// Basic Steps to Protect Your Privacy // // by cxi // // http://www.oldskoolphreak.com Information Privacy is the ability of an individual to control the terms under which personal information is acquired and used. The three different "faces" of information privacy are: Marketing: Reuse of personal information consumers provide. Lookups: What others can find out about an individual. Security: Unauthorized access to personal information. There are also three relationships everyone has that dictate different privacy concerns: our relationship with marketers as consumers, the government as citizens, and employers and employees. Most people would agree that they would want different levels of control in each relationship - I would not want a marketer to know about my employment history or the government to know about what I buy (this may be changing with the Total Information Awareness proposal, but that’s for another article). The concern for privacy on the Internet mostly deals with the marketing relationship, although employers are now heavily monitoring employee Internet use in work and the government may now have the ability to secretly monitor Internet use (according to the USA Patriot Act - again, way too much to talk about here). There are some very basic steps to protect your privacy from marketers that few users are aware of. If you’re naïve enough to think your personal information is private and isn’t floating around on the Internet, maybe it’s time to do an inventory of your personal information. Try visiting the various Internet phonebooks (whitepages.com, whowhere.com, people.yahoo.com), public records search sites (ussearch.com) or even a regular search engine like google.com - I think you might be shocked at how much you found. I found my family tree going four generations back on a Scottish genealogy site, easily found my home address and telephone number, and various discussion groups and article postings I’ve put up over the years. So what are some basic steps you could take to stop more personal information from leaking out online? Password Policies - Choose one with at least 8 characters - Don’t use something from a dictionary - Don’t use public knowledge about you (mother’s maiden name, pet name, address, etc.) - Alternate cases and use "interesting" spelling (l33t speak for example) - Don’t write your password down anywhere (this includes checking the "save password" boxes which save your password somewhere on your computer!) E-mail Privacy - The best thing anyone can do to protect their e-mail privacy is to get some encryption! There are loads of different e-mail encryption software packages out there, but the standards have been PGP (http://www.pgpi.org) and GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). It may be difficult to use at first since you have to tell everyone (who most likely don’t use it already) how to encrypt e-mails to send to you - but think of this as an opportunity to help your friends out and protect their privacy as well! - It’s been said time and time again - and yet these stupid e-mail viruses still plague computer users. DON’T OPEN E-MAILS OR ATTACHMENTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW! And have a good (FREQUENTLY UPDATED) virus checker enabled. - Use anonymous remailers (such as www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html) Web Session Privacy - Don’t give out more information than is necessary to complete transactions! - Clear History and Temporary Files at regular intervals - For the more paranoid: try anonymous surfing through proxy servers such as www.anonymizer.com and www.idzap.com Many of these steps may seem like common sense or may be relatively well-known methods. The point is that this is YOUR personal information you’re trying to protect which means YOU need to take an active stance in protecting it. All three areas of privacy (marketers, government, and employers) are expanding their abilities to collect information about people - mainly through the Internet - so now more than ever it is important for people to take charge and protect themselves online.