You may use windows or mac, if that’s the case you should understand that the more users a software or system has, the more tempting it is to write viruses or spyware, furthermore when it’s utterly insecure like windows. That is the reason why first of all you have to change, indeed I still remember one of those days from the last decade, at that time the irc (a chat network) was a mean of communication quite popular but then a bug (error) affecting several windows versions that froze the computer if some special paths were accessed was discovered, as a matter of fact almost everybody had irc clients that allowed sending and receiving files by default, so someone wrote a script to force the victim access one of those directories and every windows 95 and 98 user wasn’t able to connect for several days because if they did their computer would be frozen, something similar happened during one of the previous campus party where you could see entire rows made of computers with windows restarting again and again because of a worm (I guess it was the Sasser or some variant). What I want to say is that you have to avoid using massively used and vulnerable applications (moreover when it comes to companies or institutions), because if everybody uses it and it is discovered a security bug everybody security becomes compromised and we can also apply this to web browsers. If you use windows and internet explorer like most of the people do you will get a system full of viruses, worms and trojans as most of the people do. Install Firefox or any other free software/ open source browser (altough I’m sure someone will recommend you Opera I’m going to talk about Firefox because of the freedom, the huge quantity of plugins available, etc), and only use internet explorer on those essential pages that you trust but that are so badly done that are unable to be represented with Firefox.

If the previous step includes 70% of the Internet users we have hardly started, despite Firefox’s advantages it had had (and solved) several bugs, some of them derived from the implementations of scripting languages like JavaScript or plugins like Flash. Because to make internet surfing easier every web page can execute every scripting language or plugin installed , it is clear that granting access to scripting languages and plugins in our browser only to the pages that we trust is a key point. All this and much more can be done thanks to NoScript (a plugin for Firefox), and bear in mind that everybody that consciously used NoScript weren’t (that) vulnerable to the bugs detected in the implementations of JavaScript and Flash.

With Firefox and NoScript we can surf the web more securely than with internet explorer or safari, although there’s no thing like absolute security so we can only keep ourselves updated and informed. But let’s talk about privacy: ¿Email accounts providing several gigabytes of space?, ¿servers with unlimited resources to store yours videos and pictures?, ¿online had disks?, ¿search engines that track all the Internet with millions of servers ready to answer your questions?, ¿maps from all over the world at your disposal?, ¿calendars and documents that can be shared with everyone?, etc ¿and all for free?. No, not for free, you may not pay any money at all but it’s by no means free. Every email you receive in hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail, etc, every video you watch, every picture you open, every post you send to myspace, facebook, etc, every file, every action has to generate money somehow, otherwise the companies won’t do it. And they make it so easy for you to use their software: it is free, appealing, the registration process is trivial, etc. But what people usually don’t see is what they take away: most of the applications previously mentioned can only be used if you have sign in them and the rest will offer you advantages if you do (goodbye privacy), moreover every action is stored so that, amongst other things, they can offer you advertisements focused on your profile. Every email, post, actions is scanned, every sentence of that action and every word of that sentence is subjugated to algorithms to obtain your profile, but what do they get?: Knowing that you are looking for flowers because your wife’s birthday is approaching, that you are worried about overweight or that a new videogame is becoming more and more popular amongst your friends. And these sentences, harmless a priori, are in fact the description of you; your own, your self, you, at the mercy of the corporations. And all that provided that you don’t ever travel to non-democratic countries because let’s not forget that the companies in general , overall the multinational ones, don’t have any objections when it comes to working side by side with dictatorships and cooperate in the detention of pro-democracy people or make you disappear from their online services because, after all, they have to obey the law of the countries where they operate.

Like it or not, this is the reality, so we can stop using their services or take the good thing and avoid the bad one, provided that we choose the previously said we have a plugin called TrackMeNot that will enable us to “poison” our aol, yahoo, google and msn profile since it makes random searches, consequently the image that they collect about us becomes obfuscated. Another option, compatible with the previously said, is not to show any add (at least partially), that’s the purpose of Adblock Plus.

We can also use web applications that require you to sign in without signing up using, for example, Bugmenot, another pages will provide us with a temporary email adress, ie: Mailinator or Slopsbox, this way you can avoid providing your email to Internet pages, some of which trade your data or spam you all the time.

One last suggestion, at another level, is the use of proxies, that is, servers that redirect your petitions, thus their IP address is the one that becomes stored, not yours. There are several proxy lists, webproxy lists and even search proxies, and you can also proxy chaining so that in order to track your connection the registers of every proxy used would have to be registered, please also take into account that this option will usually slow down your speed, furthermore, the most popular (and used) proxies tend to change quite a lot, not to mention that it is also possible that the proxies you try won’t work, that they don’t offer what they claim and let’s not forget that we will never know if the administrator of those machines will be sniffing the data packages that flow through it in search of, for example, passwords.

Anyway, this is only the begging of our privacy as the mentioned web applications still store our data and we don’t know exactly what do they store, for who long or if there are more reasons apart from the previously said. But we do know that, whether you are a person, an enterprise or a government, you can only obtain information from plain data, what will lead us to talk about encryption.

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