HOWTO — Improve Privacy in Facebook

In the past few weeks, there have been a TON of news stories circulating on the web about facebook and privacy.  Through about 500 km of driving, I decided I was going to try to do something and take advantage of facebook lists.  I’m still, as of 8 May 2010, working through this; however, here are some steps you can take to improve your privacy on facebook.

But, in general, if you don’t want your friends boss total strangers city state country the internet to know about it, don’t put it up there.  Even if you set everything right today, it is hard to tell what bug is lurking in the background or what change will be made tomorrow that will make this impossible.

For the details of this, click the read more link….

Image from francobouly via flickr

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HOWTO — Encrypt your e-mail with Thunderbird, Enigmail, and GNUPG

 Everyone should be encrypting all of their e-mail.  Why?  Well, let me ask you a question….would you write your wife, husband, sweetheart, etc… a message on a post card?  Why not?  Because everyone can read it, right?!  So, how would you send it?  You’d write it on paper and put it in an envelope, right?  Well, email is just like the post card.  Left unencrypted, it is just like the post card…anyone can read it.  Encryption works like an envelope so to speak.  It let’s you pack it up so people who come across the message in transit on the internet can’t read it (just like the letter).  Just like the envelope, it can be opened…it just takes lots of time to discover the key and decrypt it.

Need more reasons?  Check out this article.

If you are interested, read more …..

[Update 09-29-2010 17:05:47] Check out this post on another reason you should be encrypting your e-mail (and everything else)

Image of the lock is from Daniel Y. Go via flickr.  Other images below are screenshots by me.

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