Instant communication and the lack of privacy

I cannot understand why people do not care more about their privacy! Instant messages, emails and the like are sent trough the Web. Often on insecure connections with no sort of encryption nor means of preventing anyone with the right tools to tap into the conversation.

Personally I prefer sending and receiving my instant messages over XMPP/Jabber, with peer-to-peer GnuPG encryption over an secure SSL connection.

Jabber is a decentralized network that works by allowing server-server connection between service providers. Meaning that you are not lock to one provider which can monitor the entire network. Everyone chooses a service provider and communicates trough that provider's servers in a peer-server-server-peer connection scenario. Much the same as with email messages!

Many free service providers, such as Google, use your personal data. Like it or not, that is their terms for giving away their services for free. Google use your instant messages, emails, as well as search records; to build a personal consumer profile of your online habits. This profile is used to serve you better search results. But also more relevant advertisement, and probably more!

I cannot understand how people can be comfortable with letting corporations know this much about them! It is insane how much people entrust them with their personal data… Wake up people!

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3 comments

Ignorance is bliss. At least thats my poor excuse. As I've said before. I use about every Google program there is, and I will continue to do so until I can find a better alternative. Jabber sure is a better alternative then the normal Google Talk, but still I haven't gotten around to use it yet.
On a side note; I'm still trying to get people to use other IM protocols then MSN.

Comment by Kent Vegard Evjen at 2007-02-10 @781.

Well Kent, if you are using Google Talk then you are using Jabber. Just from a really untrustworthy provider.

I have had great success with pushing people over to Skype, by the way. You might try that, it is proprietary and does not do Linux much good. But it is at least much more secure than Live Messenger.

If you are looking for a better email provider, then I suggest you give Open Source Notebook's affiliate Runbox a try. 10 GB email storage, 1 GB file storage, 100 MB attachment, IMAP, and more for just 49 USD per year. Norway based hosting too!

Comment by Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-02-10 @838.

I don't understand people not understanding end-to-end data privacy. At identi.ca, an open source microblogging site, the developers were talking about adding OTR (Off the Record) encryption support to their XMPP service.

Encryption. To encrypt a data stream. That's going to be posted to a PUBLIC WEB SITE.

Am I missing something? Maybe they want OTR turned on by default.

Comment by Kurt Weiske (Subscribed) at 2008-08-13 @557.

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