Many of you have installed PGP based on my recent series of articles. As promised, here is a simple way to use PGP to make your day-to-day life easier. Specifically, you can use the program to encrypt the username and passwords to various services on the Internet that you use.
I realize that Internet Explorer will save your passwords for you but there are a couple of problems with that. First, anyone using your computer can access any private sites you visit--bank accounts, credit card sites, private information sites, etc. In addition do you really want to trust your private data to a Microsoft product? I sure don't.
Instead store your information inside a simple text file that you keep PGP encrypted. This file can be right on your desktop. Unless the other person knows your private passphrase they aren't going to see your data. Another advantage to this approach is that you can keep notes along with your data. For example I might make a note of which sections of a private site are most useful to me. Then I'm not spending my time searching for that spot I saw during my last visit.
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