How to evade privacy invasion and stay anonymous online!

NEW YORK (PNN) - February 11, 2013 - Security and law enforcement experts agree the biggest threat to the individual today is identity theft. It often begins with online invasion of privacy.

If you are plugged into the Internet, especially through social media like Facebook or Twitter, your exposure to criminal tampering, loss, and invasion of your privacy skyrockets. Using any online service exposes you to risk. Emails, texting, banking online, making online purchases, even playing what may seem a harmless game at suspect website might deliver you and your identity into the eager hands of scheming cyber thieves.

But criminals are not the only worry. Governments at every level are sending our web spiders to track individuals through their ISPs right into their home computers, laptops and iPads. Aggressive advertisers and marketers want to know every nuance of your lifestyle to sell you their products and services: they want to know who you are, where you are, what you like to eat, listen to, watch, read, even your sexual preference.

The sad fact is, the more you interface with the virtual world, the more protection you need. The best solution is to interact with everything anonymously.

As more people become aware of the dangers of the Internet and wireless networks to their anonymity, companies have started up whose sole purpose is to protect you from nosy corporations, inquisitive government entities, and cyber crooks that operate around the world.

If you have a habit of frequently texting online you might check out Unsene. The site offers its basic service for free and uses new types of technological algorithms that employ architecture similar to the unbreakable codes used by some of the top intelligence agencies in the world. China, the world's most egregious hackers, have been unable to crack the NSA computers and those of the CIA. That same approach is used by Unsene to protect your conversations making them totally secure and unhackable.

Unsene's basic service is free. Their upgraded version can be had for a nominal fee.

As for surfing the web worry-free, one of the best approaches is to use a totally secure operating system that is designed to be like a bank vault as far as your identity and privacy goes. All current popular operating systems expose you to alarming levels of danger.

To address this problem, the developers at Whonix have created a virtually invisible IP address that hackers and malware and viruses can't penetrate easily. Using the system is like surfing the Internet in an impenetrable suit of armor. Your identity is very difficult to trace and your privacy assured as best as the current technology can attain.

As the Whonix creators explain, "Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user's real IP/location." Whonix cautions, however, that nothing is foolproof and the system is an ongoing work under continual development and experimental to a degree.

Saving you from privacy invasion becomes more important each year that passes. Such an OS is worth its weight in gold, but it's offered for free. That's because the developers are part of the growing IT professionals that are fighting government, intelligence organizations, and the UN, each of which seeks to control and monitor all Internet activity.

Chris Dougherty at virtualthreat.com provides more background on Whonix and a comprehensive step-by-step guide to installing the system and using it to avoid detection and tracking on the Internet.