Computer Privacy

[Maeisgood]

What is a good technology forum to go to that specializes in protecting one's identity? I can't think of a good example of such a forum, but an example of protecting my identity on-line is using the search engine ixquick.com instead of google. Computers are not my forte but I think its an important enough area of my life to work on.

 

[Alle_Gory]

1. Never give out identifiable information in a public forum. Where you live, what your house looks like, the places you visit locally, what you look like. Anything that has an address or a unique name. For example, "I shopped at Best Buy yesterday" is not easy to identify because there's so many and it's such a vast company. "I like to go to Mcgillicuddy's Bar" well that's much easier to narrow down. Even sharing a picture can be a no-no since newer cameras sometimes have GPS data built into the EXIF image tags and tell you exactly where you took the picture within a few feet. You need to know what you're giving out before you do so. EXIF data can be stripped.

2. Use separate e-mail addresses with separate and hard to remember passwords. I have several e-mail addresses for this exact reason because I don't know who to trust and who will spam me. Google and Hotmail make this easy. Hotmail has aliases which is basically another e-mail address in your e-mail address. And for the love of god please don't use the same password on every website with every account.

3. Be aware of tracking cookies and other bull****. If you're using firefox you can get addons to prevent people tracking you. Adblock and betterprivacy come to mind. Chrome also has extensive plugins though I'm not aware of them and surprisingly even Opera has add-ons as well. It's the most secure browser and it's coming along very nicely. Version 12 looks fantastic and I'm sure in a few months will make Firefox obsolete. Perfosnally I don't trust Chrome since it's Google's browser and it's designed to monitor you for ad revenue and data mining purposes. Who knows what else.

 

[UnsworthK]

Download firefox and google for something called Tor Browser Bundle. Use Tor browser and that will give you a certain degree of anonymity on the net, but it does take a while to load sites.

 

[Maeisgood]

What is a good private email service to use? I don't trust anything google-related because its all used to data mining and general borg assimilation.

 

[Martin Shabazz Jr.]

I think virtually anything sent electronically is compromised to varying degrees.

If you're that paranoid about privacy you can always go old school and do all your important stuff in person or via mail.