Internet Privacy - what is that?

Networking used to be totally private. In the early days prior to www you probably can only join BBS (Bulletin Board). Unless you talk a lot, nothing was revealed about you.

Come WWW. It still worked the same until people start to find out about you so that they could send you advertisements. Google, Yahoo etc got their finances doing just that.

How do others find out about you. Simple. Every search you do is recorded. It will show your habit, your liking, your interest. A good profiler can construct a personality trait just from your search habits.

You think that is about all? Think again. It is not just your search that is recorded. Internet service provider practically knows every internet activity that you do over the internet. Internet snoopers can also sniff out network packages pertaining to you. That's why privacy proponents insists that internet access be incognito.

Recently the great news about the killing of Osama bin Laden showed that the house he lived in has no internet or mobile connection. He is probably aware of the snooping capability and thus only rely on human courier.

There are talks about terrorist watch list. How in the world would they form the watch list unless they track your activities. For example, once I looked up information of AK47 (Assault Riffle) because I want to know where is the "safety catch". By just looking up this information, I probably end up in the watch list as normal people don't look up information of that kind. I showed that I have interest in fire arms and thus may link to killing or terrorist activity. This is how scary it is.

To us common people, we don't really need to fear such collection of information unless we are doing something covert and don't want others to know about it. The information collected about us are probably used to send us ADS. Obviously, you will be profiled to see if you have criminal traits or even terrorist traits.

Many privacy advocates don't even want to be profiled. They want to have the freedom to surf the internet incognito. Many internet browsers start to provide "incognito" window ( a browser window that will not record your activity). They even have a "do not track" setting. The former make it slightly less easy for people to track you. The latter is almost useless unless companies respect your setting and don't track you. The end result is just some meager efforts to placate users. There is no stopping others from tracking you especially government agencies. Unless you totally refrain from surfing net, you will be tracked.

Internet users knows that they are being tracked so they have counter measures. Virtual Private Network (VPN) is used to surf net under "total" privacy. You access to the VPN server and then surf from there. Since you only access to the server and the connection is encrypted, it makes it very difficult to track what you do at the server. Obviously, your activity is still know by the VPN server but it is still better than nothing.

Some VPN server even provide free access. I am not that paranoid thus I never subscribe to it. Just do a search for VPN and surf to find the number of providers available.

I really don't care about being profiled as I am just a poor nobody. What I hate is the ADS. Well, I use Firefox that have good plugins that blocks most ads. In Chrome, I don't surf with it. It is just used for mails and social networks (my Firefox even blocks Javascript from running). I do have Facebook adBlock installed plus the not-so-effective ABP. It is good enough for me.