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Tips to browse safely online

Here you'll find some basic tips to protect your privacy and reduce the ability for people to see what you do online.

The 'Close this site' button

Some pages on this website include a 'Close this site' button. Use this button to quickly hide what you are looking at. You might find this helpful if someone comes into the room or looks over your shoulder and you don't want them to know what you've been looking at.

When you use the 'Close this site' button, it immediately closes this website and opens the Google search page in a new window.

You can also quickly close this site by using the ESC button on your computer keyboard. It immediately closes this website and opens the Google search page in a new window.

The 'Close this site' function doesn't delete your browser history. This means that if someone checks your browser history on your computer or mobile device, they will be able to see everything you looked at on our website.

Clear your browsing history regularly

Web browsers keep track of your online activity through your browser history, cookies and caching. This is so you can find websites you've visited before, but it also means other people can see this data.

To protect your privacy, it's a good idea to clear your browsing history regularly. You can choose to delete everything or only some things.

Find out how to clear your browsing history in:

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For other browsers and devices, check the provider's website.

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Private browsing is an easy way to hide your browsing habits. If enabled, when you close your browser, all browsing history and stored cookies from future browsing sessions will automatically disappear.

However, the sites you visited during your current browsing session will record your browsing activity. Your internet service provider will also record this information. Any files you download using private browsing won't be deleted, so other people can access them if they use your device.

Find out how to enable private browsing in:

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    • In the 'Tools' menu (the cog icon on top right of the browser window), select 'Safety', then 'InPrivate Browsing'.
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For other browsers and devices, check the provider's website.

Accounts and passwords

Don't let your browser auto-save your passwords. While the auto-save function may be convenient, it gives anyone who uses your device access to your accounts.

When you are using an account with a password (e.g. your social media or email account), always log out before leaving the website.

Using other computers and devices

If you are worried about someone looking at your internet use, consider using a computer or device that they can't access.

This might be a computer at your local library, your work computer, or a family or friend's device. But again, don't auto-save any passwords and make sure you log out of your accounts when you've finished using the computer.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This advice is from "Tips to browse safely online" by The State of Queensland.
The content is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license.
© The State of Queensland 2024.
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White Police and Black Power | Part 1

9 July 2021

Dr Gary Foley is a founder of the Aboriginal Legal Service. To mark our 50th anniversary, we asked him to share his recollections of the racial justice movement in the 1970s and how the ALS began. Below is Part 1 of his essay, White Police and Black Power: The Origins of the Aboriginal Legal Service.

 



"Liberties are not given, they are taken."  -Aldous Huxley

 

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of founding of the Aboriginal Legal Service, it is appropriate that we be reminded of the dramatic manner in which the service came into being.

It also affords the opportunity to acknowledge the Aboriginal people who were the founding fathers and mothers of not only the first Aboriginal Legal Service in Australia, but also in doing so they had created the first free shop-front legal aid centre in the country. 

Many of those early Aboriginal activists are now deceased and deserve acknowledgement and recognition for their work.

This essay not only honours the original founders of the ALS, it also examines the context of the times that saw the service develop and emerge. That in itself is part of an important era of Australian history in which Aboriginal issues came to the forefront of Australian politics for the first time in a significant way.

The newly formed ALS was to be at the centre and forefront of the tumultuous events that led up to the 1972 Aboriginal Embassy protest in Canberra, which in turn brought an end to the assimilationist era that had dominated government Aboriginal affairs policies for the previous hundred years.

It was a revolutionary body in the sense that it was a completely new concept of Aboriginal organisation. Previously virtually all organisations and agencies that purported to exist for the "benefit” of Aboriginal peoples had been (and were still then) dominated and controlled by white administrators and white staff.

The policies of such organisations were created by non-Aboriginal people and were invariably in accordance with governmental assimilationist policies and were primarily focussed on welfare and education issues. It might be noted that education was a key component of the policy to indoctrinate Aboriginal children into accepting and absorbing the Anglo-Celtic values that the eugenicist-inspired policy of assimilation required.

Aboriginal people had no say in their own destinies, either as individuals or groups. Therefore, the emergence of an Aboriginal organisation that had evolved from within the Aboriginal community and was now being successfully administered and controlled by Aboriginal people was quite a revolutionary idea back then.

These new organisations were ones which would evolve out of community needs as determined by any given Aboriginal community. A concept in which any organisation developed to meet or alleviate those needs or problems would be overseen and controlled by community members. When the organisation was created, it would be administered and controlled by an Aboriginal Board of Directors drawn from the specific given community.

In that way it was believed that the organisation would not only be Aboriginal controlled, but also be directly accountable to the community by way of every community member being able to vote at an AGM.

These new types of organisations were described by their founders as Aboriginal community-controlled survival programs in the sense that they were seen as merely stop-gap measures created to ensure the survival of the community until such times as the concept of genuine land rights was established.


⫸ Forward to Part 2 

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Warning: This website may contain images and names of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have passed away.