Putting it all on the table
OUR MOBILE DEVICES CONTAIN A SIZABLE CHUNK OF OUR LIFES NOW, AND THEY LEAK LIKE A SIEVE. It’s your phone, your email reader, your connection to Facebook and Twitter, your camera, and so much more. The average smartphone user uses 25-30 apps, and has many more than that installed. Do you know what they all do, or who they share data with? And what happens if someone else gets your phone?
SURFING THE WEB EXPOSES A LOT OF INFORMATION ABOUT YOU. Even before you get a warning about a site wanting to access location information, or anything protected, your web browser is broadcasting a lot more information than you realize. Getting that under control is a step that anyone can do, regardless of how far down the path you want to go to anonymity, and will not take very much effort at all.
PASSWORDS SUCK, SO DON’T MAKE THEM WORSE. Remember the days when we used the same password for every site? Was it yesterday? It’s time to get serious about managing your access tokens for everything. This isn’t going to be as easy as typing your dog’s name into every password prompt, but it will give you peace of mind.
JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN EVERYONE ISN’T OUT TO GET YOU. Nobody wants to be constantly looking over their shoulder, wondering if their kids are secretly informing on them to some three-letter agency. I’m not going to get into whether or not you should trust people, as I’m more interested here in not trusting computers. Being paranoid means being suspicious, examining systems and actions and getting creative about all the ways they can be used to keep tabs on us.
THE DEFINITION OF SURVEILLANCE IS “CLOSE OBSERVATION”. When you’re working with privacy and security, this is basically the thing you are trying to avoid – someone watching what you are doing. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to be more anonymous, we need to understand how surveillance works in a digital world.
OVER THE PAST COUPLE WEEKS, THERE IS A RENEWED INTEREST IN PERSONAL PRIVACY AND SECURITY. Regardless of why, you’re suddenly a little more interested in protecting yourself from someone else’s snooping and you find yourself here, on my humble site, looking for a little help. Over the next several posts, I will do my best to give you a crash course in privacy, with as little of that “inside bullshit jargon that nobody understands”.
