Privacy+and+anonymity

=//Privacy and anonymit//y=

Privacy is the ability of individuals and groups to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about themselves is shared with others. At its extreme, privacy becomes anonymity when, for instance, a person uses it to conceal his or her true identity in order to cyber-bully someone else. Conversely, excessive privacy could also conceal the perpetrators of criminal, terrorist or computer hacking acts from law enforcement agencies. Privacy and anonymity on the Internet are as important as they are difficult to achieve. Here are some of the current issues we face, along with a few suggestions on how we can become a little more anonymous on the Web.

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 U.S. by those three-letter agencies, which we're just hearing about now. First reported by the New York Times, these were wiretaps on U.S. 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.

This is on top of all the old news that barely makes headlines anymore: [|botnet Trojans] controlling access to your computer's data and [|stealing your identity]; rampant [|spyware infections] that have been with us for years and are sometimes [|quite nasty]; the fact that only about [|a third of the public] even know what spyware is; and finally, there's even the occasional [|military breach] that exposes the personal information of people who probably value their privacy very much.

Where are we headed with online privacy? Well, perhaps you should publish your darkets secrets in a public blog right now and get it over with. The fact is, we haven't had much, or any, privacy online in quite a while. In the search for privacy, what do we have to do to become anonymous on the Internet?