This posting is about protecting your privacy and anonymity whilst taking advantage of the ease of communication and ubiquity of the Internet. It discusses some work that I have recently completed on improving privacy on the web.

Firstly, posting your private information is a bad idea. The Internet is continually indexed – whatever is there may remain indefinitely. You need to ensure that you are not connected in any way with anything that you post on the web. I am particularly cautious of sites such as MySpace.

Secondly, email is not secure. It should be regarded as a postcard – readable by anyone who sees it. Since email passes through a number of servers between the sender and recipient, there are potentially many readers. Most corporations have legal requirements to continually backup every email – if you press delete, you can’t assume that this does anything other than hide the email from your display.

It is a fact that email is automatically collected and sifted by national intelligence agencies. Governments have proven poor keepers of private information – how do you feel about public sector workers poring over what you have written.

In summary, despite technologies such as encryption, common Internet services are not really setup very well to allow people to communicate privately. In fact, encryption typically identifies the sender and receiver as having something to hide.

I look at privacy from several dimensions. Firstly, how long is information retained for? Is it accessible publicly or is it private? What is the link between you and your message? Can you control who views it, and how many times it is viewed? Are you restricted to Internet services only, or can you communicate through multiple channels?

If you can control how long information is retained, keep the access to it private, have no link between you and your message, can control who views it and how often it is viewed, and transfer meaning through multiple channels at will, you can enjoy some privacy.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time, and have recently set up a free, private system for posting messages, invitations and even for sale notices. It doesn’t require registration. The message writer creates their message and sets how often it should be viewed, and how long it should be available and the system assigns a message key that uniquely identifies it.

The writer can send this message key by email through the system, send it by SMS, letter, phone or write it down and post it. The recipient simply needs to key in the message key to view the message, and if permitted, reply to it.

The whole system is strongly encrypted, so no data is available, even in the unlikely event of someone hacking in. Once the message expires, it is gone and can no longer be retrieved by anyone.

It is currently in beta and I’ll be refining it, but I invite anyone who wants to communicate privately to try it out. It is called MyMsg2U.

Tags: anonymous browsing, encryption, Privacy, private email

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.