Privacy and security for smartphones with F-Secure’s “Freedome”

Intelligence agencies and criminals aren’t the only people who may be tracking your online behaviour. It turns out there’s a lot more to your browsing session than meets the eye.

An F-Secure Labs study found that of the 100 most popular URLs in the world, only 15 percent are accessed directly by humans. The other 85 percent are third-party sites that are accessed behind the scenes of your browsing session by the very sites that you visit. What’s more, well over half of these third-party sites are tracking-related sites that are building up a profile of you and your browsing habits. The business of tracking sites is used by millions of websites around the world to better target you with advertising.

But there’s a way to protect yourself. F-Secure’s simple privacy solution Freedome now brings the “one button” protection it’s been offering on millions of smartphones and tablets to the desktop world. Since its launch last year, Freedome has already blocked over 900 million tracking attempts globally. Now Freedome for Windows makes users invisible to trackers, hackers and snoops on their desktop PCs while still protecting their mobile devices with the same subscription.

Freedome for Windows also includes a new Private Search feature that helps desktop users get their search engine results without the tracking. Through the tools in Private Search, search queries are submitted to search engines anonymously. Freedome masks the user’s real IP address for additional anonymity.

“F-Secure is combining the power of search with the privacy of Freedome, so your private information is concealed,” says Samu Konttinen, Executive Vice President and Consumer Security at F-Secure. “You probably wouldn’t even want your own family to know your entire web searching history. Why give that information away to anyone?”

Most want their privacy back
Since the Snowden revelations, consumers have become more and more aware that they may be revealing the most intimate details of their lives through their connected devices. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Centre Internet Project, 91% of adults in the survey “agree” or “strongly agree” that consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.

F-Secure Freedome gives users a chance to regain control of their privacy however they connect. Privacy is fast becoming a luxury, but we want to make it affordable and available to everyone.

A good app to fight the bad
By encrypting data, enabling a secure connection on public hotspots and blocking trackers, Freedome prevents users’ private data from leaking. And now Freedome includes even more ways to protect your data.

The new App Security feature for Android adds cloud-based reputation scanning on top of Freedome’s powerful secure connection, online anonymity and browsing protection functions. App Security blocks the installation of harmful applications that try to steal personal information, harm your content, or use your device for illegal purposes.