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Dali Lama

Your Privacy

Online privacy is something to be concerned about. Visiting a site infected by badware could pose a risk to your computer and your data. Your email address may be hijacked by spammers.

Have you been getting more spam lately? Analysists report that spam accounts for up to 75% of the 75 billion emails sent each day, and spam levels are growing exponentially — up %100 from last year. Unfortunately spam hackers are getting more sophisticated in the techniques they employ.

PRIVATE

What to do?

  • Be super-ultra-careful when giving out your primary email address, use it only in the most important circumstances.
  • Create 3 main email addresses, i.e.: max-security, med-security, min-security. Also "sacrificial" email addresses and accounts, e.g.; nospam@yahoo.com (see Protection Tricks sidebar for more ideas).
  • Use high-quality passwords (minimum combination of 8 letters, numbers, and special characters). IMPORTANT: Change your passwords regularly.
  • How to create AND remember crazy-hard passwords
  • GOOGLE Password Tips

Identity Theft

Identity theft ruins lives. Find out how to deter, detect, and defend against identity theft. Watch a quick 10 minute video

P3P for websites

Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a standardized specification for describing a websites' privacy policy, written in XML. As a page loads, the browser reads the XML file and compares it with the users' privacy preferences. P3P provides a simple automated way for site visitors to screen a website privacy policy. P3P Toolbox.org

Protection Tricks

  • Bypass Registration
    Are you tired of typing your name, address, email and hobbies every time you want to read an online newspaper? At bugmenot just type in the site name you want to access and get a pre-made username and password.
  • Faux Inbox
    When a website requires that you provide an email address that must be confirmed by replying, use Mailinator to create a temporary one. You make up an email address that ends with @mailinator.com. Use the temporary email address to register then forget about it, all emails are deleted within a few hours.
  • Shopping
    Google Checkout™ makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure.
  • Disposable Credit Card
    Citibank allows its cardholders to create one-time-use Virtual Account Numbers. When you use Virtual Account Numbers to make a purchase, a substitute number is generated which protects your real number.
  • Hide Your IP address
    If your computer has a static IP address, any site you visit can track your activity there, and hackers can use it to break into your machine. Use Anonymizer to create a random, rotating IP.
  • Turn Off email HTML
    Turn off "display HTML" in your email preferences. Spammers can insert special HTML code into the body of an email that will tell them whether you've read a message or how long you spent reading it.