This is a great program used to help protect your privacy.

Metadata consists of information that characterizes data. Metadata is used to provide documentation for data products. In essence, metadata answers who, what, when, where, why, and how about every facet of the data that is being documented.

Metadata within a file can tell a lot about you. Cameras record data about when a picture was taken and what camera was used. Office documents like PDF or Office automatically adds author and company information to documents and spreadsheets.

Maybe you don’t want to disclose that information on the web.

MAT can only remove metadata from your files, it does not anonymise their content, nor can it handle watermarking, steganography, or any too custom metadata field/system.

If you really want to be anonymous, use a format that does not contain any metadata, or better yet, use plain-text.

These are the formats supported to some extent:

Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg, …)
Open Document (.odt, .odx, .ods, …)
Office Openxml (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, …)
Portable Document Fileformat (.pdf)
Tape ARchive (.tar, .tar.bz2, .tar.gz)
ZIP (.zip)
MPEG Audio (.mp3, .mp2, .mp1, .mpa)
Ogg Vorbis (.ogg)
Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac)
Torrent (.torrent)

The President of the United States and his birth certificate would have greatly benefited from software such as MAT.

You can install MAT with this terminal command:

sudo apt-get install mat

Look for more articles about privacy soon and by searching in our search by under “privacy”.

Protecting your privacy in todays digital age is important and one that many people just outright fail to put into consideration. My journey with privacy began several years back (Ubuntu 6.10 to be exact)… it was the end of 2006 and I made the decision to switch my operating system to Ubuntu.

There were so many reports of Microsoft spying on users, I had felt it was time to do something.

Ive not been a fan of Google for a while now either. Some headlines from them would include Google getting a Pentagon contract with the NGA, Google developing eavesdropping software (2006), Google selling data to US Intelligence agencies (2008), Google works with NSA on their network (2010), Google working with CIA to fund a startup called “Recorded Future” to monitor websites, blogs, facebook pages and twitter accounts (2010).

But Google & Microsoft are only one part of the concern. Recent news articles have cities, states and countries using drones to monitor people, Facebook tracking and targeting you, and even the IRS saying they dont need warrants to read your emails.

We are only at the cusp of this. Its going to get much worse.

One of the first steps you can do is change the search engine you use. This is super easy to do. Many people I know love using Duck Duck Go because it has a ton of extra search features. I wont go into it here so go to their site and learn more. DDG does not collect or share your personal info. Read their privacy page to learn more on why you should care about this.

https://duckduckgo.com/

One thing I dont like about Google is it creates a profile about you. A sort of bubble. It filters out the bad stuff you dont agree with and promotes stuff it knows you already like (based on your searches, facebook likes, etc). So when you search on Google you really get a filtered view of the world.

My favorite search engine is StartPage. I admit to being hooked on Google searches… almost like a drug. StartPage scrapes Google for its results so they will be similar to that of Google, minus the Google filtering I mentioned above. StartPage DOES NOT record your IP address or track your searches!

https://startpage.com/

When typing in searches, make sure to always use HTTPS to encrypt your info so at least your ISP cant record what you do.

Whichever search engine you consider using, make sure to make it your default search engine right now and start using it. There should be instructions on both pages above on how to add their search engine to your list and make it your default engine.

Next step I would recommend is to block and randomize your web browsing. There are several Firefox add-ons you can consider. Im using three add-ons right now.

The first one is by Mozilla called “Collusion” to see how your “web” of websites sharing data grows rapidly as you view websites…

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/

After installing Collusion there should be a little red icon at the bottom right of Firefox which you can click onto and get a graphical view of whos sharing YOUR data with whom. In fact, the image at the top of this article shows about an hour of web browsing on my computer and how sites are sharing all of your data with one another. Scary isnt it?

So the next two add-ons I use which helps prevent tracking is DoNotTrackMe and TrackMeNot….

DoNotTrackMe
http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php

* DoNotTrackMe attempts to block sites from sharing data with each other. As an example, ive blocked over 4,400 sites from tracking/sharing my data this morning alone.

TrackMeNot
http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

* TrackMeNot silently throws out fake search queries which help websites from creating profiles about you. In the last half hour TMN has done a Google search on “plant food” a Bing search on “frozen food” and a Yahoo search on “where is waldo”.

There are several more browser add-ons and ideas in the link here… http://fixtracking.com/

It goes without saying you should not be using Google Chrome if privacy matters at all to you. Make the switch to Firefox. True, FF is slightly slower on older computers, but the security is worth it.

Stick around for my continued series next week about protecting your privacy and talking about the endgame… were this all might lead. While its not directly Ubuntu related, privacy is important to many people in this world of growing surveillance. I will be getting into it in detail. How to change your SSN, how to register your car in another name, everything both online and offline.

If you have cool web privacy recommendations like those above, please post them. Its our human connection with one another that can be our biggest ally (or worst enemy).

Over the next couple weeks we will be looking at Google app alternatives available in Ubuntu. We’ll see if these apps are suitable or even come close to Googles products.

“Enough with Google”.

This is what we kept hearing from our closest friends and colleagues these days. The steps Google is taking to become the biblical moloch that knows everything about our surfing habits made many of us, tech-savvy people, consider a total shut-down of all the Google services we use.

Today I want to talk about browsers. Can Ubuntu offer a decent alternative to Google Chrome, one of the fastest and best browsers in town? The short answer: yes, it can.
Ubuntu has Firefox web browser installed by default. Firefox has gone through many changes in the past 6 months to up its game and compete against Google Chrome. Let’s be honest here, Google Chrome has become possibly best browser for desktop computers these days with all of its nifty features. Make no mistake Firefox is stepping up and can offer fast rendering, loading and displaying of webpages = Firefox is cool again.

What is even better is that Firefox is the browser of choice of the vast community behind Ubuntu, so that you will have plenty of possibilities to customize it, simply adding add-ons, which are really easy to install and offer plenty of possibilities for anybody.

About speed, we can honestly say that the guys behind Firefox did a great job, and in many cases Firefox is on-par if not better than Google Chrome. At least until Chrome will see a new major release which, according to Google, will be twice as fast as the previous one.

And to conclude, Firefox is RAM friendly. Google Chrome creates a separate process for each open tab, which while offering more stability, at the same time consumes as much as three times what Firefox consumes, given the same number of tabs.

So, if you want to go light and fast, Ubuntu has an answer to Google Chrome: its name is Firefox and if you never used it before, we strongly suggest you to start right now.

FireFox is Open Source, and hence its code can be modified and redistributed, in case you are not happy with parts of its functioning. And even if you are not a coder, you should love Open Source anyway, because there is nothing like using a software that cares about privacy and freedom.

Richard Stallman, founder of the “Free Software Foundation” and the “GNU Project” Discusses SOPA/PIPA on the Alex Jones Show.

Listen to the audio from an interview today (Jan-19-2012) on the Alex Jones Show. Richard Stallman is the founder of the “Free Software Foundation” and the “GNU Project”.

This is some of the best information from any media source on this topic, check it out.

Please see this related article: http://www.prisonplanet.com/sopa-battle-rages-tell-congress-we-will-not-accept-censorship.html

Startpage is a private engine that, according to what its developers say, is the world’s most private search engine.

Face it everyone, our privacy is under attack. For every search we perform using Google or Bing those companies store our IP and poison our computers with tracking cookies, to understand what we search, how much time we spend on the given websites and to track our surfing habits. All of that info will be conveniently packed and used for commercial purposes. But there is good news. The fight for privacy found another ally in this interesting search engine that fancies itself as the world’s most private search engine.

What we know is that Startpage doesn’t log your surfing habits and it doesn’t store your IP either. So, if you think privacy is an issue, and you really should, you should give Startpage a try. You may believe that Google and Microsoft are going to act kind with your data, but never forget (and it already happened with AOL) that such info may fall into the wrong hands.

Startpage, to be honest, uses some cookies and the company itself doesn’t hide it. What makes the difference with the most popular search engines is that Startpage will never feed your browser a unique-id cookie and the use of anonymous cookies, which don’t endanger your privacy, find its justification in offering the user a better experience.

 If you cannot unhook yourself from Google, this is the very best option. We use Startpage, as it is very much a proxy through the search results of Google. It may be worth noting that the results seems to be taken from google.com, as the proxy doesn’t geolocate your ip and it is so unable to automatically provide you search results in your native language.

Our advice is to give it a try, in the age of Google and Facebook you will never be minding enough about privacy. Better to be safe, then sorry.

On June 15th 2011 Google will begin to offer the Chromebook starting at $20 a month for students and teachers, and $28 a month for businesses. These will be available at both Best Buy and Amazon. Apparently, you can also buy the computers outright from Samsung ($429 with wi-fi, $499 with 3G) and from Acer ($349). According to Google, any hardware updates would mean free laptop replacements.

Google is changing the game once again by putting low cost internet laptops into the hands of most anyone now at a controlled price most all people could afford.

But how will this affect Ubuntu? Positively? Negatively? How will this dent Mark Shuttleworths plan of obtaining 200 million Ubuntu users in just a few years? How will Chromebook users handle games? Do you trust all of your data in the cloud and not on your own computer? Are these computers really YOUR computers anymore if you are basically just renting them? Lots of unanswered questions.

While I’d love to test one of these computers out, I’ll stick with Ubuntu as I believe it will be a bastion of privacy in a world that is increasingly becoming an open book (an open Chromebook) to a “police state” like world. Viva freedom and privacy!

Read more about the Chromebook here:
http://blogs.forbes.com/quentinhardy/2011/05/10/google-to-announce-chrome-laptops-20month/

and here:
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110511/google-uncrates-the-chromebook/

 

So why care at all about private searches? DuckDuckGo made a simple visual page why. Check it out at: http://donttrack.us/

You can bet insurance companies, doctors, potential employers, local authorities, collection agencies,  marketers, etc are ready to buy your search data.

So give StartPage and DuckDuckGo a try! Happy safe internet searching!