Why protect your metadata?

Every interaction you do over the internet leaves digital footprints. Malicious 3rd parties can monitor your interactions and learn a lot about your habits, preferences and thoughts.

This report shows that 9 out 10 Caught in NSA Dragnet Are ‘Ordinary People’, meaning that you don’t need to be doing anything bad to be accidentally caught up in surveillance.

Crikey wrote an article on how Data retention will hurt YOU, not criminals

Ways to protect yourself

*=Minimum recommended

HTTPS

• Setup Difficulty: Easy
• Level of protection: Low. Encrypts your data stopping casual collection of personal information
• Quick setup link: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Raw data sent over the internet can be read by anyone that handles the data as it travels to you. This could be credit card numbers, personal information, etc. E-Commerce websites have been encrypting their data with HTTPS for many years now. An easy way to help prevent leaking personal details is to ensure that you use the more secure HTTPS version. HTTPS Everywhere is a browser plugin that will switch you to the HTTPS version of a website if it is available. You can add it to your browser from it’s website https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Secure messaging

• Setup Difficulty: Easy. (However you still need to convince your friends that privacy is important enough for them to switch over with you)
• Level of protection: Medium. Will stop people from seeing who you message and what the contents are.
• Quick setup link: https://telegram.org Default chats have 1 level of protection, but use secret chats for increased encryption.
• EFF scorecard of chat clients

Using a secure messaging client can help protect what you send and who you send it to. Sometimes who you message can be worse than what you type. Simply communicating with a friend, who is a friend of someone bad can get you caught up in the net.

The EFF have compiled a scorecard of the messaging clients on how well they protect your privacy. Ones like Facebook and Whatsapp rate very low.

Website tracker blocker

• Setup Difficulty: Easy
• Level of protection: Low. Stops websites collecting your browsing habits
• Quick setup link: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

Privacy Badger is a tool from EFF to stop companies from spying on your browsing habits https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

TOR

• Setup Difficulty: Medium
• Level of protection: High. Hides that there was direct communication between you & website
• Quick setup link: https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. https://www.torproject.org/

VPN

• Setup Difficulty: Medium
• Level of protection: High. Hides that there was direct communication between you & website
• Use it to protect all of your internet access on mobile phones and desktop.
• Commercial VPNs cost money. You need to decide if your privacy is worth the $10/month

Using a VPN allows you to route all of your computer’s activities on the internet through another computer. This means that anyone monitoring your access to the internet will just see you sending an encrypted stream to your VPN provider and be unable to see what you are accessing.

Commercial VPNs are typically very easy to set up once you have signed up, many have desktop and mobile phone clients that you can use to instantly connect you.

To help you find a commercial VPN to sign up to here is a list of VPNs that value your anonymity https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-vpn-service-provider-review-2015-150228/ and another VPN list from Gizmodo http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/06/the-best-vpn-providers-what-you-need-to-know/