From Silicon Valley to middle class homes, there has been a scramble for increased internet security since the US presidential election. Encrypted mail client ProtonMail saw their signups double in the week following November 8 when compared with the previous week. Even tech’s most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, got in on the conversation — but his comments were less about the incoming administration and more about the need for increased privacy on the internet, regardless of who’s in office.

“We should be cautious about putting too much faith or fear in elected officials,” TechCrunch reports Snowden said in the Startpage.com interview. “We’re never farther than an election away from a change in leader, from a change in policy, a change in the way the powers we have constructed into a system are used. So what we need to think about now is not how do we defend against a president Donald Trump, but how do we protect the rights of everyone, everywhere, without regard to jurisdictions, without regard to borders?”

Snowden went on to point out that entrusting our data — which now contains extremely personal information ranging from bank accounts logins to private images — to private companies is misguided at best and dangerous at worst. He also called for private companies like Google and Facebook to stop collecting data they don’t “need.”

However, as we’ve seen in recent years, data collection is extremely lucrative, to the point where it would be foolish to expect massive companies who have built their empires on our data to stop collecting it. But there are steps that folks who are worried about the incoming administration (or just worried about their privacy, as we all should be as technology advances) can take to put up at least some protection between themselves and the government. (And themselves and data-collecting private companies.) Devin Coldeway has an extensive list on TechCrunch, ranging from end-to-end encryption to using a get-home-safe app, but we’re going to highlight just a few here.

End-to-end encryption for text messages

Coldeway recommends using an app like Signal, which Snowden also promoted during his Startpage.com interview. While regular SMS can be intercepted fairly easily by the authorities, Signal encrypts the messages from the time you type it to the time it lands in your friend or family’s inbox. As an added bonus, they can’t even see what’s being sent, which means they can’t be pressured by a subpoena to share your private information.

Encrypt your phone and computer

Whether you’re using Android or iOS, encryption is available on your device — but it’s probably not turned on automatically. Quincy Larson also recommends this in his piece “How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour.” For Windows users, turn on Bitlocker and for Mac users, turn on FileVault. These encryption tools insure that your data is protected and secure.

Get a VPN

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) conceals your browsing history from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) by re-routing your signal through other servers. There are browsers, like Tenta, that boast built-in VPN, but many of these browsers, unlike Tenta, actually offer proxies. While proxies do provide some protection online, they aren't designed to protect all of your internet traffic. Tenta Browser offers true built-in VPN, using the OpenVPN protocol.

So regardless of your political leanings, let’s all take this election as an opportunity to up our own internet security and focus more on privacy in the year to come. Because, like Snowden said, we’re always just one election way from a leadership change.