From Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin. For the entire article go here.
If you search for my kids online, you'll
find barely a trace of them. Not only do I not post any information or
photos of them, I have also taught them to erase their own digital
footprints.
My children, whom I will
call Woody and Harriet, are 6 and 9. They use fake names online—always.
They use software to block online tracking, and instead of Googling
homework assignments, they use a search engine that doesn't store any
data about their queries. They have stickers that cover their computer
cameras. Harriet, my older child, uses an encryption program to scramble
her calls and texts to my cellphone, using passwords that are 20
characters long.
and:
We began by using a password methodology known as Diceware, which
produces passwords that are easy to remember but hard for hackers to
crack. Diceware is deceptively simple: You roll a six-sided die five
times and use the results to pick five random words from the Diceware
word list, which contains 7,776 short English words. The resulting
passwords look something like this: "alger klm curry blond puck.
and:
Harriet also got interested in a program
called Ghostery that I use to block online tracking. She particularly
liked Ghostery's logo—a cute little blue ghost that sits at the top
right corner of her Web browser. So I installed Ghostery on her own
computer, an old netbook that we got free when setting up our high-speed
Internet connection. She began to view Ghostery as a videogame, with
the goal being to find websites with the most trackers. "Mommy, I found
one with 41 trackers!" she crowed, running into my room toting her
computer.
Harriet even started to like
DuckDuckGo, a privacy-protecting search engine whose logo is a cheerful
duck in a bow tie. I set it up as her default search engine, and she
happily showed the duck off to her friends.
To keep outside snoops away from the family iPad, we found an app from
Brian Kennish,
a former Google engineer who quit to build privacy-protecting software. His powerful Disconnect Kids app
captured all the traffic leaving our iPad and blocked any contact with a
list of known mobile tracking companies.
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