Do you want to protect data on your computer, or sent via email, from prying eyes? This page contains programs that do that.
Do you want to keep information private? This program allows you make a disk file (created by the program) appear as a new disk drive. All normal file accesses work. You can create folders within the "virtual" disk. The important thing however is that the virtual disk is encrypted. You have to enter a password/phrase to open the virtual disk. The encryption ought to be strong enough for most purposes and would prevent anyone who did not know the password from seeing the data.
TrueCypt is a Free Open Source encryption package. It creates one, or more, "disks" that, when the decryption key is entered, appear just like ordinary disk drives to the system. A bewildering number of encryption algorithms are supported. I am comfortable with the level of security provided by AES which is also one of the fastest.
The major benefit of this program, compared with private Disk Lite (see below), is that the pass phrase can be changed at any time. It is also possible to alter the drive letter that was allocated when the disk volume is created.
A traveller mode has been added which can be run without installation. due to the nature of the program
This program will create a virtual disk in a similar manner to Truecrypt. Unlike Truecrypt however it creates the disk as a Removable Disk which means that some of the filing system tools (e.g. defrag) do not work.
The main limitations of this program however are that a drive letter is allocated when the volume is created and cannot be changed (although it will pick an alternative if the letter is in use). This limitation is removed with the paid for version.
This program will encrypt a file. This can be generated as a self extracting exe file so that it can be decoded without having the software.
There are a number of well known encryption algorithms available.