The CEO of a major technology company once famously opined that, in the Internet Age, “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”
Some of us would rather not. We’d like to keep our personal information—from the stuff we share on Facebook to our credit card and Social Security numbers—under some control. We’d prefer not to let such details out into the wild, where they can be bought and sold and, often, used against us.
If you, too, are a privacy traditionalist, take heart: There are things you can do to make browsing, shopping, socializing, and other online activities less of a threat. That CEO was doubtless right in one sense: We can’t keep all of our private information private anymore. But we can certainly make it harder for those who’d like to make it public.
[Rich Mogull has worked in the security world for 17 years. He writes for TidBITS and works as a security analyst through Securosis.com. Mike Rothman is an analyst at Securosis.com and author of The Pragmatic CSO.]