Pragmatically, I think using the following can easily help improve ones security significantly

a) Gmail / Google ecosystem, which seems designed with security in mind (keep in mind that employees often have access to their companies'"products")

b) Tor browser project - https://www.torproject.org/download/download

c) Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS ("hypertext transfer protocol security" layer) everywhere - https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

... although with information technologies from an end user perspective, one can't know for sure ...

d) I'd hazard that Google group video Hangouts within the Google ecosystem are or can be some of the most secure and anonymous video conferencing system around

e) And probably much thought has gone into Google's Tensor Flow AI software in terms of security as well - and again within the Google ecosystem


*
Anonymity and Security resources, Good summary of 3 major disagreements around internet security (through 2016+)

First Library to Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Effort Stops After DHS Email

https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous-internet-browsing-effort-stops-after-dhs-email

Support Tor and Intellectual Freedom in Libraries

https://act.eff.org/action/support-tor-and-intellectual-freedom-in-libraries


*









...

Years: 1977 1978 1981 1985 1988 1990 1991 1993 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Publications by date 1977 Non-Discretionary Access Control for Decentralized Computing Systems (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Paul A. Karger. Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology S. M. & E. E. thesis MIT/LCS/TR-179, May 1977. (BibTeX entry)· Chapter 11, "Limitations of End-to-End Encryption," has some early discussion of traffic analysis issues. 1978 Limitations of End-to-End Encryption in Secure Computer Networks (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Michael A. Padlipsky, David W. Snow, and Paul A. Karger. The MITRE Corporation: Bedford MA, HQ Electronic Systems Division technical report ESD-TR-78-158, August 1978. (BibTeX entry)· 1981 Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms (HTML, PDF, TXT) (Cached: HTML, PDF, TXT) by David Chaum. In Communications of the ACM 24(2), February 1981. (BibTeX entry)· 1985 Networks Without User Observability – Design Options (HTML) (Cached: HTML) by Andreas Pfitzmann and Michael Waidner. In the Proceedings of EUROCRYPT 1985, April 1985. (BibTeX entry)· Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete by David Chaum. In CACM 28(10), October 1985. (BibTeX entry)· 1988 The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by David Chaum. In Journal of Cryptology 1, 1988, pages 65-75. (BibTeX entry)· 1990 The dining cryptographers in the disco: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability (gzipped PS) (Cached: gzipped PS) by Michael Waidner and Birgit Pfitzmann. In the Proceedings of EUROCRYPT 1989, 1990. (BibTeX entry)· 1991 ISDN-mixes: Untraceable communication with very small bandwidth overhead (gzipped PS) (Cached: gzipped PS) by Andreas Pfitzmann, Birgit Pfitzmann, and Michael Waidner. In the Proceedings of the GI/ITG Conference on Communication in Distributed Systems, February 1991, pages 451-463. (BibTeX entry)· 1993 Cryptographic Defense Against Traffic Analysis (PS) (Cached: PS, gzipped PS) by Charles Rackoff and Daniel R. Simon. In the Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1993, pages 672-681. (BibTeX entry)· Efficient anonymous channel and all/nothing election scheme by C. Park, K. Itoh, and K. Kurosawa. In the Proceedings of EUROCRYPT 1993, May 1993, pages 248-259. (BibTeX entry)· 1995 Private Information Retrieval (PS) (Cached: PS, gzipped PS) by Benny Chor, Oded Goldreich, Eyal Kushilevitz, and Madhu Sudan. In the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1995, pages 41-50. (BibTeX entry)· Receipt-Free MIX-Type Voting Scheme - A Practical Solution to the Implementation of a Voting Booth by Joe Kilian and Kazue Sako. In the Proceedings of EUROCRYPT 1995, May 1995. (BibTeX entry)· Preserving Privacy in a Network of Mobile Computers (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by David A. Cooper and Kenneth P. Birman. In the Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 1995. (BibTeX entry)· ... 2013 LIRA: Lightweight Incentivized Routing for Anonymity (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Rob Jansen, Aaron Johnson, and Paul Syverson. In the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium - NDSS'13, February 2013. (BibTeX entry)· rBridge: User Reputation based Tor Bridge Distribution with Privacy Preservation (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Qiyan Wang, Zi Lin, Nikita Borisov, and Nicholas J. Hopper. In the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium - NDSS'13, February 2013. (BibTeX entry)· An Empirical Evaluation of Relay Selection in Tor (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Christopher Wacek, Henry Tan, Kevin Bauer, and Micah Sherr. In the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium - NDSS'13, February 2013. (BibTeX entry)· Preventing Side-channel Leaks in Web Traffic: A Formal Approach (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Michael Backes, Goran Doychev, and Boris Köpf. In the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium - NDSS'13, February 2013. (BibTeX entry)· I Want my Voice to be Heard: IP over Voice-over-IP for Unobservable Censorship Circumvention (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Amir Houmansadr, Thomas Riedl, Nikita Borisov, and Andrew Singer. In the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium - NDSS'13, February 2013. (BibTeX entry)· The Parrot is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Amir Houmansadr, Chad Brubaker, and Vitaly Shmatikov. In the Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2013. (BibTeX entry)· Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Alex Biryukov, Ivan Pustogarov, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann. In the Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2013. (BibTeX entry)· The Path Less Travelled: Overcoming Tor's Bottlenecks with Traffic Splitting (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Mashael Alsabah, Kevin Bauer, Tariq Elahi, and Ian Goldberg. In the Proceedings of the 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2013), July 2013. (BibTeX entry)· How Low Can You Go: Balancing Performance with Anonymity in Tor (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by John Geddes, Rob Jansen, and Nicholas Hopper. In the Proceedings of the 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2013), July 2013. (BibTeX entry)· OSS: Using Online Scanning Services for Censorship Circumvention (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by David Fifield, Gabi Nakibly, and Dan Boneh. In the Proceedings of the 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2013), July 2013. (BibTeX entry)· The need for flow fingerprints to link correlated network flows (PDF) (Cached: PDF) by Amir Houmansadr and Nikita Borisov. In the Proceedings of the 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2013), July 2013. (BibTeX entry)· ( http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/date.html )