Encrypt emails to keep personal data secure

Encryption literally means ‘hiding away’. In computing terms, this means scrambling files, emails or communications to make sure they can’t be read by anyone who’s not supposed to read them.

Why would you want to do that? Well, you probably use encryption every day without knowing it. Every time you log in to your online banking service or shop online with a reputable company, the connection between you and the website is encrypted. This ensures nobody else can read confidential information such as your credit card number or bank details.

Without this encryption, the internet itself isn’t particularly secure. When you connect to a non-encrypted website or send an email, in theory it can be read by anybody. So, if you want to make sure your private communications stay that way, encryption is the answer.

Encryption is far from new. The kind of encryption we use today has been well known since the 1970s, and invented by British spies who kept it to themselves for reasons of national security, well before that. In practice, it means that anybody can protect their emails, documents and web surfing with a password.

Today’s most common encryption method revolves around what happens when you multiply two huge prime numbers together. It’s possible to encrypt anything stored as a digital file, but encryption is most commonly used to make communications more secure.

Uses for encryption
From a personal perspective, encryption is most useful for email. Generally, when you send an email, it passes through several other computers before reaching its destination.

These other computers are big servers run by ISPs and other companies. In theory, your email could be read by anyone with access to these servers; in practice, this is unlikely because of the safeguards these firms put in place and the sheer volume of email passing through each one. If your conversation must be kept private, though, you can encrypt the messages to make it so.

Encrypted email is mainly useful for businesses needing to keep their commercial dealings private. But sometimes home users have reason to keep their emails private, and a number of tools can help with that.

A good paid-for tool is Steganos Secure E-mail, but Gnu PG is free, although a little trickier to set up. Using either program, you can set up a public and a private key. The public one is made public; people can use it to encrypt an email for you, which you then unlock and decrypt using your corresponding private key.

File encryption is even easier - there’s no need for public or private keys, as you simply encrypt something with a single key on your computer. When you need it, the same key will unlock the encrypted data. Obviously, if you’re sending the file to someone else, you’ll need to share the key with them - a good method would be to send it in a secure email, as above.

Free privacy tools
Truecrypt is a good free tool that can protect files on a computer while Folder Lock does the same thing for entire folders, although it’s paid-for. If you just want to make notes others can’t read, Steganos Locknote is a secure version of the Windows Notepad utility.

Locknote could be used to make a secure list of your passwords for other services - that way, people can’t access it unless they have the password (although you’ll need to remember the master password to get to the list). Another tool that does just that is Password Keeper.

There are other uses for encryption: online shops use it to make sure they’re secure; if you run a business and want to do it online, you’ll need to encrypt the transactions to keep your customers’ details safe.

While most web design programs for businesses provide this facility, one of the easiest ways to do it is to use Paypal, which takes all the hard work out of it - for a commission.

Finally, encryption is also used on home wireless networks to make them secure and protect them against hackers.