Internet Privacy, Mobile Privacy, Facebook privacy
Is Internet privacy or mobile privacy possible? Should we even care? The short answer is that 100% guaranteed privacy on the Internet is impossible, however one can achieve a fairly high level of privacy which would be very difficult for non governmental agencies to penetrate.
Many people believe that it is impossible to achieve privacy on Internet and that if we have nothing to hide we should not care if we do not have privacy on Internet.
Here we will try and figure out whether privacy on Internet is possible at all.
Normally you should assume that, unless special measures are taken, any action which you take on the Internet, all your emails, all your forum posts, all your browsing is being observed and logged somewhere. The anonymity of posting or emailing using a pseudonym is an illusion.
Any reasonably determined technical hacker can gain access to your identity unless you have taken special measures. A subpoena can be served against any document that you have stored online, or against your emails.
All this has led to many people proclaiming something like "Privacy on the Internet is dead and not possible. We should not care and we should get over it."
Some big company CEOs are proponents of this view. Of course they fail to mention that they have a conflict of interest. Their companies stand to make money by selling data about you to advertisers.
However while 100% guaranteed privacy may be impossible, we can achieve higher levels of privacy and make the task of breaking our privacy harder.
True privacy on the Internet is very, very difficult to achieve. Measures that you can take to achieve true privacy will make your actions look increasingly suspicious.
However it is possible to achieve some measure of privacy. To the doubters that it is possible, one can point to the existence of "Anonymous" hacker group. For months they have been on the Internet despite massive efforts to find them and root them out.
We do not recommend Internet privacy measures to commit a crime. To such felons and would be felons it is best that they caught.
Like Bruce Shneier we believe
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
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