Research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) rates with «excellent» Dropbox, Google, SpiderOak, Sonic.net and Twitter.
Only five American internet giants are harnessing all the capabilities that encryption provides, with the aim of protecting their users' data. This is the conclusion of research by the non-governmental organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which examined how much the largest online services in the US use all available countermeasures against the NSA.
According to the EFF, the countermeasures are four «best practices», which make mass surveillance more difficult, with another protocol concerning companies that provide e‑mail services.
The nonprofit organization sent a questionnaire to 18 of the largest online companies in the US, asking which of these «best practices» they already implement or plan to implement in the near future. Based on the responses, the EFF created a related table, which shows the security measures each business adopts.
From the table, it appears that only four (Dropbox, Google, SpiderOak, Sonic.net) of them use all the available ones. Something that also applies to Twitter, but without the protocol concerning e‑mail services.
Among the five “best practices» the automatic activation of the HTTPS protocol and the support of the HSTS protocol are included, which ensure the communication of the user's computer with the site, the use of authentication cookies for users only on encrypted connections.
Also, the non-governmental organization considers it necessary that the data transferred in data centers and the servers of the internet company be encrypted. Finally, for any business offering e‑mail service, the EFF argues that it should use the STARTTLS protocol so that its users are protected when communicating with people who use another email platform.
The organization reports that all these technologies hinder mass surveillance, provided of course that a company has not handed over the “encryption keys” to the NSA. And it reminds of the relentless pressures that the e‑mail platform Lavabit faced from the American intelligence services, resulting in its founder Ladar Levison being forced to shut it down.
Source: portal.kathimerini.gr
