Add-ons
An add-on is a little program that you can install inside a browser to give it some extra features.
You can, for example, block ads with uBlock Origin,
block trackers with Privacy Badger,
customise the looks of your browser with Firefox Color,
keep track of all your passwords with Bitwarden,
add a dark theme to websites that don't have one with Dark Reader,
view, edit and delete cookies with Cookie Editor,
or even, if you know CSS, change the display of any website with Stylus !
You can download add-ons for Firefox here and for Chrome here
(though you really should use Firefox).
Web Browsers
Although they now do more and more things, a web browser's sole purpose is to help you access the internet easily and visit websites.
You are most likely using one right now to read this.
The most popular ones are Chrome and Firefox, but the latter one offers more privacy-protective options.
Container Tabs
Container tabs are a feature only available on Firefox, as an extension downloadable here.
They enable you to keep different parts of your online activity separate.
In your house, you have different rooms for different purposes : a kitchen to cook and eat, a bedroom for sleeping and personal stuff, an office for working...
You can do the same on your browser : a container for work-related websites, a container for banking websites, a container for social media, a container for personal activities like emails or holiday planing...
Separating your activity this way makes your attack surface smaller and is a good security practice. If a website in one container gets compromised and starts eavesdropping on the rest of your online activities, it will only have effect on websites within the same container.
Data Center
Place where the data from a website or online service is stored.
Decentralised
Term used to name services that are not operated by one entity (person, company, organisation...).
Usually means that anyone can run it on their own server and communicate with other people's servers.
End-to-end Encryption
Type of encryption implementation with which data is encrypted and secured between the sender and the receiver, so that no data can be looked at during transit. Only the two people concerned, the two ends, can decrypt the content with a specific key only they have.
Fingerprinting
Term that covers all the techniques used to try and determine who the user really is. It gathers all the traces you leave behind, your fingerprint, including your IP address, browser, extensions, specific settings on your browser like whether you have cookies or javascript enabled or not, your device type, screen size, operating system... Then it cross-references this data and establishes a profile to assign you to make it possible to track more accurately.
Front-End
Used to denominate the part of a digital service the user interacts with.
The front-end uses the back-end to process what should be displayed.
GAFAM
Stands for Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft.
It's the generic denomination of the tech industry's biggest companies.
IP Address
It is the online equivalent to your postal address, given to every device connected to the internet.
It can be used to follow you around, but it is necessary to deliver you the content you requested.
The best you can do is try to hide it.
An IP version 4 (IPv4) address consists of four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by dots (e.g. 192.168.0.34).
That gives us almost 4.3 billion possibilities, but today, every single IPv4 address has been assigned so there are none left.
This is where IPv6 comes in.
An IP version 6 (IPv6) address consists of eight groups of four hexadecimal (from 0 to 9 and A to F) digits, separated by colons.
That theoretically gives us 2128 possibilities, so we should be fine for a while.
Multi-Factor Authentification
Multi-factor authentification is a high security feature that will ask you for several factors when you log in. Factors are something you know (password, PIN...), something you have (passport, physical access key...) and something you are (biometrics like fingerprint, face...)
Open-Source
Principle according to which the source of a product or service (or anything) is free of access to anyone. This can be applied to any domain.
In computing, means that the code behind a program is available to anyone.
It implies that security researchers can review it and find vulnerabilities which hackers could exploit.
