The recent New York Times article "How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet" is timely in connection with last week's lecture on data protection and privacy policies.
If you happily live and breathe in the giant apps and features world of Google and Facebook and have no concerns about staying logged in as your activity is tracked, this article is not for you.
If you have any privacy concerns about protecting your digital footprints in the form of your email, search, browsing/purchase behavior or large data transfers, this article addresses current options we have, some of which are free and easy to implement.
Advice ranges from the simple such as switching up providers (e.g., use Google for search and another provider for email) to setting up your own domain name with email or your own email server. You can also use free browser add-ons such as Ghostery that block tracking data, use search engine “duckduckgo” which does not track or ‘bubble’ you, or pay to shield your IP address and encrypt data transfer using VPN services or the free but slow option Tor.
In the end, people are knowingly or unknowingly providing furtively collected electronic data that the author states can “be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies.” There may be no widespread concern today, but the article ends on the note that companies like Google “may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”
Your thoughts?
Privacy and security concerns have the potential of negating and overshadowing all the other significant benefits of the internet. Having said that, if someone is so concerned about being tracked and leaving footprints on the internet, then maybe they should not use the internet as a tool. If you are online, then you have to understand that you cannot and will not be 100% private.
ReplyDeleteThis is a similar argument to the widely debated opinion that using cellular phones can cause cancer. Just as the interet privacy point above, you have the choice of not using a cellphone if you are concerned about its side effects.
There are attempts being made to enhance the privacy and protect security and IP on the internet by the legal and judiciary bodies in the US. Regualtions like COPPA, SOPA and PIPA are a step in the right direction.
More is needed and I am sure, more will come...
Hi Junko, I think my article "I don't care what you want. Just do not track me please" from April 1 would interest you as it indeed rises the issues of privacy and its legal implications proposed by Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Yahoo! has come up with a "Do not track option" for their customers. They want to implement it from this year on. With rising security issues among Internet users, I believe that Google will be the next one to follow these steps. It has to as indicated by Federal Trade Commission report which mentions that such an option is a necessity as per law. Do you think that users who are not that familiar with all aspects (positive and negative) of the internet will care to turn it on? I doubt that. How many of us do really read all the privacy issues of biggies such as Google, Facebook or Yahoo? Well, I used to not do it but after this course I will at least skim it through (provided it will not be a 20 pages long document :))
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