Project – best practices for people to use to keep there data secure, including tools.

Greetings All —

For a while there have been questions from people on what are the best ways to keep your personal data and information safe from prying eyes on the net. This is is a hard question because your data is now a valuable commodity, by many groups, both business and governmental. Some of it is a good thing, much of the free services would never be around, or of it is it would be a “pay for use” type system if all of your personal data was kept hidden away and not able to be used. The internet we see now may never have grown to what it is today. So some personal information being used as a commodity is a good thing, but, you still need to protect as much as you can of it and how it is being used. For a few blog entries there will be some tips and ways to keep most of it secure, and ways to keep track of it from people that try to take and use it. It is not totally possible to keep all your data safe, never has and never will be, sorry that is the way it is.

For the next few entries I will give you some ideas to keep your data safe and also give you some tools to use to help as well. Here are some of the key points I will try to cover and not in any special order except I will do the general information first.

Key points to cover –

General information
E-mail
File exchange
Web browsing
IM exchange
Buying online
Social media

There are some things you can go right away, some take a bit of work but are worth doing to give you a fighting chance to keep your data safe. For now I will leave you with one quick idea, it is easy but it does require some work. It is passwords, make sure you change them from time to time, and don’t use the same one for everything. Each site should have its own password, Ok you may be saying “well how to I keep track of them all?.” There are programs that will store them and are password protected as well. When it comes to passwords, lengths is not always what matters it is what letters/numbers are being used for the password. A nice rule of thumb is 10 characters with a mix of numbers letters and special characters, that being ($&#*) or a mix of others depending on your keyboard. Use at least three of them and don’t use thinks like your pet, home, kids, or real object names. Many times people will use a dictionary to scan for the names. If you want to do a bit of looking check out Steve Gibsons web site (grc.com) he has a nice write up on password storage programs.

Well that should keep you bust for a while – more to follow.

Keeping your messages safe from prying eyes

With the current political environment your privacy is being chipped away more and more each day. Much of the debate is based on the idea that if you are not doing anything wrong then you should have no worry about your information being viewed by the government, this in itself is a fallacy. Another debate is that they need the ability to view everything to protect you from terrorists that are bent on harming your way of life, this is a long discussion in itself, but not here.

With the next few entries I will discuss ways to keep your messages private between you and the people you want to exchange information with. The key ones will be E-mail, IM and file exchange using encryption and encryption type programs. Some of them require usage of special programs that you and the person your are exchanging information with need to have set up. It is quite simple to do, I will also give some tips and tricks on using them. All of the applications I will talk about are open source so if you wish to view how they work you can.

The E-mail program I will be using in the discussion is Thunderbird with some plugins. It has clients for windows, mac and Linux, I use this because it seems to be on of the more extendable clients for email. It will be used with a public key / private key clients to encrypt and decrypt the messages. For exchanging IM between you and another person I will be expanding on pidgin, it is a multi-service client, that is it works with yahoo, AIM, jabber, exchange and some others. The last group of topics will be encrypting your files, so if you travel you can be generally sure your files will be safe from prying eyes. This is not the entire list of applications you could use, nor is there a guarantee that the data can not be decrypted at some time in the future. As technology changes one never knows, but for now its mostly safe.

I will add different programs as I go from time to time under the same heading, so I hope it will spur you into keeping an eye on your data and who may be snooping on it, for good or evil.