Other Internet Services
Email is another means by which the McKinley Park News communicates with our users and members: through our email newsletter, automated website email messages and direct email communications. Your choice of email provider — and how you secure and use your email — can have a direct impact on your privacy and the security of your communications, devices and accounts.
In addition to following best practices to keep your email secure, know and understand the terms by which your email provider is offering this service. Many email services, especially the most popular free ones, make back their money by varying degrees of user surveillance, advertising, tracking and/or scraping messages to benefit AI or other services.
For users concerned about email privacy and security, we recommend either a privacy-focused, third-party provider like Proton Mail or others, or running your own email from your own domain hosted by a qualified managed service provider.
Search Engines
Search Engines are commonly used to discover sources of information, including what we publish in the McKinley Park News. However, search engines can also be used to track you, your searches and the websites you visit. We recommend using privacy-respecting search engines that either serve as a proxy for queries to other search engines or build their results based on their own crawling and indexing.
Some options for privacy-respecting search engines include DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, MetaGer, Swisscows, Mojeek and others.
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Another way to protect your privacy while online is to route your Internet use through a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. This pushes your Internet traffic through a different network source, masking your actual location, service provider and IP address. It's one of the strongest ways you can support your privacy and protect yourself online.
VPNs are provided through accounts from a panoply of service providers, and they can be configured for all of your Internet traffic, or just your web browser, with switches to selectively turn a VPN on or off. Both free and paid VPNs are available, however, paid VPN services often support faster traffic and more options.
The scope of VPN services and options limit our ability to make specific recommendations here. However, users will find many online sources detailing and reviewing VPN services.
