What's New - Secluded hideaways

[Republished from the excellent Multimedia column in Time Out, edited by Yolanda Zappaterra.]

On the eve of the hugely criticised Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) becoming law, one of the scariest sites on the web isn't the trailer site for Scary Movie (www.scarymovie.com), or even last year's lauded one for the Blair Witch Project, but Privacy Net, at www.privacy.net. Through various demos, Privacy Net shows you how information on you and your movements online can be gathered to put together a frighteningly accurate profile for a frighteningly wide range of purposes and companies; indeed, recent estimates suggest that the average internet user appears on around 150 different databases and mailing lists. Which means that, coupled with the RIP Act, the Big Brother era (as envisioned by George Orwell rather than Channel 4) is well and truly upon us.

The RIP Act has been extensively covered in the last few months so I won't go over old ground, but to refresh memories with the bare basics, it allows the Government and some authorities (including police and security services) to monitor email and other internet activity as well as demand encryption keys from users, and it allows employers to intercept their workers' emails if they've been given (or think they've been given) consent by both recipient and sender. And draft regulations going through an extended consultation period at time of writing will also, incredibly, allow employers to monitor mail (and phone calls) without consent in certain situations. But as with any good subversive medium, the internet long ago (as far back as 1992, when the first re-mailer, Finland's anon.penet.fi - now closed - stripped emails of identifying marks before resending them) began devising lots of legal (and not so legal) ways of circumventing such draconian rules and regulations, and if you know where to go, it's not too hard to dissuade both employers and authorities from monitoring your movements by the simple expediency of making it fiendishly hard for them to do so.

Unsurprisingly, most of the places to go are American, where they're big on privacy (or identity management systems, as they like to call them), and have the software and sites to prove it. Good ones that do a range of things around personalisation and privacy protection - from creating multiple identities, profiles and passwords and rating companies' privacy policies to fielding spam or targeted mail and filling in forms with whatever data you want - include www.ezlogin.com, www.enonymous.com and www.myprivacy.org. For advice and general help an excellent US site, with lots of good links, is provided by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse at www.privacyrights.org, and you'll find loads of info around evading marketers and their dreaded lists at www.Junkbusters.com.

But one of the best ways of becoming anonymous online is through Freedom, a program developed and sold by Montreal's Zero-Knowledge Systems (www.freedom.net) for a pretty reasonable $49.95. Once downloaded, Freedom enables you to browse and email anonymously through the use of multiple digital identities, with all data encrypted and re-routed through at least three different network providers, none of whom get any information about you, your mail or your destinations. And if you're looking for sites that will offer similar advice, tools and cloaking that, like Freedom, go beyond simply not wanting to be spammed, then head for www.fipr.org/rip, which has links to around 15 such sites. Here you'll find good web-based email providers such as LokMail (www.lokmail.com) andHushMail (www.hushmail.com), which has a particularly good FAQ section too), that encrypt mails, don't cache anything to your hard drive and don't use cookies (nasty little things that enable a web site to track your activities). If it's screened surfing you're after, head for Anonymizer (www.anonymizer.com) or The Cloak (www.the-cloak.com), and if you're wanting to keep prying eyes away from your WAP and PDA devices,then http://Mail2Web.com should be able to help.

Ultimately, though, perhaps one of the best ways to stop the snooping is through the emerging trend for peer-to-peer networking, which disperses information across volunteers' drives without the need for a central server; after all, policing hundreds of millions of 'servers' as opposed to a few thousand central ones is ultimately impossible. Good examples can be found at www.freenet.com and www.publius.com, which both encrypt documents then break them up into small parts to be distributed across randomly chosen servers hosted by volunteers who don't know what the content is. The documents can easily be reassembled for decryption and viewing. For me the beauty of the system lies with the volunteers, who have to trust each other, back each other up and share the net 100 per cent. Oooh, I think I hear strains of Sham 69; If the kids are united, it'll be a brave new world indeed.

[Republished from the excellent Multimedia column in Time Out, edited by Yolanda Zappaterra.]