We believe that privacy is important and we will take reasonable steps to protect your privacy to the extent we can. What you do with your account here is your own business, within the limits described in our acceptable use policy.
Personal information we may have about you or your patterns of use will not be sold nor shared with any individuals or organizations outside Chud Systems without your prior permission, unless we are compelled to do so by law. We work under the assumption that you do not grant us permission unless you have informed us otherwise.
We will not read or examine any files, email, or other data of yours without your advance permission, with two possible exceptions. One, should you choose to publish that data without any access controls (for example, on a public web page), we will consider it public.
Two, it is possible that Chud Systems personnel may inadvertently see the contents of your private data in the course of routine systems operation and maintenance - for example, the content of a mail message that is stuck in a mail queue might be seen while we are diagnosing a mail delivery problem. If this occurs, we will treat any such data as completely confidential and will not disclose it to anyone without your advance permission.
Although we adhere to these practices to the best of our ability, it is possible for data to be compromised through accident or system compromise. It is also possible that under certain circumstances we may be legally compelled to disclose information which we would normally protect as confidential. In using our systems you agree that Chud Systems has no liability for any disclosure or the results thereof.
In our opinion the likelihood of accidental disclosure is low. Nevertheless, we recommend that you use strong encryption to protect any data that you feel is particularly sensitive. Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG, Gnu's version of PGP) is installed on this system for your use, and we will attempt to support other strong encryption products as requested by users if we can reasonably do so. If you would like a particular encryption utility installed, send us email and we'll do our best.
Use of strong encryption allows you to maintain the privacy of your data and communications without having to trust your service provider, and it protects you from disclosure without your knowledge even to officials bearing warrants (they will have to compel you to disclose the key, so you will at least be informed and be able to make your own decision).
For simple operations, to encrypt a file with GPG:
$ gpg --symmetric [file]This will create an encrypted copy of the file, named as the original filename with ".gpg" appended. This is a binary file of encrypted data. (It will be an ascii file and named by appending ".asc" instead if you used the "-a" switch, or if you have "armor" in your GPG options file, but it's encrypted either way.) You will be prompted for a passphrase to use to protect the file. By default, the algorithm used is CAST5; you can change it with "--cipher-algo [name]", for example "--cipher-algo AES256".
Note that the original plaintext file is NOT deleted; you must do this yourself. See also "man shred" if you're particularly worried about the plaintext file being recovered later.
To recover the plaintext, use:
$ gpg -d [encrypted-file] > [new-plaintext-file]Again, you will be prompted for the passphrase. If you don't specify an output file, the plaintext will be written to stdout (usually the screen, when used interactively).
Examples:
$ gpg --cipher-algo AES256 --symmetric my_secrets.txt [Prompt for passphrase, creates the file my_secrets.txt.gpg] $ gpg -d my_secrets.txt.gpg [Prompt for passphrase, writes decrypted plaintext to stdout.]