Privacy on the Web

A huge debate has gone relatively unnoticed in the world lately. I'm talking about the lack of privacy laws protecting the public against large corporations. Whenever you “Google” something, that information is immediately transferred and put into a personal profile. Companies claim they are not violating our privacy because we’re all identified by a number, we might be user 156653 or 7435375. Of course being a number does not help our anonymity. Our searches are often filled with personal information. And some have already picked up on that fact. Our searches are like fingerprints, I mean, who hasn’t Googled themselves, how many of us have typed in the address of a nearby theater when looking for show times. All this information adds up to a lot and can be easily tracked to that specific person who put in the searches.



Most people don’t realize that once they click on an advertising banner from a third party, that advertiser will place a “cookie” on their computer web server. From this point on that company is allowed to track the web sites a person has visited and what their E-mail address is.
Companies try to justify this blatant invasion of our privacy, by saying they only use it to make sure all those ad banners that pop up correspond with things that are relevant to us. Like if we typed in things about travel, we would get more travel advertisements. Like any good company Google and others say they are planning on making policies to limit the information they collect, and ease the consumer's concerns. Unfortunatly it can be really tempting for this companies to use all the information at their disposal to do what TV and other forms of advertising cannot, target individual customers. I personally don't beleive they will make enough policies to truly make sure we are protected.



So far lawmakers have opted to allow the companies to regulate themselves, mostly because congress does not know what they can do to solve the problem. Although there has been some basic outlines for how companies must go about collecting information, it really only targets those third party advertisers and still leaves our personal lives open for companies to exploit.



Until lawmakers finish making a cohesive set of laws that protect your privacy their are many steps that you take to ensure at least a bit of confidentiality.

First Delete all the cookies you already have, I guarantee it’s a lot.
Second Increase your privacy to restrict what type of companies can collect cookies on you.
Third check out some sources on your own on how to protect yourself
Finally write to your congressman, as depressing as this sounds the federal government is the only source capable of protecting our privacy.