How private is your data on Twitter and other social media websites?

I’ve been following attempts to gag Wikileaks and their supporters over the past few months and have seen everything from Amazon Web Services kicking WikiLeaks off their servers to Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Bank of America suspending payments to Wikileaks. All that under political pressure from American Government and so called politicians and congressmen.

Last night Icelandic’s member of parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir tweeted the following:

birgittaj Birgitta Jónsdóttir
just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks)

followed by this tweet:

@birgittaj Birgitta Jónsdóttir
usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. do they realize i am a member of parliament in iceland?

Later it transpired that Birgitta is not the only one affected. DoJ also wants Jacob Appelbaum’s (@ioerror), Wikileaks (@wikileaks) and Rop Gonggrijp’s (@rop_g) tweets, direct messages, geo data and other private details. DoJ requested all that info back in December 2010 and gave Twitter 3 days to deliver all the info DoJ requested . DoJ also ordered Twitter to keep it quiet and not to let their users know about this request.

Twitter challenged that gagging order and won but it is still unclear if they submitted all the info DoJ requested seeing that they only had 3 days to comply with that order.

To find out more about that story see this great article written by Glenn Greenwald.

It is widely believed that other Internet giants such as Google and Facebook received the same order, complied with it and gave all the data to DoJ without notifying their users. As I am writing this Mark Stephens (Julian Assange’s lawyer) confirmed that subpoena has been served on Skype.

In his reply to Faisal Islam he also said:
@faisalislam true and all other social networks and some isp's are saying "no comment" not "we haven't got one". That's telling.

Now let’s get to the point
Twitter, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Facebook, Google and all the other major Internet and social media websites are US based companies who are required to comply with US laws. Nothing wrong with that is there? WRONG AGAIN.

What if you are for example based in UK or Europe and let’s say you are politician or freedom fighter and you use Twitter, Facebook or any other website. Normal person would think you are safe from prying eyes but that is obviously not the case. It looks like any American  Joe Blogs can request your emails, tweets, chats, addresses and geo data from these companies and there is nothing you can do about it and even worse you won’t be notified about such a request thus you will never know.

Internet Privacy

What privacy? The moment you decide to step out on the internet your every step is being followed and thanks to a combination of Google, Social Media and cookie tracking your every step can be reconstructed and traced back to you. (Secret profiling springs to mind).

What can you do to protect your privacy online?

 

• Use VPN or Tor network for your day to day surfing.
• Host your own email server – that way no one can request to see your emails without your knowledge ( In other words don’t use Gmail, Yahoo, MSN or any other provider).
• Don’t use Direct Messaging system on Twitter because Big Brother can see your messages.
• Do not discuss private matters anywhere online if you don’t wish for any 3rd party to see your conversations.
• Don’t use Skype chat to discuss private matters because any law enforcement agency can request to see your chat history because your chat history is stored on Skype’s servers.
• Configure your browser to delete all temporary files including cookies whenever you close your browser.
• Always use different and complex passwords – never use same password on more than one website
• Use encryption system on your computer to encrypt your data. (Bear in mind that Bitlocker encryption on Windows 7 and Vista is not secure as you might think – You encryption key can be recovered from your RAM thus allowing authorities to decrypt your drives)
• If you need to use hosting services or cloud based hosting make sure that your hosting provider is not an American company and that your data will be  hosted in your own country or in a country where privacy is respected and where companies won’t hand over your data to increasingly totalitarian regime that seems to be taking over United States.

Article by: Nenad Rajsic