Tech

So, security and privacy have been in the news a lot lately, particularly with Apple’s fight against the FBI over accessing data on an iPhone. This is something that I pay attention to, and try to make sure I have the option to do, not because I feel I’m doing anything that needs to be hidden, but because I believe that personal privacy is important, and because I don’t think the government (or Facebook, or Apple, or Google, or any other company) really needs to have unfettered access into my life.

But I’m a little curious how many people I know actually take steps to protect their communications. I’ve only seen a few people actually mention using overtly privacy-conscious applications, and though I have a few installed, since I don’t know of that many other people that bother, they don’t really get used all that much.

Here’s what I’m set up with at the moment, in case anyone’s interested. I’m also open to suggestions for other possibilities.

For email, I have Apple Mail on my desktop computer set up to use PGP encryption (through the GPG Tools suite), and have iPGMail on my iPhone and iPad so that I can en/de-crypt messages when mobile (it’s a little kludgy, but workable).

For messaging, I have both the Signal and Telegram messaging apps on my iPhone, both of which boast secure end-to-end encryption for chats. I can be reached through each of those via my phone number, which either you have, or can be asked for, since I tend not to post that entirely publicly.