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How do You Protect Your Online Privacy?
P asks: "In the light of the recent discussions about on-line privacy: What can one do to protect his/her on-line privacy, while still having a enjoyable web experience? For example, are you using PGP for all your emails and Zfone for all your VOIP traffic? Or are there better ways of protecting oneself? Share your tips and tricks."
I was using GPG in Thunderbird, linked to my gmail account. This was just for signing though, so it was more to protect my identity than my privacy. I believe GPG does encryption too. It was seamless once it was setup, but I use gmail from too many places. It just wasn't worth it. Here's hoping Google adds support for this sort of thing to Gmail.
Back in 1998 I was raided by the Australia Federal Police. They were looking for evidence on computer crimes allegedly committed by people I had allegedly spoken to on IRC. They weren't after me, but I was still thankful that my harddrive was encrypted and there we no laws, at the time, that could be used to force me to give up my encryption keys. Had there been evidence on my harddrive that I had committed a crime (there wasn't, unless I'm committing crimes and I'm not aware of it) I would have been facing jail time, even though the AFP did not have any justification to search that computer because of anything I had done.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I once received an abusive e-mail from some guy who was receiving loads of spam from a source using a rotation of from addresses. My address happened to appear on the mail he received and it he snapped, firing back at me. His mail address was from his family business, looked up the whois information which was correctly filled in. Phone number, address etc, simple google of the domain name showed me forums in which members of the family had posted in, different topics, cars, real-estate. From there I could build quite a profile of this person, his family, where they lived, google earth supplied satellite images of their house. I knew what kind of cars they owned, how much their house cost and when they bought it (purchasing records of individual houses was available online as part of the council areas statistics).
I sent him a mail explaining that it wasn't me sending the spam, and he wrote back apologising, then I explained to him all the information that I'd found including the google earth picture and he couldn't believe what I'd come up with by just roaming around the net.
Task Mangler