How can I improve the privacy of my electronic correspondence?

You are highly encouraged to learn to use the freely available The GNU Privacy Guard, aka Open PGP. It's fairly straightforward, and easy to use.

The original PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was created by Philip Zimmermann, and was available to almost all popular computer platforms, UNIX, VMS, Atari, Amiga, MSDOS, Mac and many others.

Nevertheless, since Mr. Zimmermann sold his business to the security software company Network Associates Technology, Inc., so PGP is no longer available freely, and doesn't cover as many platforms as it used to. In other words, it has become just another piece of proprietary, commercial software catering to the PC desktop market dominated by various versions of Microsoft Windows ®.

On the other hand, the freely available GNU version is getting better and better, as it is conforming to a published Internet standard - RFC2440, thus is far superior to its commercial counterpart in many ways. AZC therefore recommends GnuPG to its customers in particular and the public in general.

Quoted directly from the "Overview" on GnuPG's opening page:

"GnuPG is a complete and free replacement for PGP. Because it does not use the patented IDEA algorithm, it can be used without any restrictions. GnuPG is a RFC2440 (OpenPGP) compliant application.

GnuPG is Free Software. It can be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

PGP, on which OpenPGP is based, was originally developed by Philip Zimmermann; see his page for background information on PGP.

The German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology granted funds for the further development of GnuPG. See our press notice for details."

As of this writing, GnuPG is available for various versions of UNIX (including Linux), Mac, and Microsoft Windows. Please see GnuPG Download Page for details and links.

Once you and your contacts have learned how to use GnuPG, you can send each other sensitive information electronically (your credit card number included) with very little fear that anyone could steal it. There are many other uses of GnuPG too, for instance, once you have deployed GnuPG for your daily email communication, you will have an extremely effective means to rebuff false accusations of email forgeries should it be necessary.

Further information about GnuPG is always available on its Web site. In addition, we recommend you to review the GnuPG FAQ and its Online documentation set

Happy GnuPGing!

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