Latest revision as of 16:01, 27 November 2015

Scenario- Profiling your identity and actions Surveillance

To send or not to send - that is the question! And it is not a rhetorical one: email is an all consuming part of our digital lives, but it is also very ancient, and in the years its 30-year-old design hasn't improved much in terms of security.

Email is basically made of two parts: the "body", with the content of the message, and the "header", with information on the author of the email, the person it has been sent to, the time when it was sent, etc. All this information, called metadata, can be gathered from email records and turned into a pattern, as can be seen on the Immersion project from MIT. The content of the messages, on the other hand, can be protected, and the various questions you may have about how to secure your email are answered in this section.

Other good introductory guides to email security include the Introduction to email safety from Floss Manuals and the multi-lingual secure communications chapter of the Security in a box project.

From here …

• I want to be certain of the recipient's identity (and vice versa)
• I want to be protected from malicious emails
• I want to protect my email account from unauthorised access
• I want to send an anonymous email
• To find a reliable email provider
• To send an email that no one but me and the recipient can read