Keeping your Privacy Private

[razmirz]

I don't know about anyone else but my Internet privacy keeps coming up. And no I'm not referring to stop putting your personal details on facebook and other social networking sites (not that I'd advise it). If you've ever wondered why facebook is free see below.

Truth About Facebook

Moving on we have had sopa pipa and acta as well as many other legislations which have attempted to be put into force of a similar nature. If you don't know about these firstly where have you been and secondly its well detailed in Lawcere's post here

At this point your probably wondering what other threats are pending. Well none that could directly put you in jail but lets look at search giant Google as of March the first, Google will be gathering every snippet of info they can find on you. Which isnt just what websites you visit but details down to where you go on those websites. Even here Google watch your session and monitor every page you click. Details on anonymizing your Google activity here

A further step to keep your activity's private is to "opt-out" of company's (Google included) data gathering cookies. The easiest way to do this on Firefox is with the beef taco extension found here That should keep over 100 company's from profiling what you do.

So that fairly well covers the "legal" monitoring of your information. But hacking is becoming far more prominent too even for my phone if I wanted to I could take it break into a WIFI network and steal peoples logins for all kinds of things. Which is really quite scary considering its based only on the software available for my phone now quite old phone. (Just on an off note if your home wifi says its secured with WEP or doesn't mention what its secured with make sure you change it to at least WPA preferably "WPA2 AES  only")

Unfortunately being on your network isn't the only way a hacker can steal you info so long as they are between you and the place you want to get to they can quite happily steal your data. There are some widely available but not well used technology's out there. The first one you should look at is HTTPS, HTTP is the usual computer protocol for bringing websites you your pc and you also pass information back to them such as passwords using it. HTTPS is the Secure version of HTTP and as such anyone monitoring your connection will just seen an encrypted stream of data. Passwords are the obvious info you would like to hide but it also hides all the url's you visit so instead of your provider seeing that you visited

http://www.feral-heart.com/index.php?option=com_jfusion&Itemid=2&jfile=index.php

the provider will simply see that you accessed

https://www.feral-heart.com/

no matter what page on the site you visit. So why don't browsers just take you to the HTTPS sites by default? Well that's because not every website supports it so if you were to go round typing https://www.whereever.com you would probably become annoyed at the number of times you visited a page and it chose to give you a page is unreachable error or start warning you about invalid website certificates. Again for Firefox users I have a couple of add-ons to help you. The first is HTTPS Finder found here HTTPS Finder checks every site you visit to see if HTTPS is available if it is you'll quickly be swapped over to the HTTPS version of the site. Another add-on HTTPS Everywhere lets you take rules from HTTPS Finder and forces the browser to go directly to the HTTPS site in future browsing sessions. HTTPS everywhere is found here. Chrome has a similar Extention called Prefer HTTPS found here

Some hackers are a little more advanced than this though so a further security protocol called DNSSEC has been introduced the purpose of DNSSEC is to make sure the website you reach is actually the one you intended to visit. Quite simply its there to stop hackers putting up rogue sites that look like real ones in order to steal your credentials. On Firefox a DNSSEC validator add-on is available from here It adds a key to your address bar showing grey green or red dependent on whether DNSSEC is supported valid or showing if a sites been hijacked.

An extra note for email users if you pick-up your mail from an app on your phone or a program on your PC check your account settings. Its not unusual for these to be set-up on unencrypted protocols just waiting to be snooped. Make sure your SMTP and your POP or IMAP settings show that they use SSL or TLS if your unsure about this check your email providers website for instructions.

Think that should cover most of your browsing habits and sorry about the lack of Chrome and Internet Explorer support but I just hate both browsers xD. Any additions questions or suggestions let me know.

Raz

[Zawp]

I'd suggest Ghostery over Taco.

Also, one thing a lot of people don't think about is the HTTP "Referer" header. When you click a link on a website your browser will include the site you're coming from in the request you're making to the link location.

If you click a link on secret.com that goes to google.com then Google will know that you visit secret.com, and it does it with full urls. Same thing happens with included scripts, images, etc. You can end up sharing very sensitive information with random websites if someone simply includes an image from some external site. And that's another benefit to HTTPS, unlike HTTP HTTPS leaves the referer blank.

You can use something like RefControl and tell it to always send the website root as the referer, and if you're hardcore you can use RequestPolicy.

[Ouuka]

Wow, thanks for this Raz. Its always interesting to learn these things, not to mention when it deals with personal info crap. Sad that most personal info is no longer protected anywhere.

[razmirz]

I'd suggest Ghostery over Taco.

I'm aware of Ghostery but I'm also aware of the affects of ad blocking. A good article can be found on it here
I know Ghostery does more than just ad blocking. But internet statistics are a helpful tool to those running websites better that you provide a certain degree without being profiled for your own sake so the creators can improve sites for you.