You've probably started seeing a lot of things posted on social media about what the government has just put into legislation.

We are all sufficiently scared by the new powers out Government possesses, but what can we do about it? This page will go over how to protect yourself online on your home computer, using your smartphone and communicating via SMS and phone calls.

You can view the TL;DR version if you just want results without reading much.

Internet Privacy

First and foremost, very little of what we do on the Internet is private. Facebook, Twitter and Google all comply with Government requests for data access. In the US, for many things the Government doesn't even need a warrant to access all your private information.

Fortunately, it's easy to privatise your Internet access. There are a few avenues you can go down, but the most promising and reliable method at the moment is a VPN. Your ISP (Telstra, Optus, TPG and all the others) will know that you are using a VPN, but they won't be able to track what you are doing. They will just see a meaningless stream of data going through your connection.

Unfortunately, many VPN providers (especially those in the US) will still give out your history and data, making their service useless.

What should I look for?

It cannot be free.

Free VPN services (and proxy servers) will always track your data and store whatever you do, that's how they make money. If it must be free, look into Tor instead.

No logging

If they keep logs, Government can provide a warrant and forcefully extract the logs, even if the company has the best intentions.

It must be in a "safe" jurisdiction

Anything in the US and Australia must keep logs by law, even if they say they don't. They must keep billing and payment details on file for their customers for tax purposes, all of this info can easily be extracted.

No User Identification

Why do they need to know who you are at all? Traffic and usage patterns can imply access methods, for example large amounts of data being transferred may imply illegal file sharing in the same way a massive electricity bill may imply a drug plantation.

They must accept Bitcoin

In 2014 there is no excuse not to accept Bitcoin if you are working in IT, unless you need a paper trail on the payment being made. Even if you don't pay in Bitcoin, the fact that the company takes it implies that they don't care who is making the payment, as long as a payment is made.

Any suggestions?

Yep! Mullvad and NordVPN.

Phone Privacy

The Australian Government has had full access to a significant amount of our telecommunications information since the mass inception of home phone connections in Australia. This has expanded through amendments into recording and tracking all SMS, MMS and data usage on mobile devices as well as home connections.

To access much of this data, you don't even need a warrant. That means for whatever reason the government can watch over anyone's phone or internet connection and track everything that they are doing online without a warrant.

Home and Mobile Voice Calls

Your home phone calls will always be able to be intercepted easily by authorities without awkward hardware modifications, however such devices do exist.

For your mobile, you can use an app like RedPhone on Android or Signal on iPhone.

Messaging

SMS messaging is all recorded by our carriers and therefore can be accessed by authorities. The easy way to bypass this is to use an encrypted messaging app, such as TextSecure, or one that works on both Android and iOS such as SureSpot.

Data Usage

Same as with your home Internet connection, use a VPN. You can set one up on Android and iPhone.

Data Privacy

Yep, the Government can access all the data stored on your phone and your computer easily, remotely and silently. We know this thanks to the Snowden leaks exposing the NSA and PRISM, and we also know that as a direct result of sharing this information he is now a fugitive. People have underestimated the gravity of what has happened, the US has been tracking, in real time, the Internet activity and data of the majority of Earth.

But that's not in Australia

The companies (including and not limited to Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo...) all operate in other counties, and the NSA has full access to all data generated in those countries. This includes Australia.

So every single PC and Mac computer, every single post and chat you've made on Facebook and every single communication you've been a part of on Skype is fully accessible by the NSA.

The solution to this problem is to use full-disk encryption. This will lower the performance of your device.

Protect my Mobile's data

You can encrypt your entire Android phone easily, making all of your data significantly harder for authorities to access. iOS is currently in the process of introducing a similar feature, so I will not comment yet beyond saying at the time of writing you are unable to protect the data stored on your phone if you use <iOS7.

Protect my Computer's data

Windows

Use Bitlocker.

Mac

Use FileVault 2.

Linux

Use Ubuntu built-in or dm-crypt.

Geolocation and Advertising Privacy

If you have ever used an Android phone with the default settings, you have had your location history stored on Google's servers.

Similarly, if you have ever searched on Google, they have built a profile about you for targeted advertising. You will only be able to see those pages if you are logged in to your Google account, but they still build a ghost account even if you aren't logged in, or if you're in private browsing mode. How do you think a company that provides so many free services is worth so much money, and also how do you they know how heavy the traffic is?

And they are likely to give it all out if a formal request is made.

Location History

Google has provided instructions on how to manually disable their location tracking service. Similarly, Apple also has instructions how to disable this service, but as we know in the past Apple has been able to remotely activate GPS via serial number as part of their find my iPhone service, you can even do it yourself with Lost Mode, or using a non-device GPS method.

Advertising privacy

This one is extremely hard to circumvent fully. Firstly, your browser needs to be running a tracker-blocker like Ghostery, that blocks services like Google Analytics, Adobe Tracking and hundreds of others.

You can ask Google not to serve you personalised ads, but this will not stop them building a profile using your (anonymised) data. To stop this, you must use an alternative search engine, like DuckDuckGo, who will never store any information about their users.

Conclusion

We use a VPN on all our internet connections, and we encrypt all our communications. There are great tools to help us out in getting this done, and we are still able to enjoy our privacy.

Even though we have all this new legislation allowing easier spying on citizens, we can still fairly easily prevent it. We can use VPNs and encryption to prevent Government snooping, therefore making our data safe. It is unfortunate that these measures are necessary to maintain our privacy.