Virtual Private Network (VPN)
A VPN encrypts all your traffic so no one can spy on you. The VPN stays between your device and the internet. When you visit a site, talk to someone, no matter what you do, everything is tunneled across different servers as encrypted information. If you visit a website and watch a documentary, a VPN can only be seen like this: a computer from South Korea (or another part of the world different from yours) sends and receives encrypted information from the website. There's no way to track that it's you, no way to track what that information is about. Great!
We recommend Private Internet Access (PIA) as the best VPN – they are experienced, they are secure, have lots of servers, great speeds, a very simple app and are very cheap. Free VPNs are slow and limited, so you'll have to pay for either option, but it's a worthwhile investment to protect all your internet activity. PIA also blocks ads and trackers. One license ($40/year - around €35/year) corresponds to 5 devices - so you can use the same license on 5 devices. Don't let their cheap footage on their website put you off, they are the best in the world.
Tracker and ad blocker
Privacy Badger is a tracker protection that automatically learns to block invisible trackers. You can easily use it as Firefox Addon Add it and it will block trackers for you. There are also many many free ad blockers, but we recommend uBlock Origin, as it has all the features you need. We recommend for smartphones Blockade, which works without needing to be rooted. These 3 things are all trading free and if you install them you will rarely, if ever, see ads.
Peer to Peer (p2p)
When you watch a video from YouTube or another website, that video is streamed from a server. The server may be shut down, the owner of the video or the company hosting the server may remove the video, and so on. Very insecure. However, with p2p, a video is stored on multiple computers, so essentially no one can delete it. When you watch a video, the video is divided into many parts, and you will take some parts from one computer, some from others, and so on, which combine to form the entire video file. This is the best way to share things.
P2P clients are simple apps that put all these pieces of files together and allow you to enjoy (download/watch/read) them. Although there are many P2P clients, we recommend the free and open-source one WebTorrent (available for every desktop operating system). The way it works is that you simply download a “.torrent” file and open it with WebTorrent and the file(s) will automatically download. You can do the same with “magnet” links (just click on them – that’s all). WebTorrent also allows streaming the content before downloading it. For cell phones you can AceStream (does the same thing – downloads p2p files and enables streaming).