I don’t use Facebook personally.  I’d rather not be user generated content for a company that has every incentive to make my private information public.  But nearly everyone I know does have a Facebook account, and I can understand part of the appeal.  As I’ve mentioned in other posts on digital defense, I consider personal data protection to be part of self defense.  The details of your private life can be more valuable than what’s in your wallet or purse at any given time.

Even though I don’t use Facebook myself, I decided to put a FB like button (which you can see at the bottom of this post for example) on this site.  Since there are hundreds of millions of Facebook users, I figured it would be a good way for them to share this site with their friends.  In order to do that I signed up for a Facebook account to get a FB “application id”.  I have numerous email addresses, and I used the one associated with this website when I created the account.  To my horror, I was shown a list of people I may know.  How did Facebook know that I knew some of these people since I didn’t even have a Facebook account???

After doing a bit of research, it seems that Facebook asks users to upload their email contacts in order for Facebook to see if they have any “friends” on the network.  So even if you don’t use Facebook yourself, if you’ve emailed with someone who does, there’s a good chance that Facebook has connected you to that person through their email contact list.  Keeping your private life private just got a little bit harder…

I recently posted instructions explaining how to encrypt your email for free in order to defend against hackers, corporations, and governments stealing your emails.  Here’s a short follow up on encrypting your files.

Many of us have important information on our computers, and if it were stolen it could do us more damage than having a wallet or purse stolen.  While many people think about protecting their wallets and purses, they don’t give nearly enough consideration to their digital information.  Furthermore, protecting your files is a lot easier than learning physical self defense!  The easiest way to make your files inaccessible to hackers is to encrypt them.  Download and install Truecrypt.  It works on both Windows and the Mac OS, and you can choose to encrypt everything from single files to your entire computer.

I find the most convenient feature to be creating an encrypted folder, disguised as a corrupt file.  All you do is type in your password, and the file appears as a drive where you can store your most important data.  Give it a try, and protect yourself online!

When most people use the term self defense they use it to refer to defense against a physical attack.  With so much of our lives moving onto the web, the idea of self defense needs to be expanded to encompass our computers and the internet.  CNN recently published an article on how Chinese hackers (most likely the Chinese government) were able to gain access to Gmail accounts via a backdoor created for the US government to spy on Gmail users suspected of connections to terrorism.  The article points out that if the US government can intercept or steal your emails, so can foreign governments and hackers.

The best solution is to encrypt your emails.  That way, even if they’re stolen from your computer or your online account (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) the hacker will be unable to read them.  Encrypting your emails is easy.  The only catch is that whoever you’re sending them to will need to be able to decrypt them.  So both you and the people you email will need to install software to encrypt and decrypt emails.  Fortunately, this is very easy, and there is no good excuse for not doing it.  Unlike with physical self defense, setting up email encryption takes just a few minutes…and you’re done.  Here’s how to do it for free with Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client:

1.  If you don’t already have Thunderbird you can download it here.  It’s an excellent, free mail client that functions like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail.

2.  Install GNU Privacy Guard on your computer.  You can download it here (and here for Mac users).  This will allow your computer to encrypt and decrypt files.

3.  Download the Enigmail add on for Thunderbird.  Here’s the link for both Windows and Mac users.  This add on will give Thudnerbird the ability to encrypt and decrypt email using GNU Privacy Guard.

4.  After you install it, you will have an OpenPGP option in Thunderbird. Select Key Management, then Generate a New Key Pair, and follow the instructions.

5.  After you’ve created your public and private encryption keys, right click your key and email it to your contacts.  Ask your contacts to follow these steps, and send you their public keys.  Now you’ll be able to send and receive encrypted emails that hackers, corporations, and governments will not be able to read!