Protecting your private data from intruders

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Privacy

Paul Brown

You don't have to be a criminal to want to preserve your privacy. Fortunately, Ubuntu, and the Open Source community provide ways to keep snoopers at bay.

There are no two ways about it: The idea that, if you want to keep your private matters, well, private, it's because you're a criminal or a pervert is a cynical shifting of the blame to the innocent party. The agencies doing the spying are in the wrong here. They are systematically violating the laws of all western democracies. Any private citizen doing the same thing would be thrown into jail without a second thought, and rightly so.

But, while we wait for the perpetrators of the NSA blanket spying to be indicted, what can we do? The old Internet adage "if you're not paying for it, you are not the client, you are the product" holds true for every single service on the Internet. The information you upload to popular social networks, store on clouds, and transfer through popular commercial communication networks is a prime candidate for harvesting, storage, analysis, and use by the creators of the services, as well as (as we now know but have long suspected) government security agencies.

If you want real confidentiality, you must avoid all the obvious popular and free (as in beer) options that have already proven untrustworthy. In other words, if you are serious about the issue of keeping your data private, you should steer clear of Facebooks, Hotmails, Gmails, Skypes, YouTubes, Dropboxes, and the like (I'll call this the first level of confidentiality). You should also use only open source software (a second level of confidentiality), because it is the only software that is audited frequently by independent, non-biased third parties. A third level of confidentiality is that you should be able to host the services that process and store your data yourself.

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