It seems more and more people desire greater online privacy. These same individuals usually have no problem broadcasting their location 24/7 on Twitter and posting photos of their house and vacation plans on Facebook. But never mind that, we want privacy and we want it now!
Internet privacy is becoming a buzz term, but isn’t it really just the illusion of privacy? Sure, we want our online financial transactions to be secure, but security and privacy are often confused and co-mingled. Tor servers and proxy servers have allowed anonymous surfing for quite some time, yet few take the the time to install or use them, perhaps because they feel it would be too difficult (it’s not). Facebook continues to promise that is respects user privacy, but they freely give out your information to anyone who writes an App (regardless of your privacy settings).
Then we have the browser developers catering to the privacy craze, offering private browsing, affectionately known as “porn mode.” When browsing privately, the browser is not supposed to store cache files from internet pages and sessions on the local computer. Apple Safari 2.0 was the first to release “Private Browsing” in 2005, followed in 2008 by Google Chrome 1.0 (“Incognito”), then in 2009 by Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (“InPrivate”) and Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (“Private Browsing”). As a computer forensics guy, I can say that these modes actually do a pretty good job of concealing any trace of private internet activity on a local machine. Some plugins (like Silverlight) will still store some cookies in privacy mode, and sometimes Flash leaves traces of activity behind. But overall, privacy mode does a good job concealing evidence of internet activity on the local machine.
But private browsing doesn’t stop Google from keeping track of your searches, or websites from logging your IP address, activity, and approximate location. Google Chrome gives this friendly reminder every time you use Incognito mode:
To surf the web anonymously, you need to use a proxy server – something that conceals your IP address – in conjunction with private browsing. I mentioned Tor and proxy servers above, but a new solution was just announced: StartPage. StartPage has dubbed itself “the world’s most private search engine,” keeping no logs of user searches and offering a proxy server through which to view third-party search results. Time will only tell if StartPage becomes popular, and whether or not it can keep up with the demands on its servers if it does.
But why has privacy become all the rage? Why is a service like StartPage becoming so popular? It seems that the murmurings about privacy have gotten much louder on the heels of Facebook’s recent privacy policy changes. But I believe Facebook was merely the catalyst that brought a deeper issue to light about society and human nature. I placed this blog in the category “Technology and Society” for a reason, and I intend to write about these sorts of issues a lot here at DigiToll, because technology affects society – it has a toll on those who use it (and even those who don’t).
I think that our increasing interest in privacy has to do with our cultural obsession with freedom and our shallow thought processes that allow us to believe that we should be able to publish as much information as we want on the internet but control who sees every last bit of it. I’m serious. As I said in my opening sentence, people like to broadcast tons of personal information on their Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking profiles and services. But then they get angry when they don’t get total control over that information. Last I checked, how much money does a subscription to Facebook cost?
Umm, it’s free. Duh.
But nothing is free.
Huh? You mean the college students who started Facebook are doing this for money, not just for kicks?
Exactly. If you don’t want it known, don’t publish it on the internet. They sell your information.
But that’s not fair! I should be able to control who gets to see my personal information.
Would you leave your personal diary on a coffee table in a public location?
Well of course not.
Bingo. Then you also shouldn’t broadcast your personal life on Facebook and not expect others to see it.
As you can see, most public outcries for privacy are largely moot points. Use common sense. Even if you could have total control over who sees your content (which you can’t), you still can’t control the actions of others. You may only want your cousin to see the photos of your new tattoo, but if she shows those pictures to her friend who also attends your school, you just lost control. Similarly on Facebook, if your friend with very lax privacy settings decides to post pictures of you getting drunk last night, and then he tags you in them, any of his friends can now look into your glazed red eyes whenever they’d like. Oh by the way, you probably didn’t realize that your friend is your boss’s nephew.
Kevin Mitnick and many others have consistently demonstrated that humans are the weakest link in the information security chain. If you want real privacy, stop publishing your personal information all over the internet.
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