How To Increase Security
How to change configuration of Opera for improved security
Recommended Only For More Advanced Users
Go to the Content section. If you are an advanced user you may want to deselect the option to "Enable JavaScript". This will protect you from any JavaScript based malware or privacy threats, but it will also mean that many websites will not work until you manually allow them. Thus this is a very powerful weapon in your arsenal, but it comes at a price. It greatly affects your browsing experience. In fact, with Opera there is an even greater downside to enabling JavaScript. Disabling this will not allow extensions to function properly. This includes the security and privacy extensions recommended below. Thus the question of whether to disable javascript or not is not a trivial question with Opera, even if you're willing to deal with the additional work of manually whitelisting sites. I leave this choice up to you.
Use These Extensions
Recommended For Both Beginner and Advanced Users
- Web of Trust (WOT): With this installed if you happen upon a potentially dangerous site WOT covers the screen with a warning and waits for you to decide whether to stay or leave. If you combine this with your own good sense then you will be protected from many online dangers. Also, if you choose, you can ignore the WOT warning and go to the site anyway. Please note that for sites which are largely concerned with political or religious content the ratings may be less accurate. This is because community driven services such as WOT can become tainted by individual's own biases. However, in terms of malicious sites, phishing sites, scam sites, and similar content, I find this service to be very reliable and I would not go online without it.
- NoAds Advanced: After installing this extension go to the manage extensions and then go to the preferences for the extension. Then go to the tab for Subscriptions and select the ones for "Easylist and EasyPrivacy Combination" and the one for "Malware Domains". This will help protect you from ads, malware, and certain privacy threats.
How to Increase Privacy
Like most browsers Opera provides users with the option to start the browser in Private browsing mode. What this means is that if you are running in this mode most privacy traces will be cleared as soon as the browser is closed. This is not nearly enough to adequately protect your privacy, but it is a good start. I would also advise that you change your default search engine to one which is discussed in section 2.
How to change configuration of Opera for improved privacy
Recommended For Both Beginner and Advanced Users
Under the settings part of the drop-down menu go to Preferences. Then go to the advanced tab. Under the Cookies section most users will want to select the option to "Accept cookies only from the site I visit". This will prevent sites from loading cookies that are not from the site that you are currently on. Thus almost all tracking cookies will be blocked. The only time you may have problems, and need to temporarily disable this, is sometimes when a legitimate site redirects you to another page. That said, in most cases it will work fine. Also, under the security section select the option to "Ask websites not to track me".
Recommended Only For More Advanced Users
Under the Cookies section more advanced users can select the option to "Never Accept Cookies". This will block any cookies from being set, which will stop some websites from working. For these cases you will need to manually add cookies to the whitelist. It greatly affects your browsing experience as this is not easy to do with Opera. Also, under the network tab, users can deselect the option to "Send referrer information". However, do note that this can cause problems with some websites and may need to be re-enabled.
Also, advanced users may want to go to the History section and turn off the cache for the disk, although this will mean that each time you visit a page it will have to reload from scratch. Thus this will slow down your browsing experience, but it will make it much more difficult for sites to track you. When you are done making your changes select OK to save them.
Use These Extensions
Recommended For Both Beginner and Advanced Users
-
Redirect to HTTPS: This
forces many sites, which have the option to encrypt your connection, to
actually encrypt it. Therefore your connection with these sites will be
much more secure.
- LastPass: This is a secure password manager with automatic password and form filling. It not only helps protect your passwords, and sensitive data, but also allows you to confidently create strong passwords and change them often. This is very important at times like this where passwords are constantly being stolen from numerous sites.
- Ghostery: When prompted follow the wizard. I recommend that you do not enable GhostRank. Enabling this would allow Ghostery to anomously send information about the pages visited and objects blocked, which would be used for statistical purposes. If you want it to visually alert you each time it blocks potential privacy problems then leave the option to enable "Alert Bubble" checked. That said, this option is not necessary for our purposes. I would recommend that you select the option to "enable 3pe Library Auto-Update" when given the choice. I would also suggest you select the option to "enable Blocking" and then select the option to block all bugs. This extension provides protection very similar to that of Do Not Track Plus, but I have seen no problems running both of them alongside each other.
How to Modify Opera To Achieve Improved Security And Privacy