Cryptography Apps: How To Keep Your Personal Info Private

NSA Utah Data Center Administration Building. Image courtesy of nsa.gov

If anyone had insisted a year ago that there was a giant government warehouse in Utah that was poring through every electronic communication sent from around the world, from text messages to emails to web traffic, they would be accused of having paranoid delusions. Now in 2014, though, its yesterdays news.

After former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information on the United States security programs that are looking through each piece of data we transmit, thus pulling back the curtain on how much our privacy has truly been invaded, the world has changed as our eyes were opened. Encryption is becoming a very important topic in online news, and so is the underlying field, called cryptography.

As consumers living in a post-Edward Snowden world, we should remain aware of what cryptography applications are out there, and how we can utilize them to keep our information (and thus, ourselves) safer. This article is intended to discuss some of the more practical usages of cryptography in modern computing, including PGP/GPG encryption, encrypted chat programs such as Cryptocat, the anonymous Tor browser, and will touch on a major buzz item of 2013, Bitcoin.

All technologies written about in this article are currently (at the time of publishing) legal to use in the United States.

Some Common Cryptography Terms:

Cryptography: The study and practice of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversaries.

Adversary: A third party who may attempt to decipher an encrypted message. Hackers, rival companies, and identity thieves are all common adversaries in the cryptographic sense.

Encryption: The process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties can read it.

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Cryptography Apps: How To Keep Your Personal Info Private