Online privacy is something you hear a lot about nowadays and rightly so, the digital footprint you leave carries pertinent information about you, and most of the time its information you wouldn’t want anybody rifling their way through. While there are many software-based solutions to mask your identity and location like a VPN, one company – Winston – wants you to try their hardware-based privacy filter that instantly protects yourself and your family from those pesky digital pirates from stealing your data.
The simplest way to think of Winston is as a bridge between your modem and router that effectively filters the coming and going data streams a bit like a Brita water filter – it keeps the good and protects you from the bad. According to the creators of Winston, this hardware device plugs into your network and it encrypts your entire internet activity. It does this by essentially obfuscating your data among the other Winston’s out there, instead of a traditional centralized server, and on both the network and application layer, it can disable things like cookie tracking and browser fingerprinting. It also makes your internet activity impossible to track, no even from your ISP.
The initial setup of Winston was also a breeze, you simply navigate to their setup website, follow the very clear instructions and away you go. We were up and running in under 10 minutes. With that, you do get a lot of customization options in the main dashboard on Winston, along with a large list of features from maintaining privacy to blocking ads and pop-ups, allowing you to use streaming services, and even speeding up your browsing while decreasing data usage. Users can even select some welcome preloaded filters or modules as they are called; there’s even one that prevents the social media sites from tracking you – which we loved by the way. It is also possible to set up exceptions for certain apps or websites, and admittedly, getting it just right did take a little trial and error and a dash of know-how.
It is important to note that this is much more powerful than a VPN which largely just hides your location, Winston is about privacy and security and as users put more faith in VPN’s, many of which are data-mining centres, Winston’s zero-knowledge distribution promise means that all of your data is encrypted, never seen, never stored or logged due to its peer-to-peer sharing nature. It is the first anti-tracking, truly anonymous solution that works we have tried and we love it!
The biggest take away after this past few months with Winston is how well it has adapted to our current browsing habits, we not only have a speedier more reliable connection but we also have no need for ad-blocking browser extensions that slow down your PC, we also have a lot more faith in websites like banking and online shopping because, for a small yearly fee, we know Winston handles all of that very well and has our backs.
If you are serious about your online privacy and security is your main focus when being online, it doesn’t get any better than the Winston Privacy Filter. Get yours at https://winstonprivacy.com/
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