insanesecurity

Regain your privacy and anonymity

Hopefully as you may have noticed, on a daily basis more and more of our (users) privacy is stripped shamelessly away by almost every website out there.

And so you don’t think I am speaking in a hypocritical manner, I admit I strip as well a part from your privacy, with the simple Google tracker I have inside my web pages… but for those that do care about their anonymity this is not an issue.

Tor

As any other person would say, as a first step in regaining your anonymity would be installing the Tor bundle… And don’t get me that “just hackers use proxies”, because it’s not true… who would use a proxy for a %25 bonus prison time if caught? (they would use their own tunnels and proxies, not Tor networks)

There are many reasons why you would use a proxy, apart from the list which you can read on Tor projects website “Who uses Tor?“, what better way to hide your ass when trolling people?

Use Tor, if possible even help out by setting up a node, and be happy of it’s extra anonymity (which I cannot have).

Scroogle

Well, in case you are a Google user I hope you know that every search you ever do is logged… If you have a Google account you may check your whole search history here. Now you may see where Scroogle would come in pretty handy. It also comes with SSL support, so it also adds a part of privacy to it: ssl.scroogle.org.

In simple terms Scroogle does the search on Google for you, drops the cookie that Google tries to attach to your browser and prints you the output of the search.

BugMeNot

Often enough websites ask you for a user account in your attempt to access their content, even if it’s going to be your first (and last) visit on their page. Well through BugMeNot you can bypass that compulsory registration process. Why not just register?

Mailinator

In case BugMeNot didn’t have the answer for the problem (as in bypassing compulsory registration), you can quickly set up your account without having to fear spam later on. Mailinator offers you a easy one step temporary email address for any occasion, at any time you may need it.

GPG

GnuPG is the GNU project’s complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880 . GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication (…)

Using PGP encryption has many benefits, given the amount of tools built upon it.
For the browser (Firefox) you got FireGPG which let’s you sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt anything that you can select in your browser, this even includes email, posts and so fort. It also comes with implementation for Gmail.

Firefox addons

There are two addons which I know help in providing anonymity.

One would be NoScript, which I use to block trackers (like Google Analytics), but this is just a bonus for the main reason I use it, and I mean security.

The second one is RequestPolicy, which if even would look very similar to NoScript there is a finely grained difference them. I personally use both of them, and do recommend the same if you got the patience to whitelist websites you visit.

IM Encryption

The modern use of the internet is highly oriented on instant messaging, so this area of privacy should be taken care of with more interest than any other before told privacy measure.

For example the IM client Pidgin has a few privacy and security plugins from which you may choose.

As for IM clients like MSN and Yahoo! you may download (and use) BitDefender Chat Encryption for free.

More suggestions?

If there is something that you think I missed out (as in privacy and anonymity for internet users) feel free to contribute, even with alternatives for the before mentioned ones.