Ask Slashdot: How Do You Protect Your Privacy These Days? Or Do You?

An anonymous reader writes "The NSA snoops traffic and has backdoors in encryption algorithms. Law enforcement agencies are operating surveillance drones domestically (not to mention traffic cameras and satellites). Commercial entities like Google, Facebook and Amazon have vast data on your internet behavior. The average Joe has sophisticated video-shooting and sharing technology in his pocket, meaning your image can be spread anywhere anytime. Your private health, financial, etc. data is protected by under-funded IT organizations which are not under your control. Is privacy even a valid consideration anymore, or is it simply obsolete? If you think you can maintain your privacy, how do you go about it?"

Comments

Not too bothered

[axlash]

I'm less worried about the likes of the NSA, and more worried about criminal gangs getting hold of my data and using it to make my life a misery through identity theft.

Anyhow, the way these things work is:
- Either a very small percentage of people are seriously affected by breaches in privacy, in which case I don't need to worry too much about it, or
- A significantly large number of people are seriously affected, so that it becomes a political issue and there's a push to do something about it.

Don't use "free" services

[Neelix21]

The main thing I do to protect my privacy is not to use "free" services, such as Gmail, Hotmail for personal email. I maintain my own server which has a mailserver installed. This means that no-one except me (and anyone who manages to break in) can just access my email.
I live in the Netherlands where ISPs are forced to keep "traffic records" of me. Because I'm an academic I get to use the academic ISP, which is not bound by that law, at least for Internet traffic. But having my own mailserver means that also my my email traffic is not monitored and can not be requested by the police. Furthermore, having your own mailserver and domain also makes it very easy to compartmentalise service subscriptions. Just make a new email address for each service.

I used to use Google Calendar, and Contacts but stopped with that since I discovered that OwnCloud is a really decent private drop-in replacement that you can host yourself.

I use many different privacy plugins (Ghostery, Adblock, etc.), while being aware that this makes my browser ID somewhat unique and identifiable. At least I'm making it harder for them.

I don't use my real name.

[ugglybabee]

I don't use my real name on the internet. This is no small thing, because Facebook will throw you off their network for using a fake name, and while I find facebook to be ubelievably drab and awful, I suffer a penalty in relationships from not being on it, since nearly everybody I know has some kind of presense on Facebook, I'd rather not trust the NSA with my personal information, but since i am not a criminal, the potential negative consequences involved are finite. I could be harassed for my views, though they're not particularly extreme, or falsely accused of a crime, But there are a billion people on the internet, and they've got a billion agendas, and i know from experience that some of them can truly be evil motherfuckers. There's no sense in trying to measure or aniticipate what can happen, what they're going to individually decide or figure out. I'm probably safe. I'm a 55 year old male with not much money. Nobody's going to want to stalk me for anything, but I refuse to participate in this crazy experiment whereby we turn down the privacy settings for civilization, and see who thrives, and who gets hurt. Zuck you, Fuckerberg!

Re:Unplug.

[Pino Grigio]

Here's the thing:

There are two levels of private here. There's keeping things private from potential employers, friends, family, associates and so on and there's keeping things private from the NSA, GCHQ, Chinese Government and so on. The average guy or girl has absolutely no hope of keeping their online dealings private from the latter. From the former, you don't so much keep them private as be a bit circumspect when making use of the internet, your mobile phone and so on.

So far over the last 10 years I've had 1 credit card attempted theft (tried to transfer £4,000 out of it, bank caught it as "suspect" so it didn't happen) and I've had 2 email accounts hacked and used to send spam. Of the latter, the problem was weak passwords. I now have a "system" for passwords and none are weak, but that doesn't mean the NSA and GCHQ can't still read them. I have no intention of fighting a room full of Mathematics PhDs for my data.

Even if you get the NSA to stop doing this through political action, the Chinese, Russians and so on will still be doing it.