How to protect your privacy online
Day 20 / 365
The world wide web is less than 30 years old. Yet it has become an indispensable part of our lives now. Unfortunately, the price we have paid for that is our privacy.
People who are over 20 would remember a time when privacy was an important factor when we chose what to do online. I remember people not putting up their real photos on social media, afraid that someone might misuse them. Fast forward to today, we have a generation who have grown up thinking its OK to share everything online.
Consider something as basic as your email. You might think a single email doesn’t reveal that much about you. But with a year’s or even a lifetimes worth of emails, someone can tell who you are friends with, what are your likes and dislikes or even in some cases what you are thinking.
before email, we used to send actual letters to each other. Each letter perfectly sealed in an envelope with an address for it to be sent at. Email isn’t quite the alternate same as the sealed envelope. It’s more of a postcard, several people in the middle can see what you wrote. This can be the email client you are using or even the government.
Companies earn at the expense of your privacy
The most simple solution is to encrypt the messages. You can think of it as your emails being kept in a locked box. The problem is that the servers, who are housing these locked boxes for you, will more often than not have the keys itself. And sometimes the government can get hold of these keys as well, even without your knowledge. Can companies like Google, Yahoo or Facebook come up with a better solution to protect your privacy? Probably yes. Will they implement it? Probably not.
Most of the money these companies makes comes through advertisements. Google, for example, makes more than 90% of their profits through targetted ads. So they have more than enough reasons to deprive you of your privacy.
Enter ProtonMail, a secure mailing solution
Andy Yen and few of his fellow scientists working at CERN came up with ProtonMail, a truly private email app. With ProtonMail your email would still in locked boxes, but the server won’t have the keys to open it.
Think of it this way. Alice wants to send a message to Bob. She keeps the message in a box and locks it with Bob’s public padlock. Anyone can get hands on this padlock and lock it, but only Bob has the key’s to unlock it. So Alice can send this box to the server and ask it to be delivered to bob, without the fear of any middle man getting his hands on the message.
How does ProtonMail survive without the money from the ads?
This experiment with ProtonMail has shown that not only do the people value their privacy online, but they are willing to pay for it as well. When the number of users on ProtonMail grew more than they had resources to handle, the users created a crowdfunding campaign and raised over half a million dollars.
There are many other companies that are following their footsteps as well. If you want a secure way to chat, Telegram is a good alternative.
Solutions like these give us hope that we can enjoy the positives of the internet without loosing out on our privacy.
This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday's blog — Can we grow new brain cells?