How’s Your Internet Privacy?
The reason why the social networking companies log our information is because they provide us with the free services but the free service is only free in terms of charging money. The price we pay for using these free services is our personal information. Our chat logs, the websites we visit, the products we searched for, the movies we liked all this information is collected and shredded to collect keywords which define our profile. Then this profile is used to target advertisements to us from where these companies earn the profit. Our identity information can also be sold directly to companies like insurance and direct marketing agencies. It is still ok if the information is only used for directing more precise adds to us but what if they are used for some other purposes which are not beneficial to us.
I have recently started using duckgo XMPP with “of the record” (OTR) protocol to chat with my friends. XMPP is an open source protocol for chatting. Some of the proprietary websites also use XMPP protocol for example Facebook (as of now). The advantage of using duckgo XMPP server is that they do not keep the log of your chat as opposed to everything else you would normally use e.g Facebook, Gtalk, Yahoo or MSN messenger. Once your chatting session is closed everything is erased from the server. You can choose to keep the log locally on your chat client. OTR provides encryption with the identity verification, while using OTR not only your messages are encrypted but it also verifies the identity of the person to whom the message was sent. Therefore, through this you are sure that you know the person you are chatting with as well as that your messages are being encrypted. OTR is supported by many chat clients both for the computers as well as for the mobile devices. Even if you are using a proprietary chat service like Facebook or Gtalk you can use a standalone chat client like Pidgin to setup OTR. The chats on Facebook or Gtalk will still be logged but in encrypted form which can’t be read. Along with the not to get logged duckgo XMPP server and OTR encryption the whole setup can be clubbed with the TOR network to provide anonymity. Now with this setup not only your chat is encrypted and not stored anywhere but also your real IP address is masked by the TOR network. I have set up OTR with duckgo XMPP server both on my computer as well as on my Android mobile and it works pretty well.
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