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How do You Protect Your Online Privacy?

Posted by Cliff on Tue May 16, 2006 08:55 PM
from the now-that-they-are-watching-are-you-paranoid-yet dept.
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."
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[+] IT: PGP Creator's Zfone Encrypts VoIP 150 comments
Philip Zimmermann, creator of PGP wrote in to tell me about Zfone, his new system for encrypting any SIP VoIP voice stream. His first release is Mac & Linux only. I tested it with him using Gizmo as our client and it was pretty trivial to use. While it should work on most any SIP compatible VoIP client, he hopes that clients like OpenWengo and Gizmo will incorporate Zfone directly into the UI. Zfone has no centralization, and has been submitted to the IETF. He hasn't yet determined a license, but he believes strongly in releasing source code for all encryption products. A windows client is forthcoming.
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  • Easy. (Score:5, Funny)

    by isometrick (817436) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @08:58PM (#15347585)
    I don't use the internet.

  • Forget it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly (148874) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:03PM (#15347609)
    seriously, if "They" want your data, They will go through your trash, subpoena your pay records and phone records, and tap your phone line. "They" will know more about you than you can imagine, regardless of whether you use encrypted VoIP or not.

    Want to feel safe on line? Write your Congressman, tell your friends about IP and privacy issues, affect a cultural change. As long as 51% of your friends are willing to trade freedom (theirs and yours) for security (mostly theirs), you're fscked.
    • Politicians don't care. And maybe they shouldn't. There are bigger fish to fry right now.

      I understand that in an online community, privacy is a big issue. Just like condoms in schools are a big issue with soccer moms. However, in the overall scheme of things, there are a lot of areas that need to be fixed.

      If you really want to make a change, start demanding term limits on the Senate and House.

      Demand a Constitutional ammendment limiting the ammount of money a single person is able to contribute to a poli
      • Generally, the F-16s wouldn't see the F-22. If they did (visually), they couldn't get a missle to lock on. The machine gun stands a chance, barely.

        An F-35 with a laser might do OK against the F-22, but that toy isn't shipping yet.
      • Demand that the DoD and other government agencies reduce their budgets while maintaining manpower to accomplish their missions. Do we really need to spend $200m on the F-22 when the $40m F-16 and F-18 is still good? Sure, the F-22 is nice, but would you rather be defended by a single F-22 or 5 F-16s? Do you really think a pilot in an F-22 could take out 5 F-16s?

        First, we''re not going to be fighting F-16s, MiGs? Sus? Yeah. Mirages and ChengDus? Maybe. But not Fs. Anyway, it might be able to, I don't k

        • That's what Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) argued [publiceye.org]: "Welch's famous book, The Politician, caused a stir even among many loyal Birch members who were shocked by Welch's assertion that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was "a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.""

          Got to love those conspiracists.

    • Re:Forget it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday May 16 2006, @10:22PM (#15347994) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • To protect your privacy on the Internet, you have two choices: general anonymizer like Tor [eff.org] or an anonymous proxy server [proxyblind.org].

      I prefer Tor because it is affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). A page on the EFF website states, "A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently . Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web log

  • Easy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by slashflood (697891) <`moc.wolfwoh' `ta' `wolf'> on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:06PM (#15347625) Homepage Journal
    [x] Post Anonymously

  • GPG and Thunderbird (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chicken_tonight (786398) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:06PM (#15347627)
    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.
    • There has been a discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List with regards /dev/random (which I provoked by forwarding a link to a paper critical of it), which GnuPG, OpenSSL and other crypto programs use. Apparently, there are possible attacks which would allow an attacker to calculate earlier random numbers in the sequence, allowing them to guess generated private keys. This seems to be a theoretical attack only and seems to preclude remote exploits, as you'd need access to that device. However, it points
    • I'm not sure what value there is in using GPG/OpenPGP when none of my friends do. I can think of a few things:

      - promoting awareness of GPG (on those rare occasions when people ask me about the GPG signature block),

      - using GPG for fun with fellow geeks I meet (but GPG is not mandatory --I mean, face it, I like you geeks and all, but no way am I going to exchange credit card numbers with you)

      Right now I've got my wife set up to optionally have GPG available (via Enigmail on Thunderbird), but she's hardly usi

  • built-in security? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This isn't a direct answer, but it's directly related. I've always wondered why network applications don't use encryption by default. For practically everything, from web servers to instant message apps, you have to go out of your way to set it up with any decent level of security.

    Why aren't all connections passed over ssl or ssh? I know it's a bit of overhead, but it's not that significant for modern desktops.

    Why isn't it the norm to see web servers running SSL? Why is SSL reserved for only financial t
    • One more thing to go wrong and increase support costs. Or if you like tinfoil, 'cuz the NSA want their job easier. There's no way they could snarf anything beyond src/dst/vol/time traffic analysis if most of the net were encrypted.

      I suspect some netzis like China (Singapore?) would ban encrypted traffic if they could.

      • I suspect some netzis like China (Singapore?) would ban encrypted traffic if they could.

        And England and Australia.

        The Clinton administration floated a bill that would mandate that the Feds keep in escrow "only accessible by subpoena or warrant" (yeah, right) all crypto keys.

        Your slashdot id is low enough that you remember the Clipper chip, right? (And the Republican who lead the political charge against it?)



      1. Certificates give Verisign more $
      2. Most websites are read only. So the only interesting bit for a spy is who connects, SSL doesn't hide that.
      3. You can't use SSL on multiple virtual hosts in Apache 1.x (not sure about 2.x) so even for self signing you have to choose which single hostname to use.
      4. What incentive for me as a host ?

      I'm with you for some stuff, but that's usually where verifying your identity is important. My webmail/imap host is SSL - https://www.fastmail.fm/ [fastmail.fm] but I have no idea who they actually are

    • There's a simple reason; it costs money.

      Browsers come with a limited number of root certificates. If they encounter a SSL connection not signed by one of these certificates, a dialog box pops up warning the user and asking if they wish to continue. Clearly, you don't want the browser implying that you're untrustworthy to your users, so you have to go out and get a certificate signed by Verisign or some similar company.

      Large websites clearly don't have a problem with this. What's several hundred dollars to a

  • tor (Score:3, Insightful)

    by compro01 (777531) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:07PM (#15347630)
    well, personally, if i'm doing something that i don't want traced, i'll fire up tor (http://tor.eff.org/ [eff.org])tor

    i currently don't really worry about my email security (if someone wants to read my aunt's cookie recipes, thats fine by me). if i happened to be doing something important, i'd likely use some form of encryption, likely PGP or maybe something stronger.

    • The flaw in only using GPG for "important" stuff: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by KWTm (808824) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @12:50AM (#15348550) Journal

      i currently don't really worry about my email security (if someone wants to read my aunt's cookie recipes, thats fine by me). if i happened to be doing something important, i'd likely use some form of encryption
       


      This reminds me of a joke that takes place in a courtroom:

      Prosecutor: Did you see this woman in New York?
      Defendant: I refuse to answer that question!
      Prosecutor: Did you see this woman in Chicago?
      Defendant: I refuse to answer that question!
      Prosecutor: Did you see this woman in Atlanta?
      Defendant: What!? Atlanta?? I never saw her in Atlanta!

      Moral of the story: if you don't pay attention to your email security except when you really need to, then when you do pay attention, someone else would also know to pay attention!

      If someone wants to read my aunt's cookie recipes, that is not fine by me. Eat my {/dev/random}-XOR'd dust.

  • Disable Cookies (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:09PM (#15347650)
    About all I use online is a web browser. For this, I of course use Mozilla Firefox, but disable cookies (except for sites that I know really need them, like online banking) and disable certain javascript features (opening windows, removing location bar, etc.).

    I also use adblock to disable tracking sites. You know, hitbox.com and the like which use included URLs to track you by your IP address.
    • Adblock is very cool. I had to disable it to even see ads on /. I didn't know there were ads till people were talking about them in their posts, so I had to look.

    • Re:Disable Cookies (Score:4, Informative)

      by DrSkwid (118965) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @02:47AM (#15348977) Homepage Journal
      the NoScript extension is also a MUST HAVE

      From /.'s homepage :

      <script src="//images.slashdot.org/prototype.js?T_2_5_0_11 1a" type="text/javascript">

      <script src="//images.slashdot.org/common.js?T_2_5_0_111a" type="text/javascript">

      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://a.as-us.falkag.net/dat/dlv/aslmain.js" >

      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://an.tacoda.net/an/11711/slf.js">

      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://a.as-us.falkag.net/dat/njf/104/slashdo t/mainpage_p2_top_right_skyscraper.js">

      <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
      <script type="text/javascript">
              _uacct = "UA-32013-5";
              urchinTracker();
      </script>
      • For those of us who don't use Firefox, it's easier and way more satisfying to blacklist those domains completely. Tacoda.net could be in the business of giving away free signed copies of Windows 98 to 3rd world puppies for all I know, but as far as I'm concerned they've dirtied their name with the crappy type of advertising, and I don't want to see anything from their servers. It'll be an annoying day when google catches on and brings google-analytics.com under google.co.uk, though.

  • Simple (Score:3, Funny)

    by halcyon1234 (834388) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:12PM (#15347664) Journal
    It's simple. Don't ask stupid questions on a forum populated by a good chunk of people who consider BOHF to be non-fiction (and a training manual, to boot).
  • Seriously, who are your opponents? You cannot do any security planning without threat scenarios. If the NSA wants you, they pwn j00 d00d! But fortunately, they're seldom interested , and even more reluctant to disgorge their capabilities by revealing info.

    So you have to decide what is cost effective. For me, for most things, no security at all the the perferred option. I _want_ people to read my postings and email. I'm far more concerned with my msgs not being received/read than unauthorized people

  • The ULTIMATE Solution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ImaNihilist (889325) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:46PM (#15347834)
    Lie. Lie about everything. Writing an email to your friend? Lie about it. Lie about everything that happened to you. Lie about who you are. IT DOESN'T MATTER. Signing up for some new service? Lie. Lie about your name, age, race, sex, address, credit card, whatever. Actually need to recieve the package? Send it to your neighbor and pick it up at the FedEx office with a fake ID that goes with your fake personality. Sometimes if you lie enough to a girl, you even get to sleep with her. Then, if you get herpes you can just lie to everyone else and say you don't have it! IT'S THE SAME THING IF YOU USE WINDOWS AND GET A VIRUS!! HOORAH! The lies will set you free.

  • I don't (Score:5, Insightful)

    by carlmenezes (204187) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @09:54PM (#15347870) Homepage
    I just simply do not enter valid information. If they wanted valid information, there are enough ways of getting it. The more information a site asks for, the more I make sure that the responses I give are false. If a site only wants say, my date of birth, I might give my real date. If it wants my postal address, telephone number, yada yada without just cause...I will give them wrong info. Its my way of discouraging the use of such techniques. Maybe if enough people do it, then the next time they upgrade their site they will ask only for information that they absolutely need to have instead of every little detail.
    • Maybe if enough people do it, then the next time they upgrade their site they will ask only for information that they absolutely need to have instead of every little detail.

      Heh-heh. You've never worked for a large company, have you?

      Employee: "Hey, boss, this data's no good. Most people are just typing a-s-d-f for their names and addresses and registering fake info!"

      Manager: "Yeah, but it's really important that we find out what they think of our site. Let's get them to take a customer survey after

  • The only way would be to browse the internet from a completely anonymous place like a public library.

  • Here it is take it! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by B5_geek (638928) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @10:14PM (#15347962)
    John Smith
    1234 Anystreet
    Anytown, CA
    90210
    (123)456-7890

    DOB: 1/1/1900
    email: aolsux@aol.com
    Mothers maiden name: mommy

    Easy to remember on any site I visit.
    the moral of the story, NEVER give out true information to ANY online site.
    You make exceptions on an as-needed basis.
    (eg. bank, 1 or 2 trustworthy sites to shop from.)
    • Yesterday I tried to sign up for something and entered 1/1/1900 as my d.o.b., selecting the values from dropdown boxes. For some reason, I received the error "incorrect date" until I upped the year to 1920. Strange.
        • It's not a "throw-off" credit card, but my MBNA card has a nice downloadable app called ShopSafe that I *love* and use religiously.

          It lets you generate a "one-time use" number, with a limit on the amount and expiration date. Once that number is used, it can't be used again. I just used it to buy a radio for my Harley; the price was about $700 plus shipping, so I made the amount $800 and expiration date two months out.

          Once the company uses that number, it's locked. I can go into ShopSafe and reclaim the u

  • How do I protect my identity? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chuck Chunder (21021) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @10:34PM (#15348040) Homepage Journal
    Easy, I just use someone elses!

  • Whois records (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Centurix (249778) <mrjolly@op t u s n e t . com.au> on Tuesday May 16 2006, @10:38PM (#15348056) Homepage
    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.
  • I almost never put my real name on the net, I use my "nick" extensively (it _really) cuts down on phishing attacks and makes them much easier to spot), If I have to put my name down for anything other than CC purchases I put my initials in only.

    Out of site out of mind and common sense is the only way to survive.
  • Firstly, tor [eff.org] with Privoxy and a Firefox plugin that makes it easy to switch between it and a direct connection. Others may use FreeNet [sourceforge.net], but I personally don't bother.

    For IRC, connect using SSL (If you trust the network admins. Even if you don't, still better than nothing) and perhaps through Tor as well. For email, anything PGP-ish.

    Also, for protecting my files, I use TrueCrypt [truecrypt.org].

  • Another approach that works 100% of the time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AudioEfex (637163) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @12:58AM (#15348581)
    ...Just don't put shit on the Internet you want to keep secret. You never enter it in, it never gets out. AE

  • Some cross platform tools I use both under Linux and Windows:

    • Firefox with PermitCookies extension (to easily enable cookies on trusted websites) and BugMeNot extension (to avoid compulsory registration at popular websites)
    • When really needed (since it's pretty slow) Tor + Privoxy to surf anonymously
    • Thunderbird + Enigmail for email
    • Gaim + gaim-encryption plugin for IM
    • Truecrypt for disk encryption (latest version runs great under Linux too, although there is no GUI yet)
    • Throw-away email accounts like mai
  • Be careful of the steady leak of information that most people go through. After registering on a few forums and stuff like that, it's amazing how much information you can release in a short space of time. After that, your data is only a small search [google.co.uk] away. Even though I've only used this URL and alias for a short while, it already leads to a Frappr map of users of ##slackware on freenode, with my general location and a photo... someone who really knew what they were doing could whois my site [domaintools.com] and then they'd
  • Asking Slashdot: Now THAT's a cheap way to perform methodical analysis for a government agency. No, I will not share any wisdom about how I do protect my online privacy.
  • This'll be suck eggs for many, but new to others.

    I, like many of you have the ability to have anything@mydomain email addresses that i can use/create on the fly. So what I do is, whenever I register on a website or give my email address out to a third party, I enter/provide a unique address. my email address at slashdot is 'slashdot@mydomain', at amazon it's amazon@mydomain and for any business contact it's my companyname@mydomain - anyway you get the idea.

    The instant I get spam sent to an address, I immedi

  • Technologies to use... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jurgen (14843) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @06:11AM (#15349528)
    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 [arg0.net]... 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/ [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.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/ [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/ [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

  • I just go to China. The real Internet can't touch me there.

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