Today I want to talk to you all about privacy and how you can keep it. With all this new legislation being proposed in government and the like, you might ask yourself, how do can I take matters into my own hands to protect my privacy.
Well, today I'm going to illustrate for you two methods of doing so.
Before I do, I just want to say that I don't advocate the use of the following tools or techniques within an enterprise environment, because that would cause your IT guy a whole lot of headaches. So if you work in an office, do not use these techniques on your computers at work. If you're like me, I can see when this kind of stuff is happening on the network and probably come over and smack you for it.'
So just don't do it on your work computer. This is specifically for your home computer.
Also, I'd like to point out that no technique to conceal yourself is entirely foolproof. Unless you have access to a stolen credit card, there is no way to totally hide yourself if you want to live more or less legitimately under the laws that govern your country. Even then, that's not foolproof either. So, unless you want to become a criminal to conceal your identity, keep that in mind.
Also, I don't advocate the stealing of intellectual property. All people have a right to be paid for what they do. Their labors should have reward. While legitimate means of reasonable access to affordable content is available, there should be no reason not to pay for other peoples stuff.
With all that in mind, these are some ways you can protect yourself a little from nosy people.
First thing I recommend is getting yourself a little program called "Peerblock." This is a handy little free application that basically just blocks known bad computers on the internet from connecting to you. When I say bad, I mean, governments, certain media corporations, and other people who just want to watch what your doing for whatever nefarious purpose. It's whats more commonly known in the IT community as an IP Filter which inspects internet traffic when it reaches your computer.
Once you install it and run it, you'll see what I mean when you go to surf the net. Particularly when you're watching netflix. They have a nice graphical interface which shows who is trying to connect to your computer. I take a little bit of unhealthy enjoyment from seeing those connections being dropped when I periodically check it.
Now the second way of protecting your privacy is to get yourself an account with a VPN service. These are basically people who run servers which allow you to connect and funnel your internet traffic through them. You basically create a tunnel from your computer to their computer which is totally encrypted and unreadable by anyone trying to monitor your internet usage, including your ISP. When you surf through one of these VPN's, well it looks like the websites or whatever traffic your generating is done from the site your connected to. So for example I connect to a vpn server in Seattle, and go to a specific website thats only viewable in the US, all of a sudden it works for me in Canada. This helps you get around pesky censorship laws that your crazy government might be imposing upon you.
There are dangers though when connecting to a VPN service. The first and foremost is that when you connect your computer to another with a vpn connection, you have opened yourself up to whatever is on that network. This also means, that those who are administering the network can view whatever you do on the connection. So, that means, when you are connected to a VPN service for privacy purposes, do not check facebook, do not check your email, and certainly don't do any online banking. Any time you have to type in a username and password while connected to one, you are exposed.
The VPN service you want to look for are ones which are described as being based or having servers in non-compliant areas. Non-compliant areas being, China, Russia, or any other country which is known not to co-operate with international censorship laws. Most of the time this means that those kinds of VPN's won't just give up their usage logs to governments when they are asked to. Also something to consider when connecting to non-compliant regions, you then expose your computer to those countries which are notorious for cyber crime.
There are VPN services based here in Canada which would give you a nice degree of anonymity without sacrificing the security you would lose connecting to a different country. The advantage of local VPN's is that there is a degree of recourse should anything happen.
The other disadvantage of a VPN service is connection speed. Because you are now relying on both your internet speed and the internet speed of the VPN provider, you will generally see slower connections. So you take the hit in download speed for a bit of privacy.
So on that note, I just want to end off with a nice quote I heard recently.
"Those who know know, and let me keep what little privacy I have."
Well, thats all I had to say about that..
