User blog comment:Semanticdrifter/Digital Protest Against the FISA Improvements Act/@comment-2138282-20140205173840

Although I fiercely oppose this type of surveillance, I'm actually glad it happened; although I've always considered myself very security conscious, it caused me to take a look at many of the technologies I take for granted.

For example, although I've always kind of understood that e-mail has various inherent weaknesses, for some reason I naïvely thought that connecting via SSL was good enough as a precaution. But really it isn't, so I read up on S/MIME and have obtained a set of certificates to use; not that I have anything to hide, but the mantra that the innocent have nothing to hide is bogus, as we all value at least some privacy!

I've also been re-evaluating online services I use like Dropbox; where before I was happy to let 1Password sync my keychain into Dropbox, I now use a private Bittorrent Sync shared instead for moving it between my own machines, and put a copy on Dropbox inside an encrypted disk image (so doubly encrypted) in case of some kind of disastrous data loss.

I'm also moving from Google services to services I operate myself from my NAS, as Google have always been all about processing our data.

I'm probably going much further than most people need to, but awareness of privacy is a good thing, especially when it comes to the types of information that are publicly on social networks, rather than shared only with friends. But also an awareness that data you entrust to a site may not be as safe in their care as you think.