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How to Protect Yourself From Government Surveillance and Criminal Hackers

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Protect yourself from govt surveillance icons
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December 1, 2016

Even if you like to share thoughts and photos on social media, there are certainly plenty of things that you’d like to keep between yourself and a select few. ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Director Ben Wizner sat down with our principal technologist Christopher Soghoian for a Facebook Live video Q&A on how to keep the government and other snoopers out of your private digital business.

Here are some highlights from their answers to questions from people on Facebook:

Protecting Your Passwords

Chris talks about why many people have bad “password hygiene” and the importance of a getting a password manager:

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Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com.

A couple of good password managers you can try are LastPass and 1Password.

Another way to protect your online accounts is by enabling two-factor authentication, which is an optional service offered by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter and others. Chris talks about what two-factor authentication is and how it protects you from hacking:

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Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com.

Keeping Your Communications Secure With Encryption

Chris and Ben give a brief overview on encryption and some simple steps you can take to make sure your communications are read only by the right people:

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Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com.

A free, very good app and easy-to-use app you can download for super-secure text messaging and phone calls is called Signal (we even use it here at the ACLU).

Private Web Browsing

Chris talks about what the Tor web browser is and how effective it is at protecting you from government surveillance:

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Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com.

You can get more handy privacy tips here and watch the full Facebook Live video here.

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