Protecting your personal information

Remember when you used to write a letter (by hand!), put them in an envelope, seal it, stamp it and send it off? Of course you'd put it in an envelope. First of all that makes it easier to put the address and the stamp, but you also didn't want anyone to read your private correspondence.

So how come people send e-mails with personal information to God-knows-who and do not even think that this mail can be read by anyone along the way?
I guess it's a question of habit - just click on "send" and off it goes. Encryption programs are usually cumbersome to use. Also - many people shrug it off and say "who cares about my personal mails anyway?" My mail is one of billions, who will even bother to try to read it?

Germany has passed a law that requires internet and telephone providers to save all internet and telephone communication for 6 months. Anyone who works with Microsoft desktop search knows how easy it is to do simple keyword searches on gigabytes of data within seconds. So maybe nobody is interested in your private mails today - but tomorrow?

What about the websites you visit? Did you know that you leave a "trail" in the internet? Every Website you go to needs to know where to send the data to, so it needs to have your IP address. Althought most IP addresses are dynamic and only your provider knows who has which IP address at any given time, anyone with access to your provider's records will be able to track where you were.
Given the recent scandals at Germany's biggest telephone and internet provider, where millions of personal information records leaked out and were sold on the market, it is just a matter of time until this happens again.

What if your computer got stolen? For most, the financial loss is not so critical, but think about the data on the hard disk? Not only pictures, you may have personal files that you do not want others to see? Or even bank account information, or your will? It is much more worrying what someone could do with the data than the loss of the computer itself.

I think it is time to protect ourselves a little more than in the past. The internet is maturing and it is time to be a little more careful when it comes to using it.
I want to present some programs that can help. You can find them all at:
http://www.heise.de/software
1. E-mail encryption: PGP (Pretty Good Privacy): This program has been around for years. There is a commercial "full" version and a "light" version with limited (but sufficient) features that is free for personal use.
Most people have trouble getting their head around how it works, so here is a quick summary:
To use PGP you need to generate two keys. One is a PUBLIC key that you give to everyone who wants to send you encrypted mails. This key can only ENCRYPT a mail, but it cannot DECRYPT it. The second key is the PRIVATE key that is only used to DECRYPT a mail. Obviously you want to keep that one to yourself. When someone sends you a mail, they use PGP and your PUBLIC key to encrypt it and you use your PRIVATE key to decrypt it upon receipt.
2. Hard Disk encryption: TrueCrypt is a tool you can use to create encrypted folders on your hard disk or even encrypt an entire hard disk. If you encrypt your system disk, you have to enter a password before the operating system (e.g. Windows XP) loads. It has many more nifty features. The main advantage is that, once you have entered the password, the encryption is "invisible". You can work with the folder or the disk as if it was not encrypted.
3. TOR: The onion router: This is a tool that "hides" you in the web. It works almost like a peer-to-peer network, in the sense that you go through a number of routers before you get to the final destination. Each router in between only knows the next router to send it to.
I have not used this program yet, so I'll let you know if it works as well as advertised once I get it installed and configured.