You are not alone in feeling nervous about the security of your personal data with all the recent revelations about the US PRISM programme and the UK's GCHQ trawling of the country's cable lines. The fact that they have been joined by our supposed friends at Google, Facebook and the rest of the companies committed to making your data secure, leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Leaking our data like a sieve makes all of us feel as if the neighbours are not just peeking behind our curtains, but opening our mail and emptying out our garbage for juicy tidbits after they installed secret security surveillance in every room of the house and searched in our underwear drawers to boot.
The good news is that they mostly wont be interested in you... (We are assuming you just want to get on with your life when we say this.....) And, if you are a business, transferring your information to the cloud, then you have good reason to want to be sure that your company's confidential information is just that...Confidential! Most of us don't have a problem with security or confidentiality, we have a problem when we feel it is being broken and our privacy invaded.
Nonetheless, from a personal point of view, you might find it is good to know that there are usable alternatives out there, which will give you a degree more privacy and security than you have otherwise. The caveat is that we haven't tried them all.
Here then is our top list for the paranoid amongst you.
Data storage
SpiderOak. With 2 Gb of data all encrypted so even they can't look at it, you can be reasonably sure that your data is safe unless the government files a personal warrant. Alternatives are Goodsync, Tonido and Cubby who offer private, secure depositories for your data. They can also offer some capability for sharing data, and making your files available for other users. A caution: none are as easy to use as Dropbox. You need to be patient and to follow the instructions to set them up.
Search engines
DuckDuckGo and Startpage. DuckDuckGo does not send information about your personal I address to the receiving website, so information about your profile is less easily built up. Startpage (formerly LxQuick) also anonymizes your information. All of which is no guarantee you won't be traced, but a good start.
Online browsing
Tor works by bouncing your information around sets distributed, voluntarily run servers to prevent people from monitoring your IP address. This makes it a really good idea even if you have no need for some of the other items in this list, as it prevents the build up of patterns of information around your web use, the sort of thing that hackers and companies are interested in finding out as well as the Government.
Chat
You are aiming here to leave no record of your chat and to encrypt the information so that it cant be understood by other viewers. As an alternative to Skype (Microsoft owned), Google or Yahoo chats, you could try Cryptocat which encrypts your conversations. The downside is that the person you are talking to has to have the application installed as well. And, in Cryptocat's case, you really wish they would offer a more friendly and up to date website to help inspire confidence. Jitsi also offers secure chat if you use the ZRTP encryption together with no recording of information. Other IM's you can try are Pidgin and Adium which encrypt your chat prior to sending over other applications.
Mobile
Chatsecure (for iOS) and Gibberbot (for Android) offer similar services to Cryptocat and Jitsi. Both offer to keep your mobile conversations secure and both guarantee not to save your conversations and are available from their respective apps stores.
A word of caution
Let's not over-egg the guarantees here.
The news that GCHQ is hoovering up data directly from cable connections round the world in Operation Tempora means that they actually have more access than they should to our data. You can be sure too that the reciprocal arrangements with the NSA and the other members of the big 5 are working just fine But that, as they say, is a privacy debate, which we should be having with our politicians. And, of course, you trust Government not to abuse our data, don't you?
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