The US Military has some quite excellent, and approachable, guides to improving your safety online. These are all accumulated on their fact sheets page.

In particular, the Identity Awareness, Protection, and Management Guide is very friendly for the non-technical. It’s a goldmine of handy visual references on how to configure everything from social media to WiFi networks and dating websites. I highly recommend going through and taking their advice as far as locking down the social networks you use and locking down privacy settings on your phones.

I also strongly recommend looking at the surveillance self-defence page of the EFF, which includes all sorts of useful guides including their own tips on protecting yourself on social networks and suggestions for safely attending a protest. Using Firefox as the main browser on your computers and installing the following add-ons can also help improve your electronic privacy and security considerably.

All of these add-ons will limit the amount of data platforms such as Facebook or Google have on you by restricting them to private containers.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contain-amazon/

Removes ad tracking from URLs (utm_* etc):

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Your browser gathers cookies everywhere you go, so having a plugin which automatically cleans up as you go is invaluable.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/

An excellent ad blocker

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

If you are willing to put in the effort (it takes time to configure and this is much more likely to break websites than the others), then NoScript is truly excellent for protecting your browser from malicious JavaScript.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

If you’re not in the habit of reading terms of service, ToSDR is an excellent resource. They also have a firefox plugin