Gadget marketers recently gathered in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (as if we needed more gadgets), but the feeling persists that 2011 is going to be less about digital consumption than about privacy.
While Goldman Sachs is investing in Facebook and offering high-net-worth clients the chance to get a piece of the company, I see a tech bubble in the making with regard to social media as many of us begin to scale back our exposure. People used to tell me about how many "friends" they had on Facebook. Now what I hear is mostly how many connections they've broken with contacts they never actually knew in the first place.
Much of our exposure to prying eyes is self-inflicted, as anyone who has been astounded by what people reveal about themselves on Facebook can attest.
But we're also troubled by continued security concerns as hackers compromise systems and steal identities. Last May, Google, whose operations in China were compromised by hackers, announced that it was phasing out the use of Microsoft Windows because of its vulnerability to attack.
Google, of course, has a vested interest in getting people to use its own products, like the forthcoming ChromeOS operating system, but it's also true that with more than 80 percent of worldwide installations, the various versions of Windows are a prime target for the unscrupulous.
Some attacks are low-tech, and these can be the most painful of all. An editor of mine once looked away from his laptop to pay for a cup of coffee in New York and wound up losing a huge volume of private documents related to his home and business.
Here, at least, we can begin to draw the line, for there are products on the market that offer serious protection. I've been looking at Encrypt Stick, from ENC Security Systems in Vancouver. It's a major asset for those who travel often with sensitive material on their computers.
How program works
Encrypt Stick works from a flash drive and lets you lock up anything you want in one or more "vaults," which are highly secure storage areas on the drive. You can carry sensitive information in your pocket and plug in to any available computer because access leaves no trace of the files or the program on the computer you're using. Lose your flash drive and you can recover the files, provided you've exported one of your encrypted "vaults" to a hard disk or other medium. Unfortunately, that will involve buying another license, but the cost is an affordable $40.
A free version limited in the number of vaults you can create can be found at the site ( www.encryptstick.com). You'll find that there's no real installation other than copying the program to your flash drive, at which point it's ready to use after you've set up a password. Opening the program will allow you to drag any kind of files into a vault or create a new vault at will, with your sensitive materials protected by 512-bit polymorphic encryption.
The big news about Encrypt Stick, however, is that the new version 5.0 comes with a Web browser, a significant addition given the vulnerability of widely used browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Web use today can entangle you in hacking attacks by means of keystroke logging or stolen password information from Wi-Fi networks that are not secure. Although there is a sacrifice in performance, the Encrypt Stick browser offers the balancing advantage of leaving no cookies behind. It also keeps private bookmarks and runs inside an encrypted vault on the flash drive so that your access to sensitive sites like banking and financial pages is protected.
A password manager is also part of the package. I like the ability to work within a secure environment, simply right-clicking on a user name or password field to insert the information needed to access a site. And even more, I like the ability to move between Windows-based PCs without needing to install software or worry about exposing private information to subsequent users. In an era of prying eyes, small tools like this help us regain a measure of privacy.
