Key FamilySafe Features

A FamilySafe computer will help your family members communicate and share information with each other — even in emergencies — and will also help your family connect securely with friends, trusted advisors and community resources. A FamilySafe will also help you access popular websites without giving away your identity or physical location information — often used by sleazy online marketers and criminals to "target" your family. Once installed and configured, your FamilySafe Mac will...

• Protect your family's privacy while browsing the Web and sending Internet e-mail.
• Help parents easily establish safe online activities for their underage children.
• Keep family members' personal information away from online snoops and other unauthorized parties.
• Remove 100% of e-mail "spam" if set for maximum protection using cryptographic signature checking.
• Protect your family home's location and the identity of family members (especially younger children) while online.
• Provide parents with easy "wizards" for setting up and maintaining the FamilySafe and approving new accounts for family, friends and trusted advisors.
• Keep communications with privileged family advisors private and defend confidential family communications from eavesdropping.
• Help reconnect family members separated during a disaster.
• Securely store digitized versions of important family documents (deeds, birth certificates, etc) remotely for rapid disaster recovery.
• Help your family strengthen the community by connecting safely with other families online and sharing privacy filters and other helpful information.

Why is CryptoRights developing FamilySafe?

Some important privacy goals of the FamilySafe project include:

1. Providing a direct privacy protection benefit to the public. Just by using features such as FamilySafe's on-the-fly nyms to fill in online forms by substituting policy-controlled pseudonyms linked to universal private addresses (iNames), a family can significantly decrease the chances of their real names or direct e-mail addresses being used for identity theft or online fraud. FamilySafe will include many other protective features as well.
2. Creating a safer online environment for children by making parental supervision easier, making unsupervised contact with online predators more difficult, logging all access to family members' personal webpages and defending against intrusions into the FamilySafe secure local area network. Children will have secure email accounts for exchanging confidential messages with family and friends approved by one or both sets of parents, and children's communications can be accessed by both parents together in case of emergency.
3. Educating the Public directly about growing privacy threats such as identity theft, which is becoming a lucrative, widespread criminal practice fueled by continued reliance on inappropriate/outdated practices such as using Social Security Numbers for establishing identity. In FY2005 alone, over 900,000 identities were cloned or spoofed and more than US$1.7M stolen from online accounts.
4. Joining with other open source projects, companies and donors to develop sustainable funding partners interested in the success of CRF's research and using open source, freeware technology components available from those other projects (e.g. Firefox, GnuPG, SquirrelMail, TOR, etc).
5. Promoting CRF's core mission to bring privacy tools to the Public in a new way — by starting with a broad, highly vulnerable userbase (families) and later deployment to groups with more specialized information security requirements such as human rights advocates, investigative journalists and humanitarian aid workers.

Why FamilySafe is Important to Your Family & Country

Larger societal privacy concerns, in addition to your family's online safety, now make the development and widespread adoption of tools like FamilySafe more important than ever. The US Department of Veterans' Affairs, with its huge budget, was nevertheless unable to prevent the theft of sensitive identity and financial information about of tens of millions of military veterans. Despite the recovery of a stolen laptop, those Americans are all now at serious risk of identity theft. The US National Security Agency, normally charged with protecting Americans from external information threats, was recently revealed to be searching and tracking the e-mail and telephone calls of all US citizens — without obtaining the proper legal warrants. The NSA "Program", under the cover of the ironically-named "USA PATRIOT Act" has now been determined by the Judiciary branch to be unconstitutional, and may also violate the First and Fourth Amendments, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Privacy Act of 1974. Multibillion-dollar data-gathering corporations are silently providing massive amounts of very sensitive personal information about consumers behind their backs and selling it to criminal networks and secret government agencies alike. Common sense — and even the US Department of Homeland Security — now make it clear that you take action to keep yourself and your family safe from exposure to growing online dangers. Along with protecting you from these privacy threats, natural disasters (e.g. Hurricane Katrina) now also pose a major threat to the lives and property of millions of families: a FamilySafe can be an essential part of your family's Emergency Preparedness Plan just like the bottled water, canned food and first aid kit in your basement.

Related Links

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• The HighFire Project
• The VoteSecure Project

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