Google’s ever expanding range of services have caused us to move more and more of our identity onto their web services. Unfortunately, Google does very little to protect the information that we send across its servers.

While it is pretty unlikely that your average person will ever become the victim of internet eavesdroppers, if you are sending sensitive information (or just don’t want your boss reading your emails) you might be interested in ways to use Google (and lots of other web applications) anonymously.

Luckily you have several options available to you, many of them are as simple as installing a plugin.

Firefox


VideoJug: Computer Privacy

Like most good things on the internet, many of these solutions come from the Firefox community. Generally, what you are trying to accomplish is to make it so that every time you access a Google web service you do so from https instead of http. Https encrypts your connection and makes it much more difficult for anyone snooping on your network to read your latest email about how much you hate your IT department.

Catch-All Solution

Customize Google. First of all, this is a great plugin on its own. It removes click tracking, Anonymizes your Google userid, adds a result counter in search result, filter spammy websites from search results and add links to WayBack Machine on top of a host of other features. It can also force your browser to use the https version of all of Google’s web services.

More specific solutions can be found for various Google web applications, GmailSecure and Better GMail for email. Better gCal for Google’s Calendering service and Better gReader for Google’s feed reader.

HushMail

Well, no matter what you do to try to protect your data on Google you might be looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If you really want to secure your data, you should not be sending it without encryption in the first place. One of the more common methods of securing your communication is by using client that uses PGP keys. Hushmail is one of a slew of services that allow you to sell PGP encrypted emails. The nice thing about Hushmail is that it’s free.

Some Things To Think About

If privacy is a major concern of yours, and you happen to be a power users you might also want to look into VPN or SSH tunneling as ways to obfuscate your identity. Most corporate email services will allow you to wall off communications using a secured VPN, and if you are serious about securing your communication you should take advantage of this.

You might also want to take a look at EFF’s solution, Tor.

Tor. Tor is a software product that encrypts then sends your Internet traffic through a series of randomly selected computers, thus obscuring the source and route of your requests. It allows you to communicate with another computer on the Internet without that computer, the computers in the middle, or eavesdroppers knowing where or who you are. Tor is not perfect, but it would take a sophisticated surveillance effort to thwart its protections.

Web 2.0 Roundup

None of these methods are perfect and if someone is serious about tracking your network traffic they will be able to do so without much trouble. Luckily, other than embarrassing email conversations most of us are not really worth the effort. If you are really concerned about how your data can be intercepted, do your research and if you find other interesting tools tell us here.

[Be sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed before leaving]

  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Fark
  • Mixx
  • Propeller
  • TwitThis