Your Email is at Risk

Posted: October 24, 2013

[caption id="attachment_11615" align="alignright" width="580"]Image: PCWorld[/caption]Most people live under the impression that information sent via email is secure. Wrong. Even if your email is encrypted with SSL, that might just be the case for part of its route. Protect your sensitive information sent via email.

Lincoln Spector, Contributing Editor for PCWorld shares tips on protecting yourself, and a secure sending option.

What you need to know about privacy, email, and particularly Gmail

Pritesh Singh asked whether anyone other than the intended recipient can view files attached to a Gmail message.

Unless you take special precautions, nothing you send by email is secure. That's doubly true with Gmail, since Google uses the content of your messages to target advertising.

I very much doubt that Google employees are reading your mail; there are cheaper ways to get the job done. But the potential of abuse is always there. And let's not forget the NSA's enthusiasm for sticking its nose into everything we do online.

Giving up Gmail won't help much. All email, by its nature, is insecure. Your unencrypted message will go through several servers between you and the recipient. Even if the message leaves your PC encrypted with SSL (as happens with Gmail), that only protects it for the first leg of its journey.

There's no technical reason why we can't all have full, end-to-end encryption built into our email systems. A free, open-source standard already exists: OpenPGP. All it needs is universal acceptance by the major email clients and providers.

But that's not going to happen. While it would be wonderful for most of us, such acceptance would not be in the interests of Google, Microsoft, or the U.S. government.

Read the entire article What You Need to Know About Privacy, Email, and Particularly Gmail, at PCWorld.