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How do You Protect Your Online Privacy?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-that-they-are-watching-are-you-paranoid-yet dept.

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."

2 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Easy. by isometrick · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't use the internet.

  2. Technologies to use... by jurgen · · Score: 5, Informative
    First off, use Linux. If your OS isn't reasonably secure, all bets are off, and Windows is just too difficult to keep secure for a casual user. With a good linux distro you're much better off so long as you keep it updated.

    Secondly use encrypted filesystems for data you want to keep private. I can recomend encfs for Linux http://arg0.net/wiki/encfs... it's easy to use and can be installed with yum in Fedora. It uses file-level encryption which makes possible incremental backups which retain the encryption.

    If you want protection from being forced by a court to give up your key, take a look at http://www.truecrypt.org/ . This is a filesystem that lets you keep multiple levels of data encrypted with different keys, and if you give up one key noone can know that there's more data hidden with another key.

    For web browsing use Tor, http://tor.eff.or/. Tor is still under development and may not be secure against a focused attack on you specifically, but at least your ISP won't be able to easily spy on you and your IPSs logs (which as we know are being mass-analyzed by the NSA) won't show anything about your activity. Also tor is /very/ easy to install and use, especially with Firefox and the FF tor extension. Also you can use it in combination with privoxy http://www.privoxy.org/ for some protection against malicious cookies and other tricks used by the sites you access.

    Plus, here's a good trick for ensuring that your web browser cache, history, etc., can't be easily searched by someone who gets access to your computer... put them on an encrypted filesystem, as follows. Make a script that mounts an encrypted filesystem (asking for the passphrase), sets your HOME env var to the newly mounted fs, then starts Firefox (which now places its cache there because that's HOME), and unmounts the encrypted fs after Firefox exits. You should do this even if your entire home dir is also on an encrypted fs, because your normal home dir is likely to stay mounted for longer periods of time, so this way you separate the risk levels. And it's easy. An additional little-known trick for this: set the LOGNAME env var to something other than your username to let you run a second copy of Firefox on the same X display (so you can have an "insecure" and a "secure" one running at the same time).

    Of course use GnuPG for secure email. The Thunderbird Enigmail extension makes it painless.

    You should also give money to the EFF and run a Tor server if you can, to help maintain our ability to have some privacy.

    Finally, if you are a hardcore libertarian and/or think we should have a truly free Internet, experiment with FreeNet http://freenetproject.org/ and consider donating to its development. This project ran into some dead ends with scalability but the developers have taken a fresh approach and the new 0.7 dev version looks like it might be the start of something that could get big. They have a full-time programmer working on it paid by donations (and he's so dedicated to the ideal that his salary is the bare minimum he needs to live), so consider donating. (Btw., I'm not a libertarian in the political sense, but I think we need a strong counter-balance to the marching forces of fascism, so I donate to the Freenet project.)

    :j