Gadgetory

I'm Cara Tsuboi cnet.com welcome to the inside scoop my guest today is senior editor seth rosenblatt toy car hi Seth a lot of news recently about affairs and other improprieties coming over email yes you should all thank former general petraeus for that exactly all right so let's say that one of our viewers wants to have a fair send some covert information sure give us some tips on how to keep your business a little more private okay let's start with the basics so there are things you can do that don't involve very technical solutions you can go to a cafe that has free Wi-Fi that's not near your home office or the hotel you're staying at that doesn't actually mask your IP address or anything technical but it separates you from the places that you usually go to harder to trace that back to use absolutely another very easy solution is to set up an email account that does not have your name attached to it that does not have any personal identifying information in it and does not contain anything in the subject headings of the emails you send from that account just don't make it so obvious than exactly be smart yeah okay so what about some more complex or techy solutions that are harder to try sure one thing you can do is a program called hotspot shield which will mask your IP and change it to a different IP address so that the the Internet address that you're sending the email from is not the actual one that you're using it routes it through a different one you can also get a VPN and make sure that again that you're using one that is known for having good privacy protections and that all can't ultimately be traced back to you only if the government subpoenas the information from that company and again there's another service called tour which has been around for a very long time which will create layers and hide your activity the problem with what happened to Petraeus is that the emails the government has access to without a subpoena for up to 180 days so you'd think that the director of the CIA would be smarter than that please be wrong right the bottom line I guess is you know keep your nose clean don't get into this kind of messy exactly digitally or electronically absolutely at the end of the day if you really want to send a secure message carrier pigeon I think is the way to go yeah probably the safest I mean maybe even old fashioned post card or letter could even be better than sending an email absolutely I think at the end of the day an email is less like a secure letter with a with a seal and a stamp and all of that and it's more like a postcard if you have the technical know-how you can just flip it over and read it yeah sadly I don't think this is going to the last time we talked about a probably not business being exposed to email probably not thank you so much so flat I'm Kara Tsuboi thanks for watching the inside scoop