate roundup, the best email encryption. See that article for a deeper dive into these snoop-fighters. Here's a summary.
Preveil, Private-Mail, Proton Mail, and StartMail let you lock down your communications using public-key cryptography. All but Preveil use the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) protocol to generate a key pair—one public and one private. To send me a secure message, you encrypt it with my public key, and I decrypt it with my private key. Simple!
Using Preveil is even simpler. A high-tech system involving what the company calls wrapped keys means you never deal with a key, public or private. It also means you can't connect with users of other PGP-based services, but few consumers know how to set that up anyway.
This public-key technology also allows me to send you a digitally signed message, guaranteeing that it came from me and has not been tampered with. I simply encrypt the message with my private key. The fact that you can decrypt it using my public key means it's legit. Proton Mail and StartMail automate the key exchange process with other users of the same service, while Private-Mail requires that you perform the exchange yourself. With any of these, you can exchange secure messages with anybody with a public key.
Of course, not everyone has embraced public key cryptography for their email. With Tuta Mail, StartMail, and Proton Mail, you can send encrypted messages to non-users, though you don't get the same level of open-source security. The service encrypts the message using a simple password, and you transmit the password via some avenue other than email, perhaps a secure messaging app.
Virtru Email Protection for Gmail offers free email encryption, but only if you use Gmail and Chrome. Like Preveil, it handles key management internally, though it doesn't use public-key cryptography. You send an encrypted message, and the recipient clicks a button to read it—without either of you entering a password. SecureMyEmail is likewise free if you use it to protect a single Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft account. Proton Mail offers a free tier, but it comes with some limitations.
These tools have their own dedicated roundup, so we've kept only the very best in this article.
Avoid Identity Theft
How would you like to wake up and find that you're wanted for crimes in another state or that your home's title no longer belongs to you? Full-blown identity theft can ruin your life in many ways. You can engage services that watch for incipient identity theft and help you recover if necessary, but they tend to be expensive. We recommend choosing a service that combines identity theft protection with a more traditional security solution.
We've created a separate roundup of our top picks for identity theft protection to provide comprehensive coverage. If you think you might want identity theft protection, we can help.
Five of the seven products we chose for that roundup come from names you already know: Avast One Platinum, ESET Home Security Ultimate, Norton 360 With LifeLock, McAfee Total Protection, and Bitdefender Ultimate Security. A sixth, IDShield, bundles Trend Micro Maximum Security. IDX Complete gives security software that's not the traditional security suite. All of them track your private data for signs of abuse and monitor your credit and a variety of other factors, from criminal proceedings to misuse of your SSN.
These services aim to prevent identity theft from ever happening, but they're also prepared to help if it does. You get a caseworker to help with all the paperwork, and they generally back up their work with a guarantee to spend up to a million dollars (or more) if needed to remediate your situation. Since we've given these products their own roundup, we're only including our top picks here.
Keep Your Email Address Private
With the contents of your email conversations encrypted, no hacker can sniff out what you're writing. However, your email address is exposed whenever you send a message, buy a product online, or sign up for any internet-based service. That might not sound problematic, but your email address is often used as your user ID for many websites. A hacker who finds your email and guesses your weak password now owns the account. And, of course, having your email address floating promiscuously around the web invites spam.
But how can you communicate without giving a merchant or service your email? The solution is a simple technology that lets you communicate using a temporary email address. (sometimes called a disposable email address or DEA). The recipient sees only the temporary email, but the communication comes to your standard inbox. Most such products let you reply, so your responses appear to come from the DEA. Bulc Club is an exception in that it doesn't permit replies. If you're done dealing with a particular merchant, or if one of your DEAs starts receiving spam, you just destroy it.
Burner Mail, IronVest, and ManyMe are among the services offering DEA management. ManyMe is unusual in a couple of ways. Like Bulc Club, it's free, which is a rare occurrence. And unlike most such services, it doesn't make you register a new FlyBy email (as it calls them) before using it. Say someone at a cocktail party asks for your email. You can create a FlyBy address immediately without sharing your actual email address. SimpleLogin also lets you make up DEAs on the fly.
IronVest takes the concept of masking your identity online to the next level. Besides masking your email address, it also generates unique masked credit card numbers for each transaction. You load the masked card with exactly the transaction amount, so a dishonest merchant can't overcharge you or reuse the card. It even lets you chat on the phone without giving your actual number.
Tracking alias usernames for each site isn't very different from managing a password for each site. Cloaked combines these two functions with elegant simplicity.
It's worth noting that Private-Mail and StartMail also offer limited DEA management. StartMail lets you manage up to 10 permanent DEAs and an unlimited number of DEAs set to expire within two weeks. Private-Mail provides five alternate email identities without full DEA management. Tuta Mail's email aliases are even more limited.
As noted, these temporary email services now have their own separate roundup. Therefore, we've only included our Editors' Choice winner in this lineup.
Throw Trackers Off the Scent
If you're not paying for online conveniences, you are the product, not the customer. You can surf the internet endlessly without paying a fee to visit specific sites, but those sites still work hard to monetize your visits. Advertising trackers plant cookies on your system, noting when a tracker from an ad on a different website encounters that same cookie. Through this and other tracking methods, they form a profile of your online activity, a profile that others are willing to pay for.
Almost 20 years ago, the internet's Powers That Be recognized that many users prefer not to be tracked and invented a simple Do Not Track message for browsers to send. Although the DNT system never became a standard, all the top browsers adopted it nonetheless. It had no significant effect because websites are free to ignore the header.
In place of the ineffective DNT header, many security companies began developing active systems to identify and block ads and other trackers. You'll find this feature as a bonus in many security suites and some privacy-specific products. IronVest and Ghostery Privacy Suite are among the privacy tools that offer active DNT.
The trackers, in turn, invented a different technique for identifying individuals across different websites. They rely on the ridiculous amount of information your browser sends to each site, ranging from your IP address and browser version to minutiae like the fonts installed on your system. There's so much information that trackers can create a fingerprint that's almost sure to identify you and only you.
So, what can you do? Make a liar out of your browser, that's what. Avast AntiTrack obfuscates the data sent by your browser, so it differs from website to website. Important info still reaches the site, but not in a way that can be consistently fingerprinted. Norton AntiTrack does something similar, and, like Avast AntiTrack, it also thwarts traditional trackers.
Passwords Aren't Going Anywhere Yet
Passwords are terrible, but we don't yet have a universal replacement. Passkeys are a promising development, but they are not yet universally adopted. For optimal security, you must use a different, non-guessable, strong password for every secure site. The only way anyone can accomplish that feat is by using a password manager. Unless you use a different strong password for every website, a data breach on one site could expose dozens of your other accounts.
In a perfect world, you already have an effective password manager in place, and you've taken the opportunity to fix any weak or duplicate passwords. If you aren't already equipped, some privacy products have begun offering password management as a bonus feature. IronVest, for one, offers a complete, if basic, password manager, as do the suites with identity protection from Norton and Bitdefender. You may prefer installing a top-notch free password manager separately.
Is My Data Exposed?
The first sign that your privacy is in danger may be the appearance of your private data on the dark web. Hackers who breach online data troves quickly put what they've found on the market. Many products in the antivirus, security suite, or VPN space include dark web monitoring as a bonus feature.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection also scans the seamy side of the web for your private information, but it goes deeper with its searching than many. It uses connections between found data to identify data that might relate to you. As you review these possible exposures and either verify or discard them, it fine-tunes its dark web search.
We've separately rounded up services that combine traditional security with identity theft protection. All trawl the dark web for signs of breaches or exposure and track many indicators that could flag early attempts to steal your identity.
What Do Data Brokers Know About Me?
The malefactors who trade stolen information on the dark web are criminals, but others have found ways to monetize your personal information without breaking the law. By combing through publicly available information and piecing together matching data, data brokers build profiles of individual consumers, which they can sell to advertisers or less savory customers. However, the law also requires them to delete your data upon request. The problem is knowing just who to ask, and how.
Abine DeleteMe is a pioneer in personal data removal services. When you subscribe, it searches dozens of data broker sites for your data. Wherever it finds you, it sends an opt-out request to remove your data.
DeleteMe was a pioneer, but it's been superseded by more modern services. Optery and Privacy Bee both track hundreds of brokers, vastly more than DeleteMe. Privacy Bee is more expensive than DeleteMe. Optery's top tier costs even more, though its entry-level tier is inexpensive. Both have informative free tiers. Optery, in particular, provides detailed information to help you submit and track your own opt-out requests. Privacy Bee expands on basic services with an ad-blocking browser extension and a system that makes your privacy preferences known to thousands of companies; it also manages useful industry-wide opt-outs.
What Other Privacy Options Do I Have?
Just as your private data can be exposed in many ways, software companies find various ways to protect it. If a malefactor steals your laptop or otherwise gains access to your PC, your private data could still be safe—if you've encrypted it. We've covered numerous products dedicated solely to encrypting files, folders, or entire drives. Some privacy products broaden their protection by including encryption.
Private-Mail goes beyond the usual features of encrypted email by giving you an online area to store encrypted files. You can encrypt files using PGP or a simple password and even share your encrypted files with others. Proton Mail's Proton Drive also lets you share encrypted files.
With Preveil, storing essential files in your encrypted cloud is a snap. You just treat that cloud like any other folder. Sharing with other Preveil users is also easy.
Virtru doesn't offer cloud storage, but it gives you unusual control over your messages and attachments. You can set message expiration, disable secure forwarding, and add a watermark to certain attachment types. You can also convert attachments into a protected form that only the recipient can view, just like a Virtru message.
When you run your internet traffic through a VPN, it's encrypted all the way from your PC to the VPN server. More importantly, from a privacy perspective, using a VPN masks your actual IP address, thereby preventing websites from geolocating you using that data.
One unusual feature of Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is its ability to detect social media impersonators. This tool doesn't require your social logins or the installation of a special app. Rather, it scours dozens of social media sites looking for profiles that are either yours or pretending to be yours. Once you claim your actual accounts, any that remain must be impersonators.
Who Protects the Protectors?
When you set up an encrypted email system or a disposable email address manager, your account password is a potential weakness. If you use an easily guessed password or if a stranger shoulder-surfs your login, you could lose control of your privacy protection. That's where multi-factor authentication comes in.
The concept is simple. With multi-factor authentication, logging in requires at least two of the following: something you know (such as a password), something you have (such as an authentication app), or something you are (such as a fingerprint). Nine of the 10 security services listed here offer multi-factor authentication.
All these products work with Google Authenticator or another time-based one-time password generator; some offer other types of authentication. To get started, use your authenticator mobile app to scan the QR code provided by the privacy program. Enter the code generated by the app, and you're done. Now, your password alone doesn't grant access to the privacy program. A password thief won't be able to enter the code from your authenticator app; therefore, they won't gain access.
Most of the programs listed here have earned the Editors' Choice award in their respective category. A few offer unique privacy protections that don't fit the usual pigeonholes. These aren't the only programs for protecting your privacy, though, and this isn't an exhaustive list of privacy-cloaking services. But they all do their best to keep you safe from advertisers, spies, and creeps online.