In the new age of metadata retention and tracking by governments and businesses, there is now a need for new ways to communicate to protect your privacy.
Privacy protection is not just for whistle-blowers, journalists, public interest advocates and activists; privacy protection is a basic human right for everyone. During the days of the Cold War, the West often demonised communist governments as abusers of freedoms, especially freedom of movement and privacy. Communist countries were often portrayed with arbitrary stop and search powers with demands for “Show me your papers!” If your papers were “not in order” you were whisked off for interrogation.
New metadata retention laws in many countries, both east and west, have taken this arbitrary search power to an extraordinary new level in the digital age.
Many governments can now track your browsing history, search history, location data, texts and emails; often without even requiring a warrant.
You now need tools to protect your privacy and freedom of movement from these arbitrary intrusions from your government, foreign governments and businesses.
Virtual Private Networks
One popular tools is a Virtual Private Network or VPN. A VPN encrypts and tunnels all of your internet traffic through a remote and secure server that does not store your details. This makes it very hard for governments and businesses, including your internet service provider (ISP), to track what you do online. You can even use a VPN to trick everyone that you are located in a completely different country.
You can learn more about VPNs to protect your privacy at my other post by clicking here.
Privacy for mobile phones, texts and emails
A VPN is just one of a suite of tools that you will now need to protect your privacy. Your smart mobile cell phone provides governments and businesses with an amazing amount of data including your location (using your phone’s GPS and/or phone tower triangulation) and your text messages.
Fortunately, some new open source and free communications tools are becoming available that help protect your mobile privacy. Whispersystems has created some open source security apps for mobile devices.
Private phone calls
RedPhone for Android provides end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in.
Private text and chat
TextSecure for Android encrypts your text and chat messages over the air and on your phone.
You can check out Whispersystems by clicking here.
What about iOS; not just Android?
Whilst whispersystems is free and open source, it is only available for Android devices.
Silent Circle has a “Silent Suite” of apps for both iOS and Android for private calls, messaging and contacts. You will however have to pay a subsciption fee for these services so Silent Suite is best suited for businesses that want to roll out secure communications to the team. You can check our Silent Circle at https://blackphone.ch/silent-suite/
Secure apps however don’t fully protect your mobile privacy so Silent Circle has also developed its own secure mobile operating system (OS) called PrivateOS.
Silent Circle describes PrivateOS as:
“PrivatOS is an Android-based operating system that was strengthened by Silent Circle to address modern privacy concerns. There is no bloatware, no hooks to carriers, and no leaky data. It puts privacy in the hands of you and your enterprise, without any sacrifice to your productivity.”
Use Blackphone to beat metadata retention
PrivateOS runs on Silent Circle’s own phone it sells called the “Blackphone”. If you and your enterprise want to take privacy and security seriously, check our the Blackphone at https://blackphone.ch/phone/.
Please note Silent Circle has also announced the Blackphone 2 is coming:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/blackphone-2-is-probably-the-worlds-most-secure-smartphone/.
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