The Top 10 Free, Open Source Tools For Protecting Your Privacy

Last week I had the chance to speak at the 17th Annual Reboot Privacy and Security Conference in Victoria. I did a session on the The Top 10 Free, Open Source Tools For Protecting Your Privacy which was a lot of fun. Even after removing the room separation wall and doubling the room size, we had a standing room environment I’d not seen at Reboot before; the room was standing room even down the sides. Thanks to everyone who came out!

Archived image unavailable: Reboot Privacy and Security Conference.

As promised, I’ve blogged the list with a few embedded comments:

A packet sniffer like wireshark is a tool that allows anyone on your network (such as a coffee shop or hotel) from watching your non-encrypted traffic which might include websites you're going to and emails your sending. Anyone with administrator access between your device and the destination device (also called a Man-In-The-Middle or MITM) that can run a packet sniffer can log your traffic, forever, and use it for whichever purpose they wish. End-to-End encryption tools are intended to resolve this.  

1. Tails. Tails is the amnesic incognito live system. It can be used as an alternative to your regular operating system (Windows, Linux, OSX) by downloading it and burning it on a USB stick or CD/DVD. Then you tell your computer to boot off that image instead. When you turn your computer off, there is no memory of anything you did while you were using tails, and no changes were made to your regular operating system, so you can boot as you did before and no one will be the wiser.
2. NoScript for Firefox | ScriptSafe (formerly NotScripts). This is the biggest thing you can do to protect your computer, more important than anti-virus. You should block all Flash and JavaScript by default as they can be used by malicious websites to take over your computer without you knowing. Only enable it on websites you trust.
3. PrivacyBadger. This plugin blocks privacy trackers on websites your visiting. Can be used to replace tools Ghostery or Disconnect.Me.

   Panopticlick is a web application that gives you an idea of how much unique information on yourself and your device you're providing to every website you go to. There was no internet connectivity, so I wasn't able to a live demo to show why all of these tools are important, but I used screenshots instead. Try it yourself.

4. Tor. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Use tor browser instead of Firefox or Chrome for privacy. It's slower, but the more of us that use it, the faster it becomes. Thanks to those that use it, as it also helps protect those with something to hide. Orbot is tor for Android devices.
5. ssh SOCKS proxies / VPN. The biggest trick with these, is finding an ssh or VPN host that you trust. You might use it to connect to your home machine when you're in a public or untrusted wifi network like an airport, hotel, conference, coffee shop, strangers house etc.
6. GNU Privacy Guard or GPG. This can be used for encrypting files and emails, but it requires some learning to get used to. Most people who install it then use it with:
7. Thunderbird/Enigmail. Enigmail is a Thunderbird plugin that once installed allows you to encrypt your emails. If you're on Android, check out K9-Mail and APG.
8. Jitsi. It can be used for video calls and chat, as an open-source Skype replacement.
9. Signal is for mobile devices like iphone and Android, but there is a beta Desktop client now as well. It can be used to replace whatever else you're using for text messaging on your phone. It can be used as a replacement for Telegram, Messenger, or any of the other mobile communications apps. It does encrypted voice calls as well.
10. Firewall. This will take some time, but I recommend finding a stateful packet firewall for your device (These vary by operating system). Most people are familiar with firewalls for inbound traffic, but I challenge you to also configure your firewall for outbound traffic. This means setting up rules for what internet traffic should be allowed to leave your device, anything else should be logged so you can see which apps are misbehaving, and detect unwanted activity on your device that might be disclosing your personal information. If you're on OSX or anything else BSD based, and you're eager to learn, check out pf.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of privacy tools you should be using, but many people are still not familiar with these, so I hope reading this encourages you to try each. If you find any tutorials that make using these tools really easy, let me know in the comments. If you find any of these tools complicated to use, reach out to the tool developers offering to help, as we need people like you to help make these tools easy to use, while maintaining security and the ability to keep your information private.

I also mentioned a pretty cool laptop I’ve recently come across, the Librem-15. It’s the first laptop that was designed chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security, and freedom. It includes two hardware kill switches, microphone/camera and wireless/bluetooth.

Archived image unavailable: Tweet from Ilone Harrison @ilone.

Thanks to everyone who came out, and thanks for all of the positive feedback! If you have any questions, feel free to email me or drop me a tweet.

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