Privacy--An Endangered Species
Social Networks are leaking your private information to tracking sites, according to a WebProNews column by Mike Sachoff (see link at bottom). Are you assuming you have privacy when you visit a website you wouldn't want strangers to know about? You may well be wrong. But keep reading to learn some things you can do to help yourself.
Privacy, while not specifically guaranteed in many nation's constitutions, has been regarded as a fundamental right in a democratic government. But technology is quickly taking the right to privacy away.
I remember when it took a professional skip tracer days or even weeks to track a person down who can now be found online by an amateur in 15 minutes. I also remember when a professional webpage designer told me she learned how to access people's marital status and mortgage records online. That frightened me. But those were the long-ago days, back in the late 1990s. People weren't thinking about how much of their personal information could be gained online, and there was little security.
Now that online security has greatly advanced, so has the ease with which you can access anyone's personal information. That even includes someone's credit card information or passwords.
It's a cliche' to say we're living in the age where "Big Brother is watching you." But it's not just the government big brother who's watching you, it's big brother business, and little brother your next door neighbor, and even the guy you knew 10 years ago who now lives 3,000 miles away. He might be checking to see where you go online, or watching you through someone else's hidden camera. Walk a block downtown, and you could be recorded dozens of times. Visit a website you wouldn't want your boss or spouse or sother to know about (even one that hints at your differing political views), and they may well know.
Of course it works both ways. For a small fee, you can now sit in your living room and learn a great deal about that guy who lives 3,000 miles away, and your boss and your sother. Today, you can easily collect personal information that used to be difficult for even law enforcement to gather.
And that's the reason privacy is disappearing. People have a drive for their privacy. But those same people love gossiping about, and snooping on, others. Their drive is to spy on their neighbors, and the drive of business is to make money by any (hopefully legal) means. So technology was developed to let them do that.
Like it or not, and I don't, but technology has made privacy an endangered species.
What can you do to keep your privacy from dying altogether? First, don't sign up for social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. Of course, many people will want to do that in spite of the risks.
Second, use your browser's function to delete cookies, those little bits of information stored on your computer when you visit most sites. You can set most browsers so this happens automatically when you log off. To be even safer, clear cookies immediately before going to a social network, log off from the network, then clear cookies again before going anywhere else.
Third, use reliable anti-spyware to help prevent tracking your personal information (that won't necessarily help with social networks, but it can help stop some anonymous party from tracking your Internet use).
Fourth, don't ever post anything online you don't want the world to see.
See Sachoff's column at http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/24/social-networks-leaking-users-data-to-tracking-sites#comment-92857
Image as found at https://projectbee.s3.amazonaws.com/img/Privacy.jpg No threat to any copyright it might have is intended.