The NSA is listening. They are watching, reading and in general know everything about you that you don’t really want them to know. Privacy is an important issue today. If it’s not the government or the NSA, it could be a potential identity thief or someone out to infect your laptop with malware. The recent concerns in the area of privacy and snooping has led to a resurgence of interest in companies and products that specialize in catering to what were considered paranoid consumers. It turns out, they knew something we didn’t.
Turns out when those that suggested storing private information in the cloud was dangerous, or warned that social networking sites asked for and got too much information from users that they were absolutely correct. Even those using secure measures to browse the internet through Google Chrome’s Incognito or a similar type privacy program make the mistake of clicking on links displayed outside the secure site you visited. This reveals your identity to the site you clicked on.
The TOR project, a security network utilizing cheap proxy methods and a worldwide network of volunteers is considered a premier service. The data is sent through several “layers” of the network a piece at a time and is only decrypted when it reaches the intended destination. With TOR, your internet activity is routed through one of three computers and encrypted off site. When the message reaches the intended destination, there is no way to track it to your specific IP address.
For those seeking privacy for web searching there are four services of note. They are DuckDuckGo and Blekko. These two have spam-free search engines that don’t bombard users with cookies and ads that Google and others do. These free web search engines collect information on you and your searches to more specifically target you with ads that are geared to your interests. The other two are Ixquick and Startpage, both utilize a proxy server which acts as a VPN for all of your searches. This makes any sites you visit from their page anonymous ones.
For privacy in cell phone calls and email there are four encryption programs worth checking out. These include PGP, GPG, RedPhone, and TextSecure. Both sender and recipient must have the same program for it to work. For those more concerned about advertising than about privacy, the Adblock Plus allows you to filter the ads you see online. Adblock Plus has at conservative estimates, close to 40 million users.
To round out the concerns for privacy Yahoo has their Ad Interest Manager which allows you to opt out of ads or filter them according to your interests. And finally Yippy is the little search engine that could. Could block content considered malicious or objectionable, that is. Overall, as privacy continues to be an issue, more and more products and services will be released.
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