Francois's blog

The Problem:
One of the issues with email or instant messengers presently is the number of intermediates the communication goes through, each of which could potentially read your messages since they are generally sent in plain text.

The Solution:
To drastically reduce the possibility of Internet communications being intercepted, a joint webmail or online document-editing, or filesharing account that supports end-to-end encryption would be the best.

As you may know, emails are sent, received and stored on email servers in plain text. This means that when you send an email, there are as many opportunities for someone to read your mail or cache it for later reading as there are nodes along its path from your email server to your recipient's email server. Thus emails are generally not private or secure communication channels at all.

Here are some tips to make emails more anonymous and private.

"Anonymous" proxy servers are not really anonymous. The word "anonymous" is used here in reference to the property of the proxy not to forward your Internet Protocol (IP) address to the website you are visiting through the proxy server. In other words, the website thinks the request for information is coming from the proxy's IP. However, in many cases, even this isn't true of "anonymous" proxies.

For those who are using other browsers such as:

- Internet Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx)
- Apple's Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/)
- Opera (http://www.opera.com/)
- K-Meleon (a lightweight browser built on Mozilla's Gecko engine: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/)
- or Konqueror (Linux KDE browser: http://www.konqueror.org/features/browser.php)

Security and privacy add-ons are often not as readily available and often cannot protect engine-based vulnerabilities for other browsers. However, they each have different features that may attract specific users. Rather than to propose ways to improve privacy and security by changing specific settings for each browser, I suggest using a method that should work for any browsing application: a local ad, cookie, and javascipt filtering proxy.

Here are the tools I use to browse the Internet everyday in a safer, more private manner and why. There are many avenues for you to choose from, I chose this one because it enhances my privacy without really hindering my browsing. Alternatives will follow in my next post.

Hi, I'm a technical researcher at the Citizen Lab and I will be blogging about tech tips and tricks to have a better, safer, more anonymous and uncensored Internet experience. This blog is intended for all Internet users, beginners and techies alike.