How to Keep Your Home Privacy
The old saying that a person’s home is their castle still rings true today. In 2023, building materials and technology offer many ways to maintain home privacy. Protecting a person’s privacy contributes to their enjoyment of life, so instituting your home’s privacy mechanisms can help you maintain a happier household.
In the workplace, many companies focus on computer privacy, and today’s homeowner needs to install many of the same types of programs to protect home security, too. But, maintaining personal privacy takes more than just a software program. Today’s homeowner needs to combine traditional privacy enhancements, like fences that you cannot see through or over, and security mechanisms that cut out elicit listening via technology, such as Google Assistant, Alexa, etc., and the Internet of Things (IoT). No violation of a person’s privacy is okay or allowed, so read on to learn how to cut out the unwanted noisiness and enjoy the peace, quiet, and total and complete privacy that each person deserves.
Use Fences to Secure Your Home
Erect a privacy fence that blocks views of your home and yard from the road and from neighbors’ yards. Before hiring a local contractor for fence installation, choose the type of fence that best provides privacy and complements your home’s architecture. Skip the chain link since it provides no privacy. Instead, install wood, metal, stone, cement/concrete, or resin.
The privacy fences available to you depend on those offered by local fence companies. If you want a concrete wall to protect your home privacy, but no local fence installer offers that, contact a mason or a general contractor. These two options can install a custom fence that results in complete privacy from prying eyes, especially if you install one of six to eight feet in height. Check with your city’s building code to learn the maximum height allowed for a fence.
Trees are Great for Privacy!
Enhance the privacy of the installed fence and beautify it with trees. Besides planting seedlings, care for the existing trees in your yard by contracting with a local tree service. Trimming the yard’s trees each year helps them grow stronger and can train the limbs to grow in the desired directions.
Besides your local tree trimming provider, you will also need an arborist or landscaper. Either individual can recommend trees that grow quickly and provide for enhanced home privacy. These plantings along both sides of the privacy fence improve the curb appeal of your home.
Install Blinds to Keep Privacy
The window treatments used in your home can help protect your privacy. Layer the window coverings in a similar way that people layer clothing, installing in-window blinds that you can easily raise to allow sunlight to stream in during the day. Hang sheers over the blinds on thin rods to filter the view into the home when you raise the blinds. The top layer consists of blackout curtains that let you also block the view into your home, drafty air, and too bright sunlight during the summer.
Layering the window décor creates a cheery interior appearance and improves your home privacy. Use curtain tie-backs to expose the underlying layers when opening the window treatments to allow for warmth and light. Besides the interior, also update the exterior of the windows.
Install shutters on the home’s exterior. These devices let you close the windows completely from exterior views, plus they protect the glass of your windows from debris from high winds. To further improve privacy, add window screens to the exterior of the windows. Window screens make it possible to open the windows without allowing pests to enter and their gray or black mesh also obscures the view into your home.
Keep Pests and Bugs Out Too!
Consider installing window screens as the first step towards mosquito control. Improving your home privacy means keeping out wiretap bugs of all types and insects. No pest should enter your home or online accounts or profiles in any way.
Maintain a clean home and clean yard to deter insects and other pests from entering your home. Store firewood in a wood shed on the far side of your yard. Bugs and mice love firewood piles, so maintain your fuel pile as far from your home as feasible.
At least once per year, hire one of your local pest control companies to spray your home and yard. While most homeowners focus on keeping roaches and mice out of their homes, pest control companies also offer mosquito control sprays for yards. Also, ask the pest control firm about spraying for ticks and fleas to make your yard more enjoyable for yourself and your pets.
Make Sure Your Home Is Up to Date
Updating your home with better doors and windows can help improve your home privacy, too. A steel or aluminum solid core door provides better security and, therefore, improved privacy. Of course, updating your windows and doors requires commercial renovation.
Hire a home builder or renovator to update the home’s entry points. Install Low-E, energy-efficient windows with two or three panes. These windows offer the best in energy savings and you can the installer add a tint to them that lets you see out but blocks others from peering into your home. This ends the fun of the proverbial and literal Peeping Toms.
Update Your House with a Security System
Protect your overall home privacy with a comprehensive security system. A comprehensive system addresses alerts for burglars or other intruders, rising water flood alerts, fire and smoke alarms, and carbon monoxide alarms. It can contact the police automatically for an intruder and alert 911 for other emergencies that trigger the system’s sensors.
To completely revamp your home privacy, hire a general contractor to add a safe room to your home. These rooms offer complete security for you and your family if an intruder alert sounds while you’re at home. Most safe rooms remain disguised as a faux solid wall or an exterior wall. Instead, they provide a reinforced wall that protects the secret room from the intruder with an additional wall made of cement, typically.
Safe rooms come wired with a separate telephone line, but some of these lead-lined rooms don’t allow for cell phone use. Most run on their own power source and include a refrigerator and microwave, in case the homeowner needs to hunker down overnight. They may include a cot or other furniture to make waiting for the police more comfortable.
Computer and Cellphone Privacy
Shoring up your home privacy means installing software that protects your privacy from cyber spying. For the best results, hire a computer consultant to develop a comprehensive software set that provides protection from hackers and the companies that produce the software you purchase. The consultant should install a fierce firewall that blocks illicit entry.
Another must-have – a virtual private network (VPN) – veils your physical address and secures your digital data using encryption. Some websites won’t allow users to visit using a VPN, so you’ll need to have your computer consultant show you how to turn it on and off. These two tools can significantly increase your home privacy, especially when you use them in conjunction with incognito browsing.
Top cyber safety consultants also install malware sniffers, antivirus software, and malware removal tools. Set to automatically check your system, these programs can protect your cell phones, tablets, and computers from illicit software. Also, have your consultant address any IoT devices in your home.
Smart homes offer many devices that make life easier by automating daily tasks. All of those smart outlets, lamps, refrigerators, and other smart appliances function on a part of the larger Internet called the Internet of Things. The IoT devices don’t just communicate with the humans in the household but with one another and their manufacturers. Your cyber consultant should help you set up each device, so it can only listen when you specifically address it.
Setting it up so that the software activates the microphone only when the homeowner chooses protects your privacy from illegal listening from the manufacturer or provider of software. Consumer watchdog groups already revealed constant listening by both Google and Amazon that prompted the development of the options for users to disable the “always on” microphones. Facebook faced similar criticism when it debuted its Portal devices, but updated the devices to improve privacy protections, such as a microphone off button and a sliding shutter cover for the camera lens.
These consultants can also show homeowners ways to protect their privacy online by judiciously sharing information. Have the consultant show you how to recognize spam by checking the full headers of an email to determine if it really came from the purported sender. For example, an email might appear at first glance to come from Open Sea, but after checking the headers, the individual discovers that it came from an unknown sender.
Improve financial privacy by having a computer consultant set up an online wallet for you from a respected source. This wallet lets you use your credit card or debit card with a mouse click or finger tap, but only after completing either a two-factor authentication using your smartphone, a preset PIN only you know, or an authenticator app. Using these super secure wallets stops you from needing to type in your credit or debit card number and other data at each purchase, an activity that opens you up to spying and theft by hackers.
Impending Privacy Threats
Every individual and family deserves to have their privacy protected. In prior centuries, a good fence, or perhaps a moat, protected an individual’s privacy. It only took closing the curtains and locking the entry door to ensure a quiet day or night at home. The 21st century differs remarkably.
In today’s culture, we must remain vigilant and head off privacy invasions from many sources. While nosy neighbors and Peeping Toms once topped the list of concerns, technology has developed many other entry points that physical barriers can’t close. Besides covering the windows and locking the doors, we need to protect ourselves from hackers, prankers, identity thieves, and more. The Internet and the Internet of Things offer two entry points that ethical cybersecurity analysts work hard each day to close.
Ongoing neural network research recently opened a new door for which cybersecurity has yet to develop protections. Funded by the U.S. Army, The University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University developed BrainNet, a neural network technology that creates a mind-to-mind interface. Two senders sitting together mentally send a mental message to a third person, a receiver, at a different research office miles away. The technology BrainNet provides a method of electronic extrasensory perception (EESP).
Originally developed nearly a decade ago, researchers at the two universities have entered the third phase of the technology’s development. While in development and improvement, no blocking technologies have been reported as developed. In the 21st century, the privacy of our very minds remains under attack with no individual or group on the cybersecurity front stepping up to answer the call to protect our most valuable resource – our minds, our ability to think for ourselves and keep our thoughts to ourselves.
Protect your privacy in every way possible, but also, let lawmakers know that you value your privacy. Just as the music industry had to stand up for its creators against file-sharing technologies like Napster, people must stand up for their privacy, especially that of their thoughts. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Washington Universities have yet to release the technical details of their device or software but have published their findings in multiple peer-reviewed academic journals. Upon learning the workings of the technology, perhaps someone will devise a blocking technology for it as they have for eavesdropping IoT.
Shoring Up Your Privacy
Adding safe rooms and security systems offers protection from break-ins. The right windows and window treatments protect you from Peeping Toms. Antivirus software, malware sniffers, and removal tools can protect a person’s computer and cell phone. For emerging threats like EESP, we do not yet have privacy protections.
