Once you've connected your computer to the internet, you're beset on all sides by ravenous beasts, desperate to consume tasty bits of your private data.
Trackers and other data grabbers use a wide variety of techniques to get their pound of flesh.
If you'd rather retain a modicum of privacy, you need a variety of solutions.
That's the point of ShieldApps Cyber Privacy Suite.
Among other things, it seeks out personal data in unprotected documents, actively foils online trackers, and protects your internet communication with a VPN.
This multifaceted protection doesn't come cheap; you pay $77.99 per year for a subscription that protects three PCs.
There's so much variation in privacy-focused apps that it's hard to compare prices, but this one does seem high.
With Steganos Privacy Suite you get five-device protection for a one-time fee of $49.95.
Disposable email address provider Burner Mail goes for $29.99 per year, and the similar ManyMe costs nothing at all.
Abine Blur Premium, which offers active Do Not Track, password management, disposable email addresses, and more, runs $39 per year.
Ghostery Midnight is the most like this suite, in that it combines privacy features with a VPN.
Midnight doesn't rely on browser extensions, so it can apply ad and tracker blocking for any app that connects to the internet.
But Midnight costs $14 per month, with no annual discount, which is high.
On the plus side, you can use Midnight on any number of simultaneous connections, while Cyber Privacy Suite gives you just three licenses.
Getting Started With Cyber Privacy Suite
You can install the suite at no charge for a seven-day trial, though the trial doesn't include VPN protection.
To keep using the product, you must activate it with a license key.
Installation was simple, though it did require confirming driver installations in a query from Windows Security.
On finishing installation, the product immediately ran a privacy scan; more about that scan shortly.
A simple wizard walked through the process of installing the Chrome extension.
It then went on to install extensions for Firefox and Edge.
With that, installation was complete.
The main window offers quite a bit of information.
It summarizes potential exposures found by the scan in four categories: Login Credentials, Personal Information, Browsing Tracks, and Documents.
A menu across the top includes entries for more detail on these four items, as well as access to the suite's Tracker Blocker and Dark Web checking.
One more top menu icon returns you to the main status screen.
Toward the right, the main window includes a set of toggles for various forms of real-time protection.
These include: Camera protection, Microphone protection, Tracking protection, Browsing protection, Virtual Private Network, and Ad Blocker.
You can see at a glance which features are turned on, and easily toggle any of them on or off.
Privacy Scan
Cyber Privacy Suite launched a privacy scan immediately after installation.
You can also launch a scan at will, or set a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
As noted, the scan seeks exposed personal data in various categories.
When we first ran the scan, the only thing it found was a collection of what it calls Browsing Records and Tracking Records, for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Internet Explorer.
Here, Browsing Records refers to history entries and Tracking Records to cookies.
It was simple enough to delete them all with a single, simple click.
Note, though, that in all popular browsers you can just press Ctrl+Shift+Del, and choose what to delete, with more granular control than the suite offers.
What about the other scans? It turns out our test system was just a bit too clean.
On advice from our company contact, we opened each browser, logged in to a couple websites, and allowed the browser to save the credentials.
A repeat scan found those and reported them on the Login Credentials page.
Following the instructions, we moved the found credentials into the product's encrypted Vault, and verified they were no longer present in the browser.
In a similar fashion, we let the browsers capture address and credit card information typed into web forms.
After a new scan, these showed up as profiles on the Personal Information page.
There was no option to encrypt these, just a button to delete the exposed information from the browser.
That makes sense.
If you want automated web form filling, you're better off with a Password Manager that includes filling web forms.
For that matter, importing your browser passwords into a full-scale password manager lets you fill them automatically, while this suite just stores them as static data.
Document Encryption
We keep a small collection of documents on our test systems as "bait" for use when testing ransomware.
However, these apparently weren't the right kind of files for the privacy scan's document protection.
Our company contact explained that this scan "will find bank statements of the major banks, documents with credit card numbers, documents with SSN in them, documents with the passwords we detect in the previous scan, and health and insurance documents." We dug up some old personal documents of these types, copied them to the test system, and tried again.
This time around, Cyber Privacy Suite detected about half of those documents, and we had no trouble moving them to the encrypted vault.
Looking at the documents apparently missed by the scan, we realized that although they're nominally PDF files, they consist of images, not text.
Checking with our company contact, we learned that while the original files don't wind up in the Recycle Bin, then also don't get overwritten before deletion, leaving them potentially open to forensic recovery.
We're very familiar with the concept of storing important files in an encrypted vault.
Typically, the vault looks just like any folder when open, but closes tight when locked.
You can move files in and out, and even edit files that are in the vault.
With Cyber Privacy Suite, things are a little different.
While you can open, edit, and save files in the vault, it doesn't act like a regular folder.
Rather, it's a page within the application.
A toolbar includes buttons for tasks such as encryption files, adding folders to the vault, and exporting or importing protected files.
It's not quite as seamless as the typical implementation of an encrypted vault, but it does the job.
Tracker and Ad Blocking
Seeing this product's ad blocking feature at work was a snap.
We just opened the same ad-riddled page in the test system and in a system without any ad blocking.
The blocker suppressed popup and interstitial ads, and we could see the gaps where it blocked ads embedded in the page content.
All major browsers include the ability to send a Do Not Track request to every website you visit.
And all websites are free to ignore this request; it's toothless.
Like Abine Blur, Ghostery Midnight, and several popular security suites, Cyber Privacy Suite includes an active Do Not Track component.
It doesn't ask trackers to lay off; it puts the kibosh on the entire tracking process.
When you visit a website that includes ad trackers, analytics, or other types of trackers, you'll see a number on the browser extension's toolbar button reflecting how many trackers it found.
By default, it blocks them all, with no effort on your part.
You can click the icon for a little more detail about the most prevalent trackers, but you don't get the full, detailed list that many similar products offer.
You can turn tracker blocking off for the current site, but you can't fine-tune just which trackers are permitted.
You can also turn off ad blocking on a per-site basis.
Fingerprint Scrambling
As noted, there are plenty of products that can defeat simple tracking cookies and other basic tracking techniques.
Advertisers and big websites really, really want to learn everything they can about you, so many of them have turned to a different technique for tracking your online activity.
This technique, called browser fingerprinting, relies on the fact that your browser sends a huge amount of information to every website you visit.
Portions of this data dump can help the site provide you the best experience, things like your precise browser version, which popular plugins are installed, and even which fonts are available on the system.
The problem is that the receiving website can process the huge amount of available data to yield a fingerprint that's unique to you.
If that same fingerprint shows up elsewhere on the web, that's the start of a profile that can track your browsing activity.
Like TrackOFF Basic, this suite foils browser fingerprinters by subtly tweaking the data that your browsers send.
Now you'll have a different unique fingerprint each session; you can also click to scramble things any time you like.
To see this feature in action, we used the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Panopticlick page.
This page runs a few privacy tests and also lists the important data promiscuously provided by your browser.
We found that each scramble changed an essential value known as the canvas hash, a central component of fingerprinting schemes.
It also suppressed sharing of browser plugin details and of another value called the WebGL fingerprint.
In short, it works!
Do note that some testing websites will report that you have a problem, because your browser fingerprint is unique.
These sites don't account for the fact that you get a different unique fingerprint on each access.
Not All Browsers Are Created Equal
Depending on the browser you use, you may or may not get all the browser-related features described above.
Erasing browser tracks works for Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Firefox, as does erasing tracking records.
Fingerprint scrambling works for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
Extracting and encrypting login credentials just works for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
Blocking ads and trackers requires an extension that's available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
And the option to find and delete personal information from stored web form data is just for Chrome and Firefox.
If you're keeping score, you see that only Chrome and Firefox get all the browser-related privacy features.
Those using Edge or Internet Explorer only get a subset.
And of course if you're a fan of Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, or other alternative browsers you'll have to find another way to protect your privacy.
Dark Web Check
Every week there's a new story about a data breach at some major site or business.
Passwords and other personal data stolen in these breaches wind up on the Dark Web, available to hackers and other malefactors.
Has your data been thus exposed? The Dark Web test lets you check your email addresses and passwords to see.
Like Kaspersky Security Cloud and several popular password managers, this suite relies on the HaveIBeenPwned website to perform its Dark Web analysis.
That means you don't need Cyber Privacy Suite to get this information; you could just go directly to the website.
But having this scan in one handy location with other privacy protection components is convenient.
Porous Browsing Protection
If you visit a site that installs spyware using a drive-by download, your privacy is clearly at risk.
To keep you safe, this suite includes a browsing protection component that works in any browser.
We verified that fact using a hand-coded browser.
Our company contact confirmed that this component "blocks you from accessing sites with malware, including spyware and ransomware [and] also blocks any communication between existing malware on your device and outside servers."
We're well-equipped to test detection of malware-hosting websites, because we run that test for just about every antivirus review.
The test starts with a feed of malicious URLs recently detected by researchers at London-based MRG-Effitas.
We simply launch each URL and note what the product does.
A full-scale antivirus gets equal credit for blocking access to the URL or for nuking the malware payload.
For this product, the only possibilities are diverting from the URL or failing and allowing a malware download.
Alas, Cyber Privacy Suite fared very poorly in this test, even after we combed through the malware downloads and discarded any that didn't get at least 10 hits on the VirusTotal website.
It detected just 12 percent of the malware-hosting sites.
Using a combination of URL-blocking and real-time malware protection, Sophos Home Premium, McAfee Total Protection, and Vipre Advanced Security all detected 100 percent in this test.
But wait, you may say, that isn't a fair comparison.
This privacy suite doesn't have an antivirus component.
So, let's just look at blocking access to malware-hosting URLs.
Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security blocked 96 percent of samples at the URL level, and Vipre got 95 percent.
It's clear that Cyber Privacy Suite's browser protection has a long way to go.
Mic and Cam Protection
Do you ever use your laptop in the bedroom? Do you worry about your state of dress, or undress? Perhaps you should.
Malware apps and websites have been known to peek through the webcam, without activating the telltale light.
That's a truly creepy kind of spyware protection.
Quite a few security products include components aimed at blocking unauthorized use of the webcam, microphone, or both.
Kaspersky and Trend Micro take note when a program attempts to access the webcam.
If it's not on the trusted list, they warn you, giving you a chance to make the program trusted or ban its use of the webcam.
Cyber Privacy Suite's protection is vastly simpler.
At your request, it totally disables the camera, the microphone, or both.
In that state, nothing can use these resources, not even your trusted video conferencing software.
Before that next video meeting, you'll have to turn off blocking those resources.
Simple VPN
Most of this suite's features protect your privacy locally, doing things like moving passwords from your browsers into secure storage, clearing browser traces, and attempting to steer you clear of dangerous websites.
The VPN component, on the other hand, protects the privacy of your internet communications.
While the VPN's local interface is fully integrated with the suite, the VPN code and servers are licensed from Private Communications Corp., a company that specializes in licensing VPN and similar technologies.
When you're connected to the internet through a VPN,...
