How clean is your email? (email privacy)

Member Name: mykp

Product:	email privacy
Date:	04/03/02 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: er none!

Disadvantages: er none!

I have been giving this a great deal of thought recently especially since September last year.

Now as I look after a number of computer systems which have a permanent connection to the internet and having found a Trojan on one of these system last year, a Trojan is a program which uses your computer do attack others, hiding the identity of the true attacker.

I am now thinking if this can happen to a machine which has all the latest security and patches installed on it, what can happen to the home users machine which is poorly updated and can be attacked easier? But what other things can people look at when your connected to the internet, or what about the information that is send or received by your computer? Or what things do your Internet provider log when you are online or what about your email? Are they reading it? Or is it being stored somewhere?

Okay I don't have all the answers but I do know that there is an awful lot of disk space being used on the internet to log details about the users that are logged on, the web sites you visit and when and who you are sending email to. My company does this and this isn't because we require information on our users but because of system crashes or people trying to hack our servers. However there are a lot of people out there who will collect and use information to either make money or cause halm.

Take the dooyoo web site for instance, I would imagine that they have some form of user tracking system so they can see which users visited which pages and also they DO have the facility to track which opinions I have read, or commented on. Of course this is to make the site more functional.

So what about emails. Well I?ll tell you about a few email server software packages that I have used. The first is piece is a bargain basement solution but its still several hundred dollars for just 25 users. Now this software is very widely used especially by smaller Internet providers and
the protection of the user from a disgruntle or malicious employee is virtually none. Any email box can be looked inside and emails read with something as simple as notepad. Not very secure at all.

Now what about another program made by the Gates Empire, well the system administrator can see the users but the system keeps all user details in an encrypted file, where they are stored until the user logs on and downloads their male. However if the system administrator wants the information he can always change the users password and set-up his email client with the users details and e-voila.

So there is always an abuse for privacy at your ISP, but what about the message as it flies to its destination in cyber space.

Well your data can be captured but it is fairly difficult because of the nature of the Internet. The Internet uses TCP/IP protocol, this is what you might call the language of the internet. The way information is sent means the ability to collect information as it passes through cyber space is very difficult but I bet somewhere somebody has done it!

In general the mail systems of the world tend to be pretty secure but they are open to intrusion at the places of sending and delivery by those who administer these systems, so it does wonder what privacy you have on the Internet.

If in doubt about whether to send a particular message because it might contain sensitive information then its best either not to send it or to use encryption software to encode this, and decode at the other end.

© copyright 2002, Mike Porter.

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