How to Encrypt All Your Online and Offline Data
Your digital profile can also be used to invade your privacy in annoying and creepy ways such as showing you ads that are personalized based on your most intimate preferences and information. However, it’s never too soon to start protecting your digital information from unwanted eyes. In this regard, your best friend is encryption, the science of scrambling data using mathematics. Encryption makes sure only intended people can read your data. Unauthorized parties who access your data will see nothing but a bunch of undecipherable bytes.
Encrypt Your On-Device Data First, the easy part. You should start by encrypting the data you physically hold. This includes the content you store on your laptop, desktop PC, smartphone, tablet and removable drives. If you lose your
devices, you risk placing sensitive information in the wrong hands. The most secure way to encrypt your on-device data is full-disk encryption (FDE). FDE encrypts everything on a device and only makes the data available for use after the user provides a password or
PIN code. Most operating systems support FDE. In Windows, you can use BitLocker to turn on full-disk encryption on your PC. In macOS, the full-disk encryption is called FileVault. You can read our step-bystep guide on using BitLocker and FileVault. Windows BitLocker also supports encrypting external drives such as memory cards and USB thumb drives. On macOS, you can use the Disk Utility to create an encrypted USB drive.
Alternatively, you can try hardware encrypted devices. Hardware encrypted drives require users to enter a PIN code on the device before plugging it to the computer. Encrypted drives are more expensive than their nonencrypted counterparts, but they are also more secure
You should also encrypt your mobile devices. On-device encryption will make sure that an unauthorized person won’t be able to gain access to your phone’s data, even if they get physical access to it. Both iOS and Android support full-disk encryption. All Apple devices running iOS 8.0 and later are encrypted by default. We suggest you leave it that way.
The Android landscape is a bit fragmented since OS default settings and interfaces might differ based on manufacturer and OS version. Make sure to check yours is encrypted.
Encrypt Your Data in the Cloud We rely on cloud storage services such as Google Drive, DropBox and MS OneDrive to store our files and share them with friends and colleagues. But while those services do a good job to protect your data against unauthorized access, they still have access to the contents of the files you store in their cloud services. They also can’t protect you if your account gets
hijacked. If you don’t feel comfortable with Google or MS having access to your sensitive files, you can use Boxcryptor.
Boxcryptor integrates with most popular storage services and adds a layer of encryption to protect your files before uploading them to the cloud. This way, you can make sure that only you and the people you share your files with will be aware of their content. Alternatively, you can use an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE)
storage service such as Tresorit. Before storing your files in the cloud, E2EE storage services encrypt your files with keys that you exclusively hold, and not even the service that stores your
files can access their content.
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Encrypt Your Internet Traffic Perhaps equally as important as encrypting your files is the encryption of your internet traffic.
Your internet service provider (ISP)—or a malicious actor that might be lurking on the public Wi-Fi network you’re using—will be able to eavesdrop on the sites you browse to and the services and applications you use. They can use that information to sell it to advertisers or, in the case of hackers, use it against you. To protect your internet traffic against nosy and malicious parties, you can sign up to a virtual private network
(VPN). When you use a VPN, all your internet traffic is encrypted and channeled through a VPN server before reaching its destiny. If a malicious actor (or your ISP) decides to monitor your traffic, all they’ll see is a stream of encrypted data
exchanged between you and your VPN server. They won’t be able to figure out which websites and applications you’re using.
One thing to consider is that your VPN provider will still have full visibility on your internet traffic. If you want absolute privacy, you can use The Onion Router (Tor). Tor, which is both the name of a darknet network and a namesake browser, encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it through several independent computers running a specialized software.
Encrypt Your Emails Encrypting your emails can protect your sensitive communications against people who gain unwanted access to them. This can be hackers who break into your account, or your email provider itself. To encrypt your emails, you can use Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). PGP is an open protocol that uses publicprivate key encryption to enable users to exchange encrypted emails. With PGP, every user has a public, known to everyone, which enables other users to send them encrypted emails. The private key, which is only known to the user and stored on the user’s device, can decrypt messages encrypted
with the public key. If an unintended party intercepts a PGP-encrypted email, they won’t be able to read its contents. Even if they break into your email account by stealing your credentials, they won’t be able to read the contents of your encrypted emails.
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