Internet Privacy

There are no unified laws and regulations  protecting users. EU policy differs vastly from the US one: the EU Community raises a question about data protection and the US focuses debate on PRIVACY.

A number of websites either sell or just give freely your personal information such as your full name, address, marital status, phone number and other information (DOB, your financial standing, Social Security Number and so on). Your data are collected from publicly-available sources (court records, marriage and birth certificates, voting records etc.). Any site you visit can tell who your provider is, where it is located, what you do while you are there and what software you are using.

Many sites want you to register in order to use their services. You may be asked to give your real name, and e-mail address, your physical address, your telephone number, your income level, your interests, etc. This can be valuable information for someone unwanted.

Beware of cookies!   

Often the sites we have visited and registered on remember us as a visitor. How come? Well, they have planted a cookie on our system with information about us. When we connected, our cookie files were checked to see if we were a registered user, and if we had elected to store our username and password in the cookie. Cookies may or may not be encrypted. There is another type of cookie that keeps track of logins. It remains in our RAM while we stay connected. But here we have an option: not to give access to cookies in our browsers. If we do so, we will just have to retype the username and password every time we log in to the same website. Well, not a big deal after all!

Here’s another cookie-deuce: in some cases cookies may be generated by another site, not the one we have entered. It can be for instance some advertising agency providing services for a number of other web sites.

Cookies make it easier for us to get around but let's think twice if we really want to have them.

Be careful what you send and write in e-mail messages!

Remember a hotmail scandal when someone hacked into hotmail accounts?

Or another one with facebook accounts?

For a hacker it is easy to get our account details, password and user name, or to set up so called "sniffer" software to monitor e-mails we send or e-mails containing our name, for instance. Sniffers enable the third party even to see exactly what we are doing on the computer in a given moment. Planting spywares is common for advertizing companies. When we buy some software or game and install it on our computers, we let this unwanted guest enter our systems without even being aware of the fact.

Because of all this there are lots of dangers lurking for us, average netizens. To name

a few  we can fall victims of stalking, hacking or  identity theft, our name can get on spam mailings. 

All online activities should be carried out via anonymizers.

E-mails and web browsing should be encrypted and

we should beware of what information we give, where and to whom!

Another Cyber Hacking Victim

The issue of privacy and control of individuals has reached an unexpected dimension. The Internet, on the one hand, is a powerful tool to spread information and on the other, to control or steal it. Average cybercitizen is unaware of all the dangers lurking out there in the cyber space, unaware of constant surveillance and unaware that there is no possibility to hide or escape.