Recently
released National Security Agency documents indicate the U.S.
government is “tapping directly into the central servers” of your
favorite Internet services as part of a secret program called PRISM.
Those
companies have largely denied the reports, saying they never allowed
the government direct access to their servers. Government officials have
admitted the program exists, however, and President Obama himself
defended it as legal in a Friday morning press conference.
Naturally,
privacy advocates are up in arms over the government having access to
their Internet data in this way, even if officials claim PRISM only
targets non-U.S. residents and citizens. These are some of the biggest
companies on the Internet, and they probably know more about you and
your activities than anyone else around.
Yet there are
still ways you can use the Internet without having to surrender your
personal information, data, and Internet habits to those firms in the
program.
It might be best to use services based outside of the
U.S., where the American government has no jurisdiction—bearing in mind
that other governments may have their own surveillance programs, and
anything you share publicly might be scooped up by security agencies
anyway.
That said, here’s your guide to using the Internet without using PRISM companies.
Sure, Twitter was ablaze with people joking about the government tracking all your public tweets (they are
stored in the Library of Congress, after all), but many Twitter employees were
stunned by the news of PRISM. Meanwhile, private accounts and direct messages appear to be off limits.
is another user-friendly community. It works to protect your privacy and, like Twitter, will
only divulge information it has on you if required by a court of law. Also, it only keeps IP address information for 90 days.
Elsewhere, you might opt for
Internet Relay Chat or
ICQ (now owned by a Russian company) to converse with friends.
For blogging, you might want to stay away from Google-owned Blogger, and Yahoo-bound
Tumblr. Instead, you could write longer notes on WordPress (a self-hosted blog might be a touch more private) or LiveJournal.
Email
Search
Obviously,
Google, Yahoo, and Bing are out of the question for your new Internet
lifestyle. There are alternative search engines that might help take you
where you want to go.
Blekko and
DuckDuckGo are good options. For non-American services, you could use Russia’s
Yandex, or consult this
useful Wikipedia list of options.
Maps
So long, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps! Privacy advocates might just be switching back to printing out 10 pages of
Mapquest directions. Nokia has a mapping tool called HERE,
OpenStreetMap might take your fancy, and
ArcGis is a less detailed option. Apple Maps are terrible anyway.
Voice/video chat
Skype,
a Microsoft entity, is on the PRISM list. You might wish to avoid
Google Hangouts and Apple’s Facetime as well now. There are a few
options here, such as
Tinychat,
ooVoo, and
meetings.io, all of which are free.
Video sharing
YouTube is out, sadly, in our Google-free guide. If you’re looking to share a video on the Internet, you might look to
Dailymotion (
France blocked Yahoo from buying a majority stake in it),
Vimeo, or
Liveleak.
Vine, of course, is an option too if you want to share short clips.
Photo sharing
To
share your photos via a non PRISM-affiliated company, you could share
photos directly on Twitter, use Reddit’s tool of choice Imgur, head for
DeviantArt, or go for the old staple of PhotoBucket.
Document collaboration
If
you’re working with friends or colleagues on a collaborative document,
you might be using Google Drive (formerly Google Docs). There are a few
other options out there, not counting Microsoft’s Office 365. Zoho has
a
docs suite, as does
Thinkfree.
File sharing
The
PRISM document leaked to the Guardian and Washington Post indicated
file storage and sharing service Dropbox is due to join the program
soon.
Thankfully, there are plenty of other ways to share large files
without having to explode your email storage limit or mail a USB stick.
Box has a few gigabytes of free storage, and
Kim Dotcom’s Mega—which Dotcom bills as “the privacy company”—has 50GB of space for free (though there have been some
security concerns). Wikipedia, again, has a large list
You always have the option of sending legal files to which you own the copyright through BitTorrent as well.
Operating system/smartphones
Microsoft
and Apple are reputedly part of PRISM, meaning that the Windows and OS X
operating systems on your computer might just be transmitting data back
to the government. You might want to read up on which flavor of Linux,
the most popular open source OS, fits your needs.
Likewise,
iPhones, Android phones, and Windows Phones run on operating systems
provided by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. You might be inclined to
switch to BlackBerry, a Canadian company, or use a phone without any
Internet features. Except, y’know, the government is
collecting data about your phone calls, too.
If
you really are truly worried about the government keeping tabs on your
activities, there’s really only one option: go nuclear, disconnect
everything, and go live on a secluded island for the rest of your days.
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