Pri­vacy Web Tools Grow In Pop­u­lar­ity Fol­low­ing NSA Revelations

Rev­e­la­tions about the Na­tional Se­cu­rity Agen­cy’s sur­veil­lance of both phone and In­ter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tions has re­sulted in a dra­matic in­crease in the us­age of search en­gines that are not a part of the „big nine.”

  • The big nine are a group of search en­gines that fun­nel data through a pro­gram called „Prism.” 
  • Prism has been a se­cret pro­gram to com­bat for­eign threats that gath­ers data for the NSA.

Nine search en­gines con­tribute data to Prism, in­clud­ing well-known en­ti­ties like Google, Ya­hoo, Face­book, and Bing.

Prism par­tic­i­pants typ­i­cally store data about users’ search queries for any­where from 9-18 months. 

In re­sponse, many in­di­vid­u­als now want a more anony­mous on­line pres­ence, and they want it now. 

Search His­tory Privacy

A lesser known search en­gine, Duck­DuckGo, does not store per­sonal search his­to­ries at all.

On June 6, 2013, Google was iden­ti­fied as a con­trib­u­tor to Prism. In less than a month fol­low­ing that date, Duck­DuckGo saw its search in­quiries al­most dou­ble in num­ber. Gabriel Wein­burg, CEO, agrees that his site’s pri­vacy pa­ra­me­ters are grab­bing more and more attention.

With Duck­DuckGo, no per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able in­for­ma­tion about users’ search his­to­ries is ever stored on the com­pa­ny’s servers. Sub­poe­nas to ac­quire such in­for­ma­tion would prove to be fruitless. 

Now, be­cause Duck­DuckGo does not have a his­tory of per­sonal pref­er­ences on its servers, it can­not as quickly sug­gest rel­e­vant search in­quiries when one com­mences a search. 

Not sur­pris­ingly, lists of pri­­vacy-ori­ented al­ter­na­tives that pro­mote more anonymity are be­ing com­piled. One is log­i­cally called „Prism Break.” 

Mes­sage Privacy

Nadim Ko­biessi heads up Cryp­to­cat, a chat pro­gram that fully en­crypts all mes­sages be­fore they are transmitted.

Law en­force­ment could the­o­ret­i­cally at­tempt to sub­poena a con­ver­sa­tion from Crypt­cat, but it would be point­less, be­cause no one at his com­pany can ever see an un­en­crypted mes­sage, given the man­ner in which the con­cept is structured.

Cyrp­to­cat’s lim­i­ta­tion is that users at both ends have to down­load the soft­ware. This means let­ting go of the con­ve­nience of mes­sag­ing through, for ex­am­ple, Facebook. 

TextSe­cure is a mo­bile app that of­fers the same en­cryp­tion services. 

Cloud Stor­age Privacy

For those want­ing to en­joy anonymity when us­ing cloud stor­age, there is Spi­der Oak.

It func­tions a lot like Google Drive and Drop­box, but Spi­der Oak staff can never see the con­tent of your user files. That’s be­cause such files are au­to­mat­i­cally en­crypted. Pri­vacy comes at a price, how­ever. If you for­get your pass­word, Spi­der Oak can­not help you. 

IP Ad­dress Privacy 

Those want­ing to pre­vent iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of their IP ad­dress can look to an open-source pro­gram called Tor.

This soft­ware routes your web traf­fic through mul­ti­ple com­put­ers world­wide be­fore it ar­rives at the URL that you’ve se­lected. Iron­i­cally, this tech­nol­ogy was ini­tially de­vel­oped by the U.S. Navy, and it is still the ben­e­fi­ciary of gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Tor down­loads spiked af­ter the NSA revelations.

In the past year, the pro­gram has been down­loaded over 35 mil­lion times. Cur­rent ac­tive users are es­ti­mated to ex­ceed half-a-mil­lion in number.

The con­cern with Tor is that hid­ing an IP ad­dress by high lev­els of re-rout­ing could pos­si­ble re­sult in one’s IP ad­dress get­ting linked to an­oth­er’s il­licit activity. 

Fi­nan­cial Privacy

Of course, Bit­coin has brought a level of anonymity to fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions that hereto­fore did not ex­ist. This elec­tronic „money” is de­cen­tral­ized, but it is also volatile. That is, Bit­coin val­ues can gy­rate both up and down.

Ac­cep­tance of this dig­i­tal cur­rency is any­thing but uni­ver­sal, al­though there are even bars in NYC that now ac­cept Bitcoin. 

Privacy Web Tools Grow In Popularity Following NSA Revelations

Al­though the pur­suit of on­line anonymity can serve up a fresh set of chal­lenges, such ef­forts are likely to in­crease, and to in­crease dra­mat­i­cally go­ing for­ward. The grow­ing aware­ness of what search en­gines have been do­ing with data is only likely to ac­cel­er­ate in­ter­est in en­ter­prises such as DuckDuckGo.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: In­ter­est­ing Trend! The US press is pretty nice to those in power by not talk­ing too much about the is­sue, com­pared to the press, for ex­am­ple, in my home coun­try, Ger­many.

Still, as this ar­ti­cle shows, pri­vacy con­cerns are increasing.

What’s the im­pli­ca­tion for business?

The im­pli­ca­tion is that busi­nesses need to work on gain­ing and main­tain­ing cus­tomer trust!

Yes, the high­t­ened sen­si­tiv­ity of con­sumers for pri­vacy pro­tec­tion is rais­ing trust is­sues. A few years back con­sumers were scared to buy on­line be­cause they did­n’t want to give their credit card data away. This is not a big prob­lem any­more, but the cur­rent NSA topic is just one of many pri­vacy top­ics that fre­quently pop up.

  • Think Face­book track­ing you all over the web,
  • think Google com­bin­ing data across all services,
  • think LinkedIn ac­count data get­ting hacked.

Con­sumers are more aware of pri­vacy prob­lems than ever.

Busi­nesses can use con­sumer pri­vacy con­cerns to their ad­van­tage if they take ex­tra care

  1. to pro­tect their cus­tomers privacy,
  2. and to make cus­tomers feel save.

How to do this might be sub­ject of a fu­ture post!