Online Privacy! Figment of our imagination?
Online privacy is a huge misconception that a lot of people have. Many people think that as they sit at home searching the web it is in complete anonimity. Is it? The idea of online privacy is a very murky one indeed and from the original idea of the internet being an open research tool privacy was never what they had in mind. But because people are at home alone in the privacy of their home they feel that if no one can see their computer screen, no one can see what they are looking at.
Who's to blame?
The blame is not solely to put on the web or the websites that people visit. Many times 'warnings' can be found on sites about not sharing personal information in chat rooms, forums and comment sections but people still insist on using their own personal name and information. They do not realize that now their text can be found in a seach, revealing their name and everything that they posted. This leads to some intersting discussion because once you have entered your real name and e-mail on a site it is now stored on a hard drive somewhere along with all of the discussions that you had on that site.
Websites
The next blame lies within these websites who are storing all of your information. Several sites have been sued for for liquidating their customer databases to the highest bidder and others have sold customer information under the table. Even if it is not a company-wide decision who is to say that one employee with access to that information could not be persuaded to do so. Most websites track your information and ip address histories and store that information. Whether this is for advertising purposes or to improve the speed of their page loading through cache's they are watching your every move. Some recent survey's show that most site policy's now indicate that they have the right to sell your information to third parties unless you explicitly 'opt-out' of this. Now as many as two-thirds of sites do not guarantee that they will not sell your information and feel as though they have every right to do it.
Advertising
One of the main purposes behind this online-trade of information is advertising. The more a site tracks what you look at and look for the more they can target you for advertising. Even Gmail performs a text-search through your email to choose key words for advertising purposes. Have you ever wondered how it seems like you might look something up once or twice and suddenly you feel like you see advertisements for it everywhere. This is because of cookies that are stored with your search information that now know specifically what you search for and what to advertise right in front of your face. Several advertising companies like DoubleClick Inc. track users anonymously as they browse the internet and are some of the key targets for this heated debate. Companies argue that need personal information to offer individualized services and advertising to their customers. Does this effect how you feel about them?
The Federal Government
The scariest point of this discussion of privacy comes from the US government themselves. In 2013 Edward Snowden a former systems administrator for the NSA leaked information about the NSA and the US government having numerous global surveillance programs as well as many other world governments. He revealed systems and databases that contain trillions of device-location records, real-time monitoring of social network sites, bulk collections of web-cam images and even the bulk collection of telephone metadata by the NSA. This all brings up the debate of our governments secrecy towards mass communications collection and the mass surveillance that is going on within the web and our phone systems. Another employee of AT&T intenet found a prism within the AT&T main server station that directly routed all information and data they collected straight to an unknown room within the building that was run by the government. After knowing all of this how do you feel about your privacy on the web? How do you feel about the balance between national security and information privacy?
What do you think?
So whether it is websites tracking your every move for advertising purposes or the federal government tracking it to incriminate you, the web users deserve to know that nothing you say or do online is a 'secret'. Have you done something online that you wouldn't do in your normal life, or wouldn't want everyone to know about? This is a very scary subject with a lot of grey areas that seem to work against the everyday web browser. Is the government abusing its power and performing illegal acts to catch online criminals? These questions are not for me or any one person to answer but for everyone that uses the internet, whether for legal purposes or whatever purposes that they have, should the internet have more privacy laws enacted or will the government just go over our heads and piggyback our information anyways. Just remember next time you search for something that they are searching for you and me. It seems like there is not a lot of options for internet privacy because of the uphill battle that consumers and users are facing these days. On one hand we need to government to intervene with the corporations to help keep our information safe from hackers and theives. One the other hand our government is also tracking and stealing all of the same information. One solution that has already been put in place is a free software and an open network called .tor or (the onion router) that helps defend against network surveillance, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor works by basically bouncing your communications and information around to a network of servers, run by volunteers all over the world and prevents somebody from watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. This seems like a great idea but even the government was able to break the code and catch Ross Ulbricht the founder of 'the silk road'. Tor was originally created with the 'US Navy' in mind but is now used by many other people for a variety of privacy concerns, you can read more about it here: About The Onion Router. The possiblity of tor and other software programs like it are endless and seem like the most probable solution to this problem but in the end the government will do whatever necessary to comprimise our privacy online, as they already have with tor.