When you browse over the Internet, or Chat, or send/receive email – you are not doing that in private. It is important to understand exactly what is private, and what steps you need to follow to maintain the privacy.
When accessing any website such as Yahoo.com, you get connected to the web site’s server which provides you the information you seek – search results, or email. This connection is not direct: you are connected through a series of nodes. Each node can view/alter the information that is flowing through it.
A protocol – ‘https’ provides privacy to your interaction by adding a ‘Secure Socket Layer‘ on top of the normal HTTP protocol. Enough of jargon, back to English!
So when you use this particular protocol you are secure subject to some caveats. Use of this protocol can be confirmed through the ‘https’ at the beginning of the URL, and through the ‘lock’ icon at the bottom right: 
.
A lot of online websites support HTTPS for logging in. You have to select ‘secure’ at the login screen where you enter username/password. This means that your password is protected during the communication. However, these sites move back to normal mode after the login: your data (for example the email content) is not protected. Gmail supports secure connection even after login but you have to enable it in the settings – this makes sense and you should do it. However, even after doing this it does not mean that all your content is ‘protected’ – more on this later.
Please understand that if its emails in question: just your using a secure connection is not enough. The recipient should also use it for the information to remain inaccessible at the nodes.
Proceed to the next part of the guide.
Disclaimer: This is just a guide and is not meant to replace professional advise. No measures can guarantee 100% security. There are a lot of threat vectors outside the scope of this tutorial: such as key loggers on your computer. In addition, the severities explained for warnings are just guides and have no scientific basis.
