Privacy Service Tips
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I got a comment on my recent post “Is Hushmail Safe?” where someone expressed the idea that a privacy service located in Canada wouldn’t be able to provide you with any real protection because of it’s proximity to the US and MLAT treaties between the two.
There are some basic practices that will help insure your privacy regardless of where it is in relation to you. They all center on the principle of not giving them any information that you don’t want them to be able to reveal.
IP Address
Your IP address goes a LONG way toward identifying you. Therefore you should never connect to a privacy service of any kind directly. Instead you should always use Tor or other anonymizing proxies to conceal your IP address.
But that slows everything down
It’s true that using TOR or other anonymizing proxies is slower than connecting directly. That’s because the steps that provide the increased security take more time and cpu cycles to do. It’s up to each person to decide if their security needs are worth slower loading pages
Proxy Chains
If you’re using proxies other than TOR, be sure to use a chain of several proxies. Ideally each one should be in a different jurisdiction. The connection should be something like this:
Your Browser > proxy1 > proxy2 > proxy3 > privacy service
Encryption
NEVER give anyone your private key or the passphrase! You only have their word that they won’t misuse or reveal them and simply put, that ain’t good enough. Instead of giving hushmail (or any other service) your private key and passphrase, you should do all encryption locally and only give the service the encrypted version.
If you’re sending your message by hushmail or remailer chains it’s also a good idea to wrap PGP/GPG encryption in a layer of symmetrical encryption. This further serves to hide the recipients by concealing the key-id of the key it’s encrypted to.
The way to do this is to encrypt the message to the recipient’s key, then take that encrypted block and encrypt it using a strong passphrase instead of a key. Both PGP and GnuPG can do this.
That seems like a lot of work
Yeah, I suppose it does but if you want privacy you have to be proactive about it. It takes a few extra steps to ensure privacy and security. If your data/message/secrets are worth it, you’ll take those steps. If they’re not worth it then they’re not really secrets at all.
Technorati Tags: privacy service, privacy tips, anonymous, proxy, anonymity, tor, anonymizing proxy, privacy service tips, encryption, privacy
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