Keeping an eye on your privacy

By taking some sensible precautions and giving some thought to the way you use your computer, you can reduce the possibilities of unwanted intrusion and surveillance.

It seems that barely a day goes by without another computer security scare story hitting the headlines. As a home PC user and web surfer, it is easy to feel vulnerable.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. By taking a few basic precautions, you can make your information more secure and make yourself less visible as you browse websites or chat in newsgroups online.

What's the magic word?
One of the most straightforward things you can do to protect your computer from prying eyes is to password protect it. This means that when you, or anyone else, turns on your computer it will ask for a password before it starts up.

You can do this at the BIOS level. BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System and is the very low-level operating software on top of which all the other software, including the operating system, on your PC runs.

It's a simple process, but bear in mind that if you forget this password you won't even be able to start your computer up, so choose a password that will be easy for you to remember.

One way to ensure basic privacy if you're using Windows XP or Windows 2000 is to create user accounts for everyone using your PC and assign each of them a password. You can use this system to permit or deny access to different applications or different groups of documents.

If you are using Windows XP you can set up a new user account by selecting Control Panel from the Start menu and then selecting User Accounts.

If you then choose Create a new account, you can type in a name and password and tailor the available files and folders the new user has access to.

If there is more than one person using your PC, it's important that you don't set up your computer with just a single administrator account.

The administrator, in Windows terms, has much greater access to security measures than an ordinary user and if somebody else comes along while you're away from your PC, they can make changes which wouldn't be possible if they weren't working at the administrator level.

If you need to leave your PC for a short time while you're working on a sensitive document, you can lock your computer by activating the password on your screen saver.

You'll only be able to unlock it if you know the password, so no one else who's at home at the time would be able to take a look at what you're working on.

As a quick tip, building numbers into your passwords makes them harder to guess, so Rover72 is a harder password to guess than Rover, even if the hacker happens to know the name of your dog.

Hide and seek
In Windows it's possible to hide a file from anyone else using your PC by right-clicking on the file and selecting Properties, then checking the Hidden box under the General tab. You can reveal the file again by unchecking the box.

You can also password-protect individual folders on your PC, rather than relying on the user password that Windows asks you for when you start up your computer.

While it's a good security starting point, all the Windows password protection really does is hide your files from other users; a quick search would turn up your data fairly easily.

To set or deny access to a Windows folder, right-click on that folder, select Properties and then choose the Security tab. Select a user from the Group of user names list and check the Allow or Deny boxes, according to the level of access you wish the user to have to that folder.

More recent versions of Microsoft Office allow you to password-protect files individually so they can't easily be read by anyone without the password. To do this, open the file, click on File then Save As and select the Tools option in the top right-hand corner of the dialogue box.

Select Options, click on the Security tab and you'll be able to choose separate passwords to open or modify any file, so you can allow people to view a document but still restrict who can make changes to it. You can protect Excel documents and other Office files in the same way.

Gone for good
If you've ever deleted a file by accident and breathed a sigh of relief when you fished it out of your computer's Recycle Bin, you'll know that it's fairly easy to retrieve supposedly erased files.

It's all too easy to forget that when you delete a file, all you do is transfer its details to the Recycle Bin folder. Open that folder and you can reinstate the file as if it had never been deleted.

So, you must remember to empty the Recycle Bin on a regular basis. Even then, however, these files are not gone forever.

For full privacy, you need to go one step further. You need a file shredder. File shredders are programs, some of them written to military security standards, which physically overwrite the contents of a file with a series of other characters.

There are plenty of file shredders available as shareware but a couple of good ones are AbsoluteShield and File Shredder 2000.

There's no safety net and once a file is deleted it's gone for good. It's probably best to reserve the shredder for sensitive files and continue to use the Recycle Bin for day-to-day deletions.

Scrambled messages
Email is not the most secure form of communication, which is why you're advised never to divulge your bank details, for example, in an email.

A regular email, if intercepted, is easy to read. If you're sending sensitive information and are worried about this you can scramble or encrypt the content of your emails.

The encrypted email can only be decrypted with a software 'key', which is retained by the intended recipient of your email.

You can do this from within Outlook in Microsoft Office, by selecting Tools, then Options, then Security and clicking to place a tick in the Encrypt contents and attachments for outgoing messages checkbox.

You'll also need to create a digital signature and certificate to send to the person you want to exchange encrypted emails with so their computer can validate you as an authorised correspondent.

You can set up a digital signature for all your correspondence from the same Security tab in the Options panel. Click on the Get a Digital ID button and you'll be taken to a page on the Microsoft website where you can choose your Digital ID provider. VeriSign and the US Postal Service are just two of the possible sources.

If you want to go further than this for more secure encryption, you may want to consider installing encryption software on your PC, such as that offered free of charge by Pretty Good Privacy, or using a secure email service such as Hushmail.

Hushmail is a free, easy-to-use webmail service that offers secure, encrypted messages between its users. Simply sign up on the Hushmail website to get 2Mb of webmail storage space and send messages with attachments of up to 1.5Mb, all fully encrypted.

If you need more than this, you can pay $30 (about £16) a year for a premium service, which includes 32Mb of storage space and technical support.

To send a secure email through the system, you just need to log on to your account on the website, as you would with Hotmail or any other web-based mail service. Messages to people who don't subscribe to Hushmail are sent unencrypted in the normal way.

Who's watching you?
Certain websites, and in most cases you won't know which ones, download software known as spyware to your PC when you visit them. This software sits on your PC and monitors the sites you visit.

It can also scan the files on your PC, track your reactions when pop-up ads appear, and even tailor the ads you see to your usage and reaction patterns.

Some spyware even relays details such as your name and postcode back to the company that runs the website. In most cases, though, this information is used for commercial purposes such as marketing rather than anything more underhand.

Detailed information like this is useful to advertisers, particularly those that send out bulk email, and is sold by the creators of the spyware.

You probably object to uninvited software looking through the files on your computer or monitoring the way you use the internet and the sites you visit. To prevent this kind of spying, there is a range of software that can help.

The best known is Ad-aware, which checks through your PC's memory, drives and the Windows registry, hunting for spyware. It's available to download here and is free for personal use. Spybot does a similar job and is also free to download.

Stay anonymous
When you send an email, each message normally contains your email address, which is useful if you want the recipient to be able to reply to you.

There are times, though, when you might not want people to know your email address and it's quite possible to send a message with an untraceable return address.

By far the easiest way to do this is to set up a disposable email address, which you can do at www.jetable.org, www.spamgourmet.com or www.mailinator.com.

These services are all available free of charge and allow you to set up a temporary and anonymous email address from which you can send emails. Any emails you receive at this address will be forwarded to your regular email account.

You may also want to limit the amount of data that different websites can access about you, perfectly legitimately, through the use of what are known as cookies.

These are snippets of data held in text files on your computer's hard disk, which contain information about your use of websites. A website will 'read' the cookie relevant to your use of that site each time you visit and may tailor the pages you view accordingly.

To control the cookies stored on your system, you don't need any third-party software, you can do it all from within Windows. We'll deal with Internet Explorer, but most of the common browsers enable similar control.

Open the browser and select Internet Options from the Tools menu. Under Temporary Internet files you'll see the Delete Cookies button. Press this and at a stroke you can delete any cookies currently on your system.

To block cookies from being stored on your PC in the future, click on the Privacy tab under Internet Options in the Tools menu and use your mouse to move the slider to the top.

Be aware, though, that some sites demand that you allow cookies to be stored on your computer for you to use them.

Put up a wall
Another line of privacy protection that you should definitely have if you use the internet regularly, particularly through a broadband connection, is a firewall.

This can be either software or hardware, which prevents outside users from connecting to your PC without your permission.

If you run Windows XP, there's a rudimentary software firewall included in the operating system but it is switched off by default.

To activate the Windows XP firewall, double-click on the My Network Places icon on your Desktop, then click on the View network connections option on the left-hand side of the window that appears.

The icons displayed here will differ according to how you connect to the internet. If you have a dial-up connection, right-click on the icon under the heading Dial-up.

If you have a broadband connection, right-click on the icon under the heading LAN or high-speed and if you connect to the internet through a router, right-click on the icon labelled LAN. Next, select Properties from the drop-down menu and click on the Advanced tab. Check the box under the Internet Connection Firewall heading and then click on OK.

There are plenty of other firewalls available, most of them a lot more thorough than the freebie supplied with Windows XP.

Software such as Norton Personal Firewall from Symantec and Zone Alarm from Zone Labs enable you to set up and maintain impenetrable firewalls. The Norton product costs £45 to download while the basic version of Zone Alarm is free.

The key to privacy
All of the measures we have looked at in this feature to help protect your privacy relate equally to notebook computers as they do to desktop systems.

If you do own a notebook, however, you might want to give some thought to the additional privacy-protection measures you can put in place to keep the data stored on your notebook safe.

Due to the portable nature of notebooks, they are far more accessible than your home PC. If you're carrying a notebook around with you, protecting the physical unit is much more complicated than merely locking your front door when you leave the house.

It's worth restating the importance of using passwords to protect access to your computer, to specific folders and to individual files, depending on how sensitive they are, just in case the worst happens and your notebook is stolen.

An extra way of protecting your notebook from unauthorised access is to use a USB security key. As the name suggests, the small device is plugged into the USB port on your notebook and without it the computer won't operate.

As long as you keep the USB key separate from your notebook (don't keep it in the same bag!), then even if the computer is stolen, the information on it should remain unusable. One such product is The Saint, a USB security key available from a range of online retailers, including www.gadgetstuff.com, for about £30.

You can also pick up USB memory keys that can be password protected - all the USB memory keys in Iomega's Mini range offer this feature, prices start from around £38 for a 128Mb drive - or that will encrypt files and data stored on the key so that only you can read them.

The Ministor USB flash drive from Amacom offers 128Mb of storage space and comes with software you can use to encrypt sensitive files or folders. It costs just over £62 and is available from Simply Computers.

Protect your data
Protecting the data held on your computer and your privacy online is an important issue but not one to get paranoid about.

By taking some sensible precautions and giving some thought to the way you use your computer, you can reduce the possibilities of unwanted intrusion and surveillance.

There are many different ways of approaching privacy and doing just a little bit here and there to remove automated spies and protect your important or sensitive files with passwords will make a big difference to your feeling of security. It needn't cost a lot and could have the added bonus of speeding up your PC.