Question

what do you understand by privacy ? how can you ensure privacy of your data on the internet ?

Answer 1

Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet.[1][2] Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large-scale computer sharing.[3]

Rethink your email setup. Assume that all "free" email and webmail services (Gmail etc) are suspect. Be prepared to pay for a service, such as Fastmail,that is not based in the US – though some of its servers are in New York with backups in Norway. (My hunch is that more non-US email services will appear as entrepreneurs spot the business opportunity created by the Snowden revelations.) It would also be worth checking that your organisation has not quietly outsourced its email and IT systems to Google or Microsoft – as many UK organisations (including newspapers and universities) have.

The real difficulty with email is that while there are ways of keeping the content of messages private (see encryption), the "metadata" that goes with the message (the "envelope", as it were) can be very revealing, and there's no way of encrypting that because its needed by the internet routing system and is available to most security services without a warrant.