How to stop the online snoops
PeekTired of being hounded by online retailers, indexed by search engines and possibly monitoredby Big Brother governments? Jamie Carter looks at ways to thwart the cyber snoops
It's been more than a month since the Post exclusively interviewed surveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden, but the fallout from his revelations about the US PRISM cyber-snooping program continue. Among them were claims that US authorities have hacked Chinese mobile phone companies to access millions of private text messages, while Tsinghua University in Beijing appears to have been targeted, too.
It has brought attention to just how public our personal web browsing, online chat, file transfer, voice-over IP calls, cloud storage and e-mail really are. But is there anything we can do to stay safe from the snoops?
It's hard to hide yourself, if someone pursuing your information is determined
There are multiple ways of "digital shredding", encrypting data and staying anonymous, but before we explore the options, it's worth asking why you want to operate in secret. Also, if you encrypt your data, does that make you more suspicious to government snoopers?
Kevin Curran, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, reckons anyone making such arguments is living in the past. He says we've moved on from a time when the only people using encryption were paranoid geeks, terrorists and law enforcement agencies. Forget the Big Brother angle and think of it this way: is locking your house at night suspicious behaviour, or having a PIN code on your smartphone?
Keeping your private data secure is good practice for individuals and is becoming a necessity for businesses.
But there is no silver bullet that will keep all of your data and online behaviour safe.