Privacy Blog

"Friends don’t let friends get spied on.' – Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and longtime advocate of privacy in technology.

Email Security

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Secret Text In Senate Bill Would Give FBI Warrantless Access To Email Records

Big Brother will soon be watching you more than ever. A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers using those beloved ‘National Security Letters’ — without a warrant and in complete secrecy. The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in […]

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Gabriel is Possibly the Most Secure Suite of Products for use with Family, Friends, and Business Associates

Gabriel from VirnetX includes secure email and a lot, lot more. It includes military-grade encryption along with freedom from spam mail. It never stores any data on any third-party servers, not even email servers, and not even on VirnetX’s servers. These benefits are automatic when communicating with other Gabriel users. Gabriel will lock out all hackers and spies with its combination of encryption, virtual private networking (VPN), and serverless technology. […]

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Swiss Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail Releases iOS and Android Apps and Opens to the General Public

The following announcement was written by the folks at ProtonMail: World’s largest secure email service allows open signups for the first time since 2014 and releases mobile apps. March 17th, 2016 Geneva, Switzerland ProtonMail, the world’s largest encrypted email provider, is announcing today that the service is leaving beta and will be allowing open registrations for the first time in nearly two years. Concurrently, the service will be launching its […]

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SecureMyEmail™ Will Offer Safe, Secure, and Private Messages with End-To-End Encryption on ANY Email Address

Email was invented years ago when security was not a problem. As a result, email today is one of the most insecure services available on the Internet. We probably should stop using email except that billions of email messages are sent daily and it is almost impossible to convince millions of people to stop the one service they use the most. Yet secure email isn’t just about protecting personal and […]

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Privacy-as-a-Service from Dispel

I have to admit that “Privacy-as-a-Service” is a new buzzword for me. I had not heard of that until I read an article by Rob Marvin in PCMag.com that describes an offering from a new start-up called Dispel. The service promises to leverage ephemeral cloud infrastructure to safeguard business data. While the term “business data” is prominently mentioned, the new service is aimed at businesses and individuals alike. Dispel claims […]

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How to Safely Send Secret E-mail Messages

“Don’t send your credit card number in an e-mail message!” How many times have you heard that statement? Many times, I hope. There is good reason for that statement: normal e-mail messages are sent across the Internet in plain text, and it is easy for many people to intercept these communications. Network sniffers can spy on your email traffic. Using Secure Sockets (SSL) helps, but there is no guarantee that […]

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Privacy in an Age of Publicity

In 1844, the British Post Office opened personal mail addressed to a foreign national who was living in England. When the report of the interception became public, the New-York Tribune condemned the opening of mail as “a barbarian breach of honor and decency.” Today, the U.S. and other governments routinely open and read the personal email of citizens and non-citizens alike, even those living in other countries. Isn’t this still […]

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Google Wants to Add ‘Not Encrypted’ Warnings to Gmail

Google is getting ready to alert Gmail users when messages are received in the clear instead of via encrypted transport, in response both to slow adoption of encryption by some hosts, and apparent hostility to encryption in some countries. Google’s multi-year project, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, comes to a similar conclusion: there’s a long tail of servers managed that aren’t keeping up with the need to encrypt.

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Internet Firms to be Banned From Offering Unbreakable Encryption Under Proposed New UK Laws

Talk about a major step backwards! The Telegraph is reporting that the UK Government is going to ban companies from offering ‘unbreakable’ encryption, effectively requiring a backdoor in products from the likes of Google and Apple. Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through […]

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