5 free software tools for greater privacy
Here are a few ways to safeguard your surfing, email
By Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service | Mar 27, 2014 7:00 AM
If you use the Internet or a mobile phone, which in
modern society is hard to avoid, your personal data and communications are
constantly being collected and analyzed. From browsing histories, to emails to
text messages, revealing information is sought by a variety of actors,
including hackers, government spy agencies and the courts. It's hard to keep up
with the new ways information thought to be private is leaking out. But there
are a number of companies and volunteers building software tools that provide
privacy for users around their electronic communications. And best of all, many
of the basic versions are free.
Wickr: This San Francisco-based company's applications
for Android and iOS have been gaining traction as a safer alternative to SMSs
that are stored by operators. Messages and content such as files and photos can
be tagged with an expiration date after which they're thoroughly erased from
the recipient's device. Only encrypted content passes on the wire, and
encryption and decryption takes place on users' devices. Basic messaging via
Wickr is free.
MaskMe: This free extension for Google's Chrome browser
and Firefox is a multi-prong privacy tool. It generates "disposable"
email addresses that users can supply for website registrations if they don't
want to hand over their real one. Emails are forwarded to a person's main
address but can be shut off if spammy ones arrive. It also has a login and
password manager that is one of the best around as well as a strong password
generator. Abine, which built MaskMe, offers a $5 a month subscription service
for other masking features, such as the ability to supply a one-time disposable
credit card number and alternative phone number that diverts calls to your real
number.
Ghostery: Tracking Internet browsing is crucial for
delivering targeted advertising but also has grown more sophisticated,
prevalent and invasive than most users realize. Ghostery, which is free, is an
extension for the major Web browsers that records who is tracking your Web
activity through cookies, Web bugs, pixels and beacons. It provides information
on the entities that are doing the tracking and users have the option of
instructing Ghostery to block the activity in the future.
DuckDuckGo: A person's search history can be enormously
revealing. In 2006, the New York Times identified a specific person based on
their analysis of a data set from AOL thought to have been sufficiently made
anonymous. Search engines customarily retain this kind of data for some time to
improve their technology, but in the wrong hands, it at best could be
embarrassing and at worst, dangerous. DuckDuckGo has steadily gained popularity
as an alternative. It doesn't record a person's search terms or pass them along
to the site a person visits. It also doesn't record a browser's user agent
string, a batch of information about software the computer is running, or the
computer's IP address, which can, in some instances, be linked back to a
specific computer.
GPG Suite: It's never been terribly easy for lay people
to set up using encrypted email, but the GPG Suite makes it about as simple as
it's going to get. The Mac-only software suite lets people set up a pair of
private and public encryption keys in order to send scrambled email to other
people. It works with Apple's Mail program, and once set up, an encrypted
message can be sent by simply clicking a lock. The GPG Keychain Access
component is used to search for and store another person's public key, as well
as import and export keys. The group behind the suite, GPGTools, finances the
project through donations, payable by credit card, PayPal or bitcoin.
This story, "5 free software tools for greater
privacy" was originally published by IDG News Service .
Comments
Post a Comment