DHAKA: People, who care about their privacy, should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google -- said Edward Snowden.

Snowden conducted a remote interview on Sunday as part of the New Yorker Festival, where he was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy, and expressed his opinion there.

However, his first answer called for a reform of government policies.

Some people take the position that they “don’t have anything to hide,” but he argued that when you say that, “You’re inverting the model of responsibility for how rights work”:

“When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.” According to Snowden.

He added that on an individual level, people should seek out encrypted tools and stop using services that are “hostile to privacy.”

For one thing, he said you should “get rid of Dropbox,” because it doesn’t support encryption, and you should consider alternatives like SpiderOak.

Nevertheless, Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden, an American computer professional, leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) of United States, starting in June 2013.

He was also a former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

BDST: 1441 HRS, OCT 13, 2014