These days, there is absolutely no guarantee that what you do online is private. While there are many ways to hide your surfing habits from your family, cloaking yourself from unwanted and unnecessary snooping by local, state or federal authorities is much more difficult. As conservative politicians push for more restrictions of personal freedom, it is increasingly difficult for the regular citizen to maintain their right to privacy. Over the next few posts, I will investigate some of the things you can do to protect those rights. Consider this the first of a series.

The most important thing I can suggest to you, dear reader, is to immediately STOP  using your ISP’s email. If you don’t know what that is, it’s the free email you get when you signed up for your particular ISP or Internet Service Provider. Instead, sign up for an account with any of the free email services from such sites as Microsoft, Gmail or Yahoo. Personally, I use Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, each for different purposes. You don’t have to go as wild as I have but make sure you use at least one of them for yourself.

Why use a free service? There are two reasons, essentially. One is simple. When you change ISPs, you don’t have to send emails around to all of your contacts to tell them that you’ve changed your email address. The chance that any of the three services I have mentioned will go out of business is very slim. Secondly, free email accounts are much harder to trace. Authorities can pressure your ISP to reveal the address you use with them and, probably, your password. In Canada, a bill is in Parliament right now that would allow them to do that without a warrant. Imagine what certain people could do with your personal emails. Anyone who the party in power considers and enemy could be investigated. More on this a bit later.

The other thing that is open to scrutiny is your surfing habits. Let’s say that you’re a public figure or a politician or a high-profile civil servant. With the new rules in place, any security official could track your surfing habits without a warrant. Unless you are doing something illegal, there is no reason for them to know what sites you visit, is there? If you are committing a crime or if you are suspected of being involved in criminal or terrorist activity, wouldn’t it be fairly easy to get an official warrant to snoop around in your life? The trick to hiding your surfing habits is fairly simple. I will be investigating the TOR network over the next few posts. In the meantime, check out the TOR Project here: https://www.torproject.org/

Lastly, if you’ve been watching any modern TV detective series or movie, you’ll know that your lowly cell phone can give just about anyone your exact location in the world. The GPS locator in your phone sends out complete details of your movements every day. As you know, hackers can listen in on your conversations, access your voice mail and even download photos from your cell phone for their own uses.

Smart phones are wonderful pieces of technology but you might want to stop and think about how much of  your private information your little friend is keeping track of. A tip here might be to have a cheap, throwaway phone for day to day use and a iPod Touch, for example, for all of your other Internet and GPS uses. There are other ways around this but now is the time to start thinking about your privacy and how your cell phone impacts it.

Look forward to more tips and tricks here in future posts. I am all for the rights of victims of crime and/or terrorism but I cannot put up with this growing trend of normal citizens losing their right to privacy. What do you think? Comments and questions are welcome.

Thanks for reading!