Internet Privacy (not Complete Yet)

With all the traffic on the internet, the risk of private information falling into the wrong hands is astronomical, and with all the advances in computer technology the rate of privacy loss is advancing as well. A lose of a credit card number can ruin your credit and the lose of a bank account number can ruin your life. Anything on the internet can be access by anyone with the right computer knowledge. All programs have back doors and all back doors can be accessed. Little information is safe from prying eyes, but there are ways to insure your future’s safety.

It is important to know how the internet works before you can know how much discretion is necessary. “The Internet is based on a series of standard technical protocols which allow various computers located around the world to access specified files on other computers and then view those files”. Put simply, the internet is a way to connect to other computers and access files that they make public. It does this quickly by breaking down the data and sends it through servers until it reaches its destination. There are many different protocols that send information, TCP/IP, STMP, FTP, HTTP; however they all do the same thing, send data. The entire internet is a transfer of data and commands, no matter how pretty the net makes it seem.

Keeping those transfers safe is another story, because even the simple act of searching on Google can lead to the world finding out more than they need to know. In august of 2006, AOL had released the searches of 650,000 subscribers , revealing the private lives of many people. Using major search engines like Google and Yahoo is probably safer than using AOL but even they can slip up just as AOL had. Using search engines like Metacrawler or Dogpile, who search Google and all the other major engines anonymously, keeps things like that from happening because they do not store search queries .

One particular individual of the AOL incident had an interesting story. The Florida resident had passed out on his keyboard in the early afternoon and accidentally searched random lines of text, such as “llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb”, “vvvvbmkmjk”, and “vvglhkitopppfoppr”. When he had awoken about an hour later he had searched for terms like “My cheating wife” and more explicit things. A few days later he was looking for surveillance