To what extent do you secure your data?

[l0gic]

With all of the recent controversy surrounding government snooping and general invasions of privacy, the popularity of end-user crytography seems poised to explode in the near future. What steps (if any) have you taken to secure your sensitive data and personal information?

[jollyrancher82]

Where is the "My personal data does not exist" option :(

[VaKo]

I just keep anything I don't want people looking at in my head. No one can get in there. ?

[l0gic]

I just keep anything I don't want people looking at in my head. No one can get in there.

Yet. <_<

[darkzar99]

I just keep anything I don't want people looking at in my head. No one can get in there. ?

Im going to go with VaKo on the personal information, if its personal i wont put it anywhere where there is a chance someone could get it

[rFayjW98ciLoNQLDZmFRKD]

I encript things I dont want people to see, anything secret is stored physically

[Famicoman]

I don't really have personal data. Passwords are in my head. Thats it.

[CaveMan]

i keep them behind my routers firewall :P and thats as far as i go :P

i was thinking of turning on windows firewall a few days ago.... but than my data would be more accessable

[Darren Kitchen]

What constitutes personal information?

Photos, music, creative writing, financial data?

[l0gic]

What constitutes personal information?

Photos, music, creative writing, financial data?

Damn you... Mubix brought up the same point in the IRC channel. :)

I would consider "personal" data anything you wouldn't want coming up in a Google search. This includes any passwords, financial data, SSN, super-secret h4x0r projects, index of your gay porn collection -- anything that could be used directly or indirectly as leverage against you.

[gameman733]

.... index of your gay porn collection....

ok, now i DEMAND links :P (jk)

[Sparda]

The only personal informated I have is stored by Firefox... and that is protected with a realy long master password.

[Dr Zaius]

If it's something that I will need to access regularly or it's rather important/sensitive then it's in a disguised Truecrypt(http://www.truecrypt.org/) volume, I don't use a hidden volume inside this as plausible deniability isn't too much of an issue. Inside this volume is a rather confusing directory structure (a relic from when I was alot younger and thought encryption was only used by evil Nazi's on their submarines). The personal information stored there isn't very revealing, I don't have whole passwords there, only portions of the password or a hint to remind me of the password. Theres backup's of a few MYSQL databases, bookmarks, logs etc there too. Oh and a few passwords to things I shouldn't have passwords too. None of it is really worth anything to most people unless you know what your looking for and what it looks like.

Apart from the Truecrypt volume theres nothing sensitive stored on my computer at all. I do however have a USB flash drive, I use the manufacturer's solution to prevent access as opposed to Truecrypt here though. Although only thing that's sensitive on it is Portable Firefox with all its bookmarks, cached passwords etc. There might be some NetStumbler sessions, music or whatever on there depending on what I have been doing recently, but usually that's not too sensitive.

I am not particularly concerned about someone gaining access to my computer and getting my data I'm more concerned about them intercepting my sensitive data in transit or my data being stolen from a third party that is storing it. An E-Commerce server with 10000 credit card numbers on it sure looks alot more tasty than some average Joe's Windows 98 machine with his 1 credit card number and his wife's muffin recipes.

[metatron]

I keep all my personal data that I care about encrypted and I have a system set up to destroy that data under a hand full of situations.

[stingwray]

For DVD backups the data is encrypted and in parity so that if one disc in the set dies then the information is on another at least.

I have my USB stick encrypted with all my portable applications on that I need like Firefox, Thunderbird. So that I have all my stuff that I need where ever I go.

Most things that I transfer over the net are encrypted, even if its not particularly sensative but I want to make sure that it is not tampered with.

[harrison]

I don't do anything bad, but I have a lot of data that I don't want being released to the public. In fact, I have a lot of data that I wouldn't want even a close friend or family member seeing. For example, quarterly statements from my investment firm, or banking statements. All of that information is private, but important to keep in case you need it for tax purposes. So I encrypt the information and usually back up the important files (encrypted) on some external source, like a thumb drive or something, because they are usually very small sized files. I do that just in case my hard drive were to crash or something like that. And yeah, I keep a copy of the key pair on an external location as well, just in case. But like I said, most of the data that I need to keep secret is very small text or pdf documents, nothing big like movies or pr0n vids, so it's relatively easy for me to keep it encrypted. I would say about 95% of my data is left unencrypted, because it's not important to anyone other than me, just work stuff, etc.

[karmazilla]

I only have three files that are of such importaince that it merits "special treatment": My digital signature (in denmark, you can pay your phone bills and report your taxes with these) and a key pair for my internet banking logon.

What do I do with them? I keep backups on almost any data carying device within my grasp; laptop, server, mp3 player.

I don't explicitely encrypt these files, because they are inherently secure by them selves, meaning that you need to know the password before you can make use of them - and the passwords I use for these files are strong (rainbow crack is highly unlikely and John is not in your lifetime).