How To Split An Atom

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While it is pretty unlikely that your average person will ever become the victim of internet eavesdroppers, if you are sending sensitive information, or maybe just aren’t interested in letting everyone know how much time you spend on Facebook, you might be interested in ways to make your way around the web privately.

Here are some simple solutions for the privacy minded.

Disable Facebook Beacon

This one comes to us from Idea Shower.

• Download and Install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox.
• After restarting Firefox select ‘Add-ons’ from the Tools menu.
• Click the ‘Options’ button on the BlockSite extension
• Click the ‘Add’ button
• Enter http://www.facebook.com/beacon/* into the input box
• Click ‘OK’
• Click ‘OK’ again and you are good to go.

Customize Google

Download 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 send PGP encrypted emails. The nice thing about Hushmail is that it’s free.

VPN and SSH

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 mask 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.

Tor

Even though there are some questions as to whether Tor is completely secure, if you configure it properly it can be a great way to obfuscate your web habits.

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.

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