Privacy and anonymity

[chiawaikian]

Privacy and anonymity on the internet are as important as they are difficult to achieve. Here are some of the the current issues we face, along with a few suggestions on how to be more anonymous.

 

Online privacy issues are in the news every week now. This is good for us, because when it's newsworthy and notable it means people still care about the privacy of their personal information in some fundamental and important way. Privacy on the internet (or rather, a lack thereof) has been with us for ages, but as technology converges we are all forced to make some important new choices about what we are willing to disclose. Let's start with a few examples.

 

Recent events have found the Electronic Freedom Foundation warning users not to use Google Desktop's new "search across computers" option, which stores a user's indexed data on Google servers for up to 30 days. It's making headlines, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. In recent weeks we've also heard about government attempts to subpoena information from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Perhaps a subpoena for all the files indexed on your Google Desktop is not that far away. Then there are the wiretaps in the US by those three-letter agencies, which we're just hearing about now. First reported by the New York Times, these were wiretaps on US citizens that were sometimes done without requiring court approval at all. I don't know about you, but even when I'm not doing something wrong (which is most of the time), I get very nervous when I hear about privacy issues popping up in this way.

 

 

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/15/privacy_anonymity/

[Eldmannen]

Yes, privacy is very important but often it is trespassed, violated and ignored.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy

 

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